Methyl bromide – how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

Methyl bromide is a pesticide used mainly to sterilize the soil before planting crops such as strawberries and tomatoes. Farmers in the United States use more of this chemical than in all other countries combined.

Methyl bromide came late to the party. Its role in ozone depletion was not widely understood until the early 1990s. Here is a timeline with significant dates for methyl bromide.

• 1991 - Together with two other groups, NRDC petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to phase out methyl bromide, citing a provision of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments requiring the agency to eliminate any newly-identified ozone-depleters in seven years or less.
• 1992 - Montreal Protocol member states agreed to start curbing methyl bromide, although on a slower schedule. The 1992 treaty amendment merely froze each country’s production at its current level.
• 1993 – EPA granted the petition and set a deadline for eliminating methyl bromide production by January 1, 2001.
• 1995 - Countries agreed to a ban in developed countries by 2010, with the possibility of exceptions for “critical uses.”
• 1997 - Montreal parties agreed to accelerate the phase out schedule, with a ban (except for critical uses) in 2005. Developing countries agreed to phase out 10 years later.
• 1998 - Congress amended the U.S. schedule to match up with the international one.

Things went smoothly at first. But when President Bush came into office, the chemical companies that make and distribute methyl bromide sensed their opportunity. Led by Chemtura (formerly known as Great Lakes Chemicals), and tomato and strawberry growers in politically key states began a full-scale campaign to reverse the phase-out. Congressional committees beholden to industry held hearings – I was usually the only witness on behalf of the ozone layer – and introduced bills to void the Clean Air Act’s controls. But by publicizing the health risks and the industry’s special-interest pleading, NRDC was able to keep the bills bottled up.

The industry did better with the Bush administration. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) became methyl bromide’s biggest booster – so much so that when Congress gave USDA money to spend on alternatives to methyl bromide, the department used some of the funds to help defend keeping methyl bromide around.

In 2003, the U.S. asked the Montreal treaty parties for enormous exemptions from the impending 2005 ban. I went to the critical meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, where I was the only non-governmental environmental spokesman. Given the privilege of speaking from the floor to all the delegates, I opposed the U.S. exemption request, explaining that it was so large that American production – which had come down by 70 percent – would start going up again.

For the first time in the history of the Montreal Protocol, the parties deadlocked. They put the question of any exemptions over to another meeting six months later.

In the meantime, I came across a remarkable letter from EPA to the Congress. The letter admitted that Chemtura and a handful of suppliers had built up a stockpile of methyl bromide that was even larger than the U.S. exemption request. Why was this important? Because the treaty parties – the U.S. included – had agreed that no exemptions could be granted until existing stocks of methyl bromide were used up.

EPA wouldn’t disclose just how big the secret stockpile was, supporting company claims that the information was a trade secret. So NRDC sued EPA and eventually won disclosure of the stockpile data. It turned out that the companies had squirreled away more than 37 million pounds of the chemical – nearly twice the initial exemption request.

Though other countries granted the U.S. an exemption for 2005, NRDC has succeeded in reducing the amount cut each year. But the U.S. is still asking for methyl bromide exemptions each year, even though the stockpile is still larger than the annual need. In contrast, other countries – developed and developing alike – have cut their methyl bromide use by 90 percent or eliminated it altogether. The U.S. request still dwarfs all others combined.

So when the Montreal parties gather next week for the 20^th anniversary meeting, I’ll be there trying to convince other countries to say “no” to further exemptions and to require the U.S. to use up the methyl bromide stockpiles instead of making new supplies.

Another problem is that methyl bromide is growing fast for treating wood pallets and packaging to guard against invasive pests like the Asian longhorned beetle. Outbreaks of this and other pests are destroying urban trees in New York, Chicago, and other places, as well as devastating the ash forests of the upper Midwest.

Charged with keeping out invasive species, the USDA required exporting countries to spray wood pallets and crates with methyl bromide to kill these bugs. (Another permitted technique is heat treatment, but many exporters find this too expensive.) But the treatment doesn’t always work, and it’s easy to counterfeit. The obvious solution would be to transition from wood packing material to plastics, cardboard, and metals – materials the bugs can’t ride on. But no, the USDA won’t even consider that alternative.

So NRDC and several states are suing USDA to force a serious look at alternative packaging materials that could eliminate the bugs without any harm to the ozone layer. We’ve already won a ruling that the department misunderestimated the amount of methyl bromide its rules will cause to be used, and the amount of damage that will be done to the ozone layer. And in the coming years, NRDC will try to close a loophole in the Montreal Protocol that lets this bug-spraying use go unrestricted.

HCFCs – play it again, Uncle Sam

HCFCs pose a different challenge. Some HCFCs came into use alongside CFCs, and later they were used as CFC substitutes. They have about one-twentieth the ozone-destroying power of CFCs, but still enough to matter. We have to get rid of them too.

The 1990 amendments to the Montreal Protocol and the 1990 Clean Air Act gave HCFCs a limited lifespan. They could come into use as CFC substitutes, but with a schedule set in advance for eliminating them in a second wave. HCFCs will be largely gone in industrial countries by 2020, and production in developing countries will be frozen in 2015 and eliminated in 2040.

The problem is that HCFC production is growing much more quickly than expected in fast-growing developing countries, mainly China and India, fueled both by their rapid economic growth and by exports to industrial and developing nations.

At the urging of NRDC and other environmental groups, the United States has joined a half dozen other countries – from Mauritius and Mauritania to Argentina and Brazil – in proposing to tighten the HCFC phase-out schedule for both industrial and developing countries.

If we let HCFCs continue growing, the world will suffer more ozone depletion – and more global warming, because these chemicals do double damage. Fortunately, we can avoid that growth and we can accelerate the phase-out schedule for these chemicals, in turn adopting alternatives that are safer for both the ozone layer and the climate. At the same time, we can redesign new refrigerators and air conditioners to use less energy.

China and India are playing a careful game. They have not rejected a faster phase-out, but they are looking for more financial support from the treaty’s international fund before agreeing to tighter requirements. While the U.S. has proposed faster cuts, it has yet to put any additional funding on the table. Both sides need to do more.

The HCFC and methyl bromide proposals will be the focus of attention when the countries meet in Montreal next week. NRDC will be on hand to press for faster action.

I’ll let you know what happens.

Most people know that we’ve gotten rid of the ozone-depleting chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (“CFCs”). But very few people know how we did it.

It’s actually a remarkable story, and one of NRDC’s greatest achievements. On a personal note, I’ll be receiving awards next week from EPA and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in honor of NRDC’s role.

But there is something more important here than celebrations and awards. Now we are turning to face the crisis of global warming. And as we do that, there are lessons to be learned, and hope to be drawn, from our success in saving the ozone layer.

Over the next few days, I’m going to tell the ozone story and what it means for global warming. Today, I’ll talk about how we found out about CFCs and their threat to the ozone layer, and how NRDC helped push and pull us to agreement on the Montreal treaty and the ozone protection provisions of the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Tomorrow, I’ll focus on what we still have to do to finish the job of protecting the ozone layer – by eliminating chemicals called methyl bromide and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). And finally, I’ll share the lessons I draw from this story for the fight against global warming. (For those who want to read ahead, click here.)

So first, what’s the ozone layer, and what does it do for us?

Ozone is a molecule made up of three atoms of oxygen. Normal oxygen consists of two oxygen atoms.) Down here on the ground, ozone is formed from car and power-plant exhaust and is toxic to breathe. But a natural layer of ozone developed in the stratosphere – 6 to 10 miles overhead – over millions of years.

Ozone has the happy property of screening out a lot of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. In this way the ozone layer protects us from skin cancer, cataracts, and other diseases. In fact, the ozone layer made it possible for life as we know it to evolve on land.

 Ozone is a pretty unstable molecule. It is constantly being destroyed and re-made by solar radiation. CFCs and related chemicals upset the natural stratospheric balance by increasing the rate at which ozone is destroyed. This lets more of the dangerous UV radiation reach the Earth’s surface, raising our risks of skin cancer and other illnesses.

How did we get into this mess, and how did we get out of it?

In 1974, two atmospheric scientists, F. Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina, discovered that CFCs could weaken the ozone layer. Millions of pounds of CFCs – then used mainly as propellants in aerosol spray cans – were being released into the air each year. They were virtually indestructible in the lower atmosphere. But Roland and Molina, in work that later earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, found that when CFCs reached the stratosphere and were hit by ultraviolet radiation, they broke apart, freeing chlorine atoms that attack ozone and turn it into ordinary oxygen.

Rowland and Molina felt a special responsibility to get their discovery out beyond the dry scientific journals – to let the responsible government agencies and the public know what they’d found. NRDC also saw the danger and took on the challenge (You can read [here] what my colleagues did to help publicize Roland’s and Molina’s findings, to pursue federal and state bans on CFC aerosols, and to jumpstart international cooperation.) Alarmed by the news, the public shunned aerosol products, and sales dropped rapidly. Eventually, the EPA banned nearly all CFC aerosols in 1978.

Losing, then finding, the way forward.

After the U.S. aerosol ban in 1978, there was a general misconception that the problem had been solved. To be sure, the ban reduced CFC production and emissions in this country. A few other countries – notably Canada and the Scandinavian nations – also banned CFC aerosols, but other European countries and Japan refused to follow suit.

Moreover, growing amounts of CFCs were still being used in refrigerators and air conditioners and in industrial applications. And other ozone-depleting chemicals, including fire-protection chemicals called halons and other industrial solvents, were also being used in growing amounts. For all these reasons, President Carter’s EPA published official findings in 1980 that CFCs still posed a danger.

In 1981, however, Jimmy Carter handed over the White House to Ronald Reagan, who was fiercely opposed to environmental regulation. Nonetheless, NRDC kept up the pressure for action. In 1984 – after Reagan’s disastrous first appointment to head the EPA resigned – I filed a lawsuit based on EPA’s findings of danger in 1980. Those findings, I argued, triggered a requirement under the Clean Air Act that EPA take action to restrict the non-aerosol uses of CFCs.

In those days (much like now), ordinarily we’d get no response from the EPA and we’d have to fight it out in the courts. But in this case, I received an interesting and unusual response: EPA wanted to negotiate.

It turned out that a small group of career civil servants – backed by the one original Reagan appointee who had not resigned in disgrace – were alarmed by what they saw and were determined to do something about it. So NRDC and EPA settled the lawsuit with an agreement on a Stratospheric Ozone Protection Plan that set a schedule for completing a risk assessment and building consensus on further action among businesses, environmental organizations, and governments.

The EPA risk assessment had a dramatic impact. Looking over the next century, EPA demonstrated that the ozone layer would be badly weakened under the assault of steadily rising CFC production, causing hundreds of millions of skin cancer cases and millions of deaths in the United States alone. The global toll of death and disease would be many times larger.

The shock of the Antarctic “ozone hole.”

Meanwhile, British scientists and NASA satellites discovered the Antarctic “ozone hole” – a near-complete loss of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica every September, when sunlight returns to the South Pole. Further research soon proved that the chlorine from CFCs was the cause. I called it “a genuine global emergency” in Congressional hearings. The strong visual image of the Antarctic ozone hole (link here) increased the public’s sense of urgency.

Starting in 1985, I took part in meetings between governments, companies, and environmental organizations to build consensus on further domestic and international action. Here’s one anecdote from those meetings:

At one point, a Dupont representative long known for fighting CFC controls presented a paper showing that Dupont (and other companies) had investigated numerous other compounds. Some could work, he said, as alternative refrigerants, solvents, or foam-blowing agents. But they were more expensive to make, and none could compete against lower-cost CFCs. He thought he’d proved there were no practical alternatives. But I and others participants drew a different conclusion. Didn’t his paper show that there werealternatives? And wouldn’t they be competitive if CFCs were eliminated? Suddenly, the problem that companies said had no solution had plenty of solutions.

Attitudes began to change. At an international conference in 1986, the head of the U.S. industry’s trade association broke with the past and called for some limits on CFC growth. Citing a New Yorkerarticle on the ozone layer, he said he could no longer defend his industry’s position to his children at the dinner table.

NRDC’s phase-out plan.

Speaking at the same conference, I proposed a bolder plan. On strictly environmental and public health grounds, I said, we ought to ban CFCs immediately. But it had to be recognized that the CFC producers and users would need some time to develop and market alternatives. So I proposed a worldwide phase-out of CFCs in ten years, with an 85 percent reduction in the first five years. (Read my article in the Amicus Journal [pdf file])

In the following months, I testified before Senate and House committees and worked with champions in Congress – Senators Max Baucus and the late John Chafee, and Representatives Henry Waxman and Sherwood Boehlert – to write proposed legislation to phase out CFCs in the United States. Other congressional leaders, including Senator Al Gore, called for U.S. diplomatic leadership to forge an effective international ozone treaty. With my colleague David Wirth, I represented NRDC as a nongovernmental observer when international negotiations resumed in 1985. 

 Despite the Reagan administration’s anti-regulatory bias, EPA Administrator Lee Thomas and Secretary of State George Shultz supported a strong U.S. leadership position in the treaty talks, advocating a 90 percent phase-out of CFCs over 10 years. Their position had some unlikely allies. Attorney-General Edwin Meese felt that American companies would be at a disadvantage without a treaty, because NRDC’s lawsuit was likely to force a phase-out in the U.S. even if there was no international agreement.

The counter-revolution. 

Opposed to the EPA-State phase-out plan, the CFC lobby went to other parts of the Reagan administration for help. Officials in the Office of Management and Budget began a closed-door late-night inquisition questioning every aspect of EPA’s risk assessment and the phase-out policy. One official suggested that skin cancer was a “self-inflicted” disease.

 Late in the game, I was invited to appear before the OMB inquisitors. When one said their purpose was to decide U.S. policy for the treaty talks, I reminded him that we already had an established policy in favor of phasing out these chemicals. The next day I made a round of phone calls to the officials that were present, telling each of them that if they backed away from the phase-out policy, I would let the papers know exactly who did it, and why.

For the several weeks, the direction of U.S. policy remained in doubt. The turning point came when Interior Secretary Donald Hodel urged President Reagan to abandon the idea of an international treaty and rely instead on a policy of “personal protection” in which people would be encouraged to wear hats and sunglasses. I broke the story of the “Ray-Ban Plan” to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the TV networks picked it up the next day. Hodel became a laughingstock (see Herblock cartoon in NRDC’s Back from the Brink: How NRDC Helped Save the Ozone Layer), and the Reagan administration continued to push for a treaty.

With Administrator Thomas leading the final negotiations, consensus on the treaty came together in Montreal in September 1987. Twenty-four countries agreed to cut CFC production 50 percent over 10 years. The United States ratified the treaty, which was named for the city of its birth, the following year.

From half step to the full phase-out.

As the 1980s came to a close, NRDC kept pushing on three fronts for a rapid and complete CFC phase-out. Together with other environmental organizations, I helped negotiate agreements with several industries to hasten their transition from CFCs. One agreement with the auto repair industry created a standard for recycling CFCs when servicing car air conditioners, instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere.

Second, NRDC successfully pushed for an ozone protection amendment to the Clean Air Act. The new law, enacted in 1990, mandated the complete phase-out of CFCs and other powerful ozone-depleters. It established recycling requirements and a program to assure the safety of chemical substitutes. The new law even provided phase-out dates for a second generation of ozone-depleting chemicals called HCFCs.

Third, NRDC worked to strengthen the Montreal Protocol, an effort that led to the London Amendment of 1990, under which parties to the treaty agreed to completely phase out CFCs. Industrial nations and developing countries reached a precedent-setting schedule for phasing out the latter’s CFC production after a grace period of 10 extra years. They also set up a multilateral fund through which industrial countries would help developing nations cover the extra costs.

It did not go entirely smoothly. At one point, the first President Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, instructed his negotiators to reneg on the U.S.’s commitment to support the multilateral fund. I was on hand in Stockholm to get the news to the Washington Post and the New York Times. The administration quickly backed down. As a result, China, India, and other major developing countries joined Montreal Protocol and agreed to a full phase-out.

The phase-out schedule was further accelerated in 1992, when 87 countries agreed to ban CFC production by 1996. The 1992 amendment also added methyl bromide—an ozone-destroying pesticide—to the list of controlled chemicals. In 1997, countries agreed to phase out methyl bromide entirely by 2005, with limited exemptions for the most critical uses. Now there are more than 190 countries that have joined the Montreal Protocol.

With few exceptions, nations have met their phase-out commitments on time. At the 20-year mark, scientific experts report that the production of 95 percent of all ozone-depleting chemicals has been eliminated. Though it will take until late in this century, there’s a good chance that the Antarctic ozone hole will disappear and that the ozone layer will be healed worldwide.

As a side benefit, the CFC phaseout has been the most effective step yet taken to slow global warming. Because CFCs are heat-trapping gases, their virtual elimination has delayed the onset of global warming by approximately a dozen years.

But the job isn’t finished. Amid the 20^th anniversary celebrations, there will be tough negotiations about U.S. exemptions for a pesticide called methyl bromide, and about a faster phase-out of chemicals called hydrochlorofluorocarbons (“HCFCs”). I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.