In environmental/climate-change reporting, Elizabeth Kolbert is top of the line. In a recent New Yorker talk of the town piece, she offers a devastating picture of a country (and a world) that knows what it needs to know about climate change, has just received a Biblical style report on the dangers already upon us (“The I.P.C.C.’s list of potential warming-induced disasters—from ecological collapse to famine, flooding, and pestilence—reads like a riff on the ten plagues...”), and is still standing around doing next to nothing and waiting for worse. She also paints a sorry picture of what President Obama has (or rather hasn’t done) about it – and for once we’re talking about a man who understands perfectly well what’s at stake in a country that, “instead of discouraging fossil-fuel use… underwrites it, with tax incentives for producers worth about four billion dollars a year. Those tax breaks are evidently ludicrous, and they should be repealed. According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. is the world’s largest single source of fossil-fuel subsidies; the I.M.F. has estimated that eliminating such subsidies worldwide could cut carbon emissions by thirteen per cent.” In her first two paragraphs, below, she does offer a vision of hope from the past for what might be done. Tom “The chemist F. Sherwood Rowland is one of the few people in history about whom it can accurately be said: he helped save the world. In 1972, Rowland, a chemist at the University of California-Irvine, attended a talk on the compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons. At the time, these were being used as refrigerants, cleaning agents, and propellants in aerosol cans, and they had recently been detected in the air over the Atlantic. CFCs are unusually stable, but it occurred to Rowland that, if they were getting blown around the world, at very high altitudes they would eventually break down. He and one of his research assistants began to look into the matter, and they concluded that in the stratosphere CFCs would indeed dissociate. The newly liberated chlorine atoms would then set off a chain reaction, which would destroy the ozone layer that protects the earth from ultraviolet radiation. “Industry groups ridiculed Rowland’s findings—Aerosol Age accused him of being a K.G.B. agent—but other scientists confirmed them, and Rowland pressed for a ban on CFCs. As he said, “What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?” The discovery, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, of an ozone “hole” over the South Pole persuaded world leaders, including Ronald Reagan, that the problem was, in fact, urgent, and a global treaty phasing out CFCs was approved in 1987.” newyorker/talk/comment/2014/04/14/140414taco_talk_kolbert
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 12:03:02 +0000
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