Andrew Simms - The ozone layer is recovering – there’s hope for the environment yet // George Monbiot - Stopping climate meltdown needs the courage that saved the ozone layer
A global treaty to eliminate harmful chemicals and protect the ozone layer has paid off. We need to take the same decisive action on fossil fuels
“Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse,” wrote the poet Sheenagh Pugh. “Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.” News that the ozone layer is showing signs of recovery – 27 years after a ban on the manmade chemicals that damaged it – is welcome evidence that decisive international action can avert self-imposed disaster. It is that rare flower, a positive environmental story.
It’s easy to forget the potentially catastrophic threat the world faced only recently. In the 1980s, scientists noted the ozone layer – which screens us from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays and without which we couldn’t survive – was thinning. The cause was tracked down to a group of chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, that were being increasingly used in everyday household and industrial appliances and goods, such as fridges and aerosols.
The challenge of removing them seemed great. They were cheap, incredibly useful and everywhere. And yet, trusting the science, and with international leadership, an agreement – the Montreal Protocol – was signed within two years of the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer in the southern polar region. In less than a decade, the content of the damaging chemicals in the vital stratosphere began to decline. Now, the hole has stopped growing bigger and is expected to shrink.
The Montreal Protocol itself has long been held up as an example of a great environmental success. And, in fact, it is far from alone. There has been positive action against acid rain, as well as improvements in air and water quality in the northern hemisphere. We have also seen the abandonment of self-defeating “predict and provide” transport policy, which saw concrete covering countryside on the promise of alleviating congestion, only for the extra road capacity to usher in more car use and the return of congestion with all its associated health and fossil fuel dependency problems.
The change in the ozone layer is a perfect riposte to the burnout and insidious defeatism, even of some environmentalists, who have given up hope of “winning big” again and settle instead for incremental policy reform. But can this hold out hope for the biggest challenge of all? Fossil fuels are more pervasive than ever, with a bigger industrial lobby protecting and promoting them. We have all to a greater or lesser degree been brought up to be dependent on them – from brushing our teeth in the morning to locking the garage at night. Their use is also not only a problem in isolation, but has literally fuelled us to overconsume, and hence overburden, countless planetary ecosystems on which we depend.
In this challenge, it is not enough that we substitute clean energy for dirty energy – in the same way as substitutes for CFCs were found – but that we change habits of consumption that have been fostered during the brief era of cheap fossil fuels.
Nevertheless, certain parallels between the ozone triumph and the danger of climate change are clear. There is a scientific consensus about the threat the problems pose to life and human civilisation. It’s a non-choice between runaway warming and gradual irradiation. And in both cases the main culprit is also clear. It remains within our power to act, and there might be even more to gain from action on climate change too. A shift to cleaner energy systems and consumption patterns that are better for personal and planetary health and wellbeing are possible.
The inescapable logic of necessary action seems to be creeping up even on the oil companies. Increasingly desperate attempts by the chief executive of Shell to dismiss the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, giving him the awkward economic problem of so-called “stranded assets”, is the definition of someone who doth protest too much.
What is cheering is that when it comes to the ozone layer, it’s taken us less than three decades to move from regulatory action to seeing positive results on a complex, global issue. This should remind us that swift action can still prevent catastrophic, uncontrollable warming. But decisions and action to radically reduce emissions need to happen in the next two years – about the time it took from discovering the hole in the ozone layer to agreeing the Montreal Protocol. As Pugh’s poem went on to say, “sometimes we do as we meant to”.
This week the UN revealed that the ozone layer is recovering so fast that, across most of the planet, it will be more or less mended by the middle of the century. Ozone is the atmospheric chemical that blocks ultraviolet-B radiation, protecting us from skin cancer and from damage to our eyes and immune systems, and protecting plants from destruction. It’s coming back, and this is a great advertisement for active government.
