Saving the Ozone Layer

Ed Ayers:
For our next story, we’re going to take you to an auto repair shop.

David Doniger:
So I had to get my car repaired and I go to this car repair shop.

Ed Ayers:
That’s David [Donegar 00:35:34]. In the 1980s, he was an attorney with the National Resource Defense Council and he was trying to get federal action on a big issue that was only getting bigger: the ozone hole.

David Doniger:
I call my office and I ask if I have any messages. “Yes, so-and-so is trying to reach you urgently.” I call this person and the person says, “You’re not going to believe what I just heard. I was just in a cabinet meeting with my leadership and Donald Hodel is saying we shouldn’t have an ozone treaty, we should tell people to protect themselves. We should have a personal protection policy.” I said, “What does that mean?” And the person says, “It means wear hats and sunglasses.”

David Doniger:
So I’m in this auto repair shop and asking them in the office, “Can I use your phone again?” I called reporters for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. I tell them the story and they said, “Who can we confirm this with? We can’t go by your say-so.” And out of desperation… because I knew I couldn’t give my source away at EPA… I said, “Call the Interior Department and ask for the secretary and ask if they’ll confirm it.” Half and hour later the reporters call back and say, “You’re not going to believe this: they confirm it! What is your comment?” I did a quick cost-benefit analysis. I said, “The industry says it’ll cost a billion dollars over 10 years to phase these chemicals down, and if you have to buy everybody a hat and two bottles of sunscreen and a pair of sunglasses every year…” and I did the math and it came out to 10 billion dollars.

Ed Ayers:
The chemicals David is referring to are CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons. They were commonly found in everyday aerosol items like hairspray as well as refrigerants and foams. In the 1970s, two scientists discovered that when CFCs were released into the stratosphere the sun split them apart. This caused a reaction that destroyed the ozone layer. It also meant that the sun’s harsh UV rays could shine harder on the Earth’s surface: hence the sunscreen reference.

David Doniger:
So you would end up with a weaker ozone shield high above our heads letting in more dangerous ultraviolet radiation that would cause skin cancer, damage to plants, and many other bad consequences. The first reaction of the industry was denial and that denial phase carried through, really, into the early ’80s.

Ed Ayers:
David says some of his NRDC colleagues helped publicize the findings, and the American public, they were concerned.

David Doniger:
This made TV news. It made all the big papers, because it was one of the first times that we came to a realization that the chemicals we use, the things we’re doing, could really alter the global atmosphere. There was a very strong consumer reaction right away: people saying a collective, “I don’t need hairspray or underarm deodorant that bad, in this form anyway.” Consumers shifted very quickly to roll-ons and pump sprays. Some companies reacted quickly to offer those products but the consumer trend was really sharp and the sales of CFCs for aerosols just plummeted.

Brian Balogh:
Now keep in mind this is the 1970s: the environmental decade. As you heard in our first segment, Ronald Reagan approach environment protection a little… well, let’s just call it… differently. So I asked David how the Reagan Administration of the ’80s tackled the issue of CFCs.

David Doniger:
The very last thing that the Carter Administration did was issue a finding that the CFC use was still going on after the aerosol market more or less dried up. The use for refrigeration, the use for solvents and foams… the leakage from that set of uses was also a threat to the ozone layer. That finding triggered a requirement under the Clean Air Act to follow up with further restrictions. Well, that’s when Reagan came in.

Speaker 13:
ABC News now makes its projection for the presidency. Reagan is our projected winner. Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, a sports announcer, a former actor…

David Doniger:
And in the first three years, the EPA was run by Anne Gorsuch Burford. The other big name from the Interior Department was James Watt.

Brian Balogh:
You might remember Jay Turner talking about Burford earlier in the show. She was forced to resign in 1983 after a scandal over mismanagement. In her place, Reagan brought back William Ruckelshaus, who ran the EPA under Nixon.

David Doniger:
Now, my organization, NRDC, knew that after the Carter Administration had made this finding of endangerment we could sue the agency to force action to be taken. That’s the way the Clean Air Act works. It gives citizens’ groups the authority to go to court to force the agency to do things that are required. But we didn’t want to take that lawsuit in the first few years because we were afraid that the first Reagan EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, would just revoke the finding of danger. So we waited. When Bill Ruckelshaus came in, we knew him to be a man of honor and principle and science-driven and we knew that he wouldn’t react to a lawsuit by revoking the scientific finding, so that’s when we brought the lawsuit.

Brian Balogh:
By this time, though, David says public interest in the issue was waning. People weren’t necessarily thinking about what chemicals went into their refrigerators.

David Doniger:
What happened is I got a call one day soon after we filed the lawsuit from someone in the agency: a career staffer. He said, “You don’t know me,” and it’s true I didn’t know who he was. I’m thinking, “Who is this guy?” He said, “If you push this lawsuit, you’re going to win, but then you’ll get the wrong answer. You’ll be able to force a decision from the agency but you’ll get the wrong answer. I need two years to beef up the science of the alternatives, the science of the effects.” It was a very grandiose plan. “I’ll do this in a series of workshops with industry and with you and we will rebuild the support for action on this.”

Brian Balogh:
And he wasn’t named Deepthroat, was he?

David Doniger:
No. His name was John Hoffman, but he was one of the most influential people at EPA. So we agreed to a settlement agreement that gave the agency two years to work on these studies and the outreach and engagement.

David Doniger:
I remember a meeting in Vienna, Virginia, where representatives of the DuPont Company, which was the biggest maker of CFCs, came into that meeting and they said, “We want to show you, in all earnestness and honesty, that there are no alternatives.” One by one they said, “We have this one and that one and these would work, but they’re more expensive than the CFCs, so there’s no answer.” A light bulb went off in my head. I said to them, “You mean if the supply of the CFCs was restricted so that their price went up, these other chemicals would be competitive?” And they all looked a little dumbfounded. I’m still not quite sure whether I was being set up to reach that conclusion or whether they had never thought of it themselves, but it was the right answer.

David Doniger:
In 1986, at one of these conferences that EPA had organized, they made me one of two keynote speakers, the other one being from the industry. The guy from the industry spoke first. He said, “We have concluded that we need to limit how much more of these chemicals we make.” And I gave a presentation in which I said, “We need to phase these chemicals out, and if we were really following the science we’d do it right away, but I realize that there’s a need for a transition. I propose that we phase them out completely over a 10 year period.”

David Doniger:
By that time there was a new EPA administrator named Lee Thomas who was in the Ruckelshaus mold. He was a straight shooter. He decided that a 95% phase out over 10 years should be the US policy going into a new set of international negotiations about these chemicals. It was at about that time that the ozone hole was discovered. The ozone hole is the name for a huge drop in the levels of ozone in the stratosphere over Antarctica that shows up at the end of the long southern winter, which ends in September, and the sunlight peaks up over the horizon and suddenly the ozone levels plummet.

David Doniger:
How is this discovered? Well, there was a research station on Antarctica with a device that looked up and measured the ozone concentration from the group up, and for a couple of years they found these anomalous low readings in September when the sun came up and they didn’t know what to make of it, so they waited until the next year to make sure it happened again. Finally, they published the results in Nature Magazine. Then it turned out that folks at NASA have a satellite that’s been circulating over the whole world, but including Antarctica, and they had 10 years or more of records of ozone layer concentrations. They went back into their files and sure enough they found evidence that this ozone hole had happened in the late 1970s and was growing, growing, growing.

Brian Balogh:
I don’t need to tell you that the only penguins we have here in the United States are in zoos and I guess Batman comics. What happens at the South Pole can seem like a world away from the hustle and bustle of Washington DC. But the fact is the ozone hole required a global solution.

David Doniger:
There was awareness that this was an international global problem, so there was an effort to get negotiations going among countries. Mostly it was between the industrial countries, because the developing countries at that time didn’t make these chemicals. So mostly it was between the US, the Europeans, the Scandinavians, the Canadians, and the Japanese were the other major manufacturers. The US, Japan, Europe were the manufacturers and the other developed countries were concerned about this.

Brian Balogh:
With so many players it’s not surprising that it was a struggle to develop an international agreement to limit the use of CFCs. David says the 1985 discovery of the ozone hole gave negotiators a boost. It helped set the stage for what many people see as one of the biggest environmental success stories of the 20th century: the Montreal Protocol.

David Doniger:
It was really dramatic. What they got in Montreal was a 50% phase down over 10 years. My initial reaction… It’s great. There’s an agreement. But my initial reaction was, “This isn’t going to do the job.” A few weeks later, I said to the same guy, John Hoffman, “I’m concerned that this is a halfway measure and we’re going to get stuck here.” He said, “You’re wrong, David. In three years we will be back at the negotiating table and we will ramp this up to a full phase out.” And he turned out to be right: that the momentum was building to do more.

Brian Balogh:
Now, EPA aside, I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan taking the lead on what really required international leadership. Did he?

David Doniger:
This is an interesting part of the story. Lee Thomas, the head of the EPA, and George Shultz, who was the secretary of state, worked together on this. They both took this problem very seriously and they worked this negotiating position through… I referred to it earlier, where Lee Thomas said, “Our position should be a 95% phase out over 10 years.” Shultz and Thomas got this adopted as the US negotiating policy, largely because the other agencies didn’t care or weren’t paying attention. Then the industry became alarmed. Again, I told you they were willing to limit how fast things grew… and some of them were willing to put a freeze on the production… but they weren’t ready to sign up for a full phase out. So they went shopping in the Reagan Administration for some other agency to raise issues, and they found their champion in Donald Hodel.

Brian Balogh:
If you need a refresher, Donald Hodel was the secretary of the interior who David referred to earlier: you know, the just wear sunglasses guy. It turned out, though, that Reagan took sun damage pretty seriously. He’d had experience with skin cancer, and some historians think that experience motivated Reagan to prioritize the issue. I asked David he thinks Reagan weighed in on the issue personally.

David Doniger:
I don’t know. I think that he may well have signaled that he got it; he understood this problem. So anyway, he backed Shultz. There was another little incident that I’ll report, that at one point there was a cabinet meeting about this presided over by Ed Meese, who was the attorney general and very close to Reagan. This is where our lawsuit came in, because he said that he was in favor of pursing the international treaty. Why? Because if we didn’t have a treaty, the NRDC would win this lawsuit and would force very severe restrictions on US companies and then the European and Japanese companies would have an advantage. So he favored a treaty in order to have everybody…

Brian Balogh:
On the same playing field.

David Doniger:
The same playing field, exactly right.

Brian Balogh:
You’ll recall the Montreal Protocol only went some of the way toward a full phase out of CFCs. David’s colleagues insisted it was only a matter of time until science proved the connection between CFCs and the ozone hole. That discovery was already happened and it was made in Antarctica in 1986 by a team led by Susan Solomon, who was a researcher with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

David Doniger:
Immediately, we had the basis to come back and force further action, so we actually brought another lawsuit saying that the halfway measure wasn’t enough. We replayed the same dynamics where the US, under the tail end of Reagan and during the Bush Administration, would still have the same interest in having a global solution.

Brian Balogh:
These efforts resulted in new changes to the Montreal Protocol, which has been revised several times. According to a 2013 New York Times article, if the Montreal Protocol had not halted production of CFCs the planet would be warming at an even faster rate. So I asked David what he’s learned about fighting climate change from his effort to stop the spread of the ozone hole.

David Doniger:
I think the story tells you that we can solve global environmental threats like climate change. It also tells you that the resistance of the industry in question is very powerful and the fossil fuel industries are much bigger than the chemical companies that made these refrigerants. They learned some important lessons about obstruction from the Montreal experience. They learned that, from their point of view, the chemicals industry gave in too easy. They learned some obstructive techniques that they have applied with great effect in the climate treaty negotiation. They were in the process during the Reagan Administration but even more so in the years since of taking over the Republican Party so that one whole party is opposed to environmental protection, especially climate protection. In the ’70s that wasn’t so. The outcry was bipartisan. But what’s happened is a symptom of our broader political realignment where people have sorted themselves into partisan camps as individuals and then politicians have sorted themselves into partisan camps. Funding from the oil and coal and gas industries, but primarily oil and gas, for right wing political causes is very strong and they invested heavily in denialism and confusion.

Brian Balogh:
So if you were to offer one optimistic lesson to take away from the saga of CFCs, what would that be?

David Doniger:
Maybe I’d say two things. One is the industry cried wolf that the economy would come to a halt, you wouldn’t be able to keep food cold, you wouldn’t be able to keep medicines cold in the distribution chain, the economy would fall apart if anything was done to these precious CFCs. And it turned out that when they turned the corner on this they could develop the substitutes. Most people don’t know that there’s a different chemical in their air conditioners and so on than there was 40 years ago. In fact, there have been two or three generations of chemicals and we’re going through another generation of refrigerants right now. It doesn’t even show up in the price of products. It doesn’t show up in the way they work. And the same thing is true about the innovations we need to solve climate change in terms of that electric cars work really well. You see this in electricity too. Most people don’t know where their electricity comes from, but the cheapest sources of electricity now are renewables, and the most expensive thing to do would be to build a new coal plant. It just isn’t happening any more.

David Doniger:
But it’s not enough to rely on the markets alone. You need government to step in. The reason we have a Clean Air Act is that the marketplace doesn’t take not of the health damage and the environmental damage that air pollutants cause. You need to have limits, pollution standards, phase downs of these chemicals in order to make the marketplace work properly to innovate and replace them with safer alternatives. We know that can work.

David Doniger:
The other thing I would say is the best time to have dealt with climate change would be about 40 years ago, but the second best time is now. People are now seeing the impacts. The percentage of people who get it… that the climate change problem is real and it’s caused by carbon pollution and by industrial chemicals like CFCs and HFCs… They get it, and the support for pollution control measures is very high. One we get through the current administration, I think we’re on the cusp of a renewed attack on the pollution that’s driving climate change.

Brian Balogh:
David Donegar is the senior strategic director for the climate and clean energy program at the National Resource Defense Council.

Brian Balogh:
That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh:
BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 14:
Brian Balogh is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is a professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew [Windham 00:59:39] for Virginia Humanities.