Tim Flannery: Montreal Protocol Day

Australian palaeontologist and environmentalist Tim Flannery spoke in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the Lannan Foundation's 2007 Readings & Conversations series. Flannery is introduced by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, and his talk begins at roughly 12:30.

In this excerpt below, Flannery discusses the significance of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to address ozone depletion in the atmosphere.

[We] have lived through three separate and distinct, global or near global air pollution problems. … The first … became known as the acid rain problem. …

Within a few years of the acid rain problem being addressed, scientists told the world of a very disturbing finding. British and American teams in the Antarctic had started to measure the level of ozone in the atmosphere over the Antarctic and had independently recorded great drops in ozone concentrations. …

Ozone is a very rare element in our atmosphere … but it does a very important job for us, because ozone is a sunscreen. If you brought the whole of the [ozone layer] down to sea level and you could see it, it would form a layer about that thick, about three millimeters thick. There’s just not a lot of it. …

It took a couple of Nobel laureates, a couple of brilliant Americans, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, to track down the cause ... and they discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were at the root cause. … They were initially the last thing you would suspect of causing any problems, because they are totally stable at sea level. They don’t seem to interact with anything. What scientists had failed to understand was that, as these CFCs rise up through the atmosphere,  … there they break down, and … a single chlorine atom can destroy many thousands of ozone molecules. And the reason that the ozone was depleting over the Antarctic was that the chemical reaction is most effective at very low temperatures.

That discovery had such a profound impact on people that it galvanized the world to get together and agree to ban those chemicals. And the protocol under which they were banned was known as the Montreal Protocol, an agreement reached in Montreal, Canada, in 1987. And that moment is a moment in our human history that I think we fail to celebrate significantly. … I think we need a Montreal Protocol Day.

If we had failed to agree, as a species, on banning those chemicals in 1987, we know what the trajectory of chemical production was and we can work out what the burden of the CFCs would have been by 2007. … For every one percent decline in ozone or one percent increase in radiation, we get a one percent increase in failure for seeds to germinate. The same thing happens at the surface of the ocean, among tiny creatures that are the basis of the food chain. So if we hadn’t agreed in ‘87 to ban those chemicals, I think we would have been facing a full-blown crisis of life on Earth.

One more aside, … if chemists in 1928 had decided to make bromofluorocarbons instead of  chlorofluorocarbons, I don’t think we would be here today. The reason they didn’t use bromine instead of chlorine was that bromine was a little more expensive than chlorine and it had a couple of characteristics that made it a little bit less favorable for the particular applications that they had imagined for these chemicals.

But the big thing about bromine is that it is 46 times more effective at destroying ozone than chlorine. So we would have had no ozone layer and wouldn’t have known what had gone wrong. It would have happened before we had really come to grips with the problem.