Word: cfc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last week it was the twelve nations of the European Community that took the lead in dealing with the threat to the ozone. In a surprise step, environmental ministers meeting in Brussels agreed that their countries would reduce CFC production by 85% as soon as possible and try to ban the chemicals altogether by the end of the century. That goes far beyond the 1987 Montreal Protocol, ratified by the U.S. and 30 other nations, which pledged only a 50% reduction...
...move galvanized the U.S. into action. President George Bush quickly called for a phaseout of all CFC production in the U.S. by the year 2000, if adequate substitutes can be found. Senator Al Gore, a Tennessee Democrat, introduced a bill in Congress requiring the U.S. to phase out all CFCs in five years...
...more immediate concern is that the chlorine released when CFC molecules break up destroys ozone molecules. The ozone layer, located in the stratosphere, between 10 and 30 miles up, is vital to the well being of plants and animals. Ozone molecules, which consist of three oxygen atoms, absorb most of the ultraviolet radiation that comes from the sun. And ultraviolet is extremely dangerous to life on earth...
When scientists first warned in the 1970s that CFCs could attack ozone, the U.S. responded by banning their use in spray cans. (Manufacturers switched to such environmentally benign substitutes as butane, the chemical burned in cigarette lighters.) But the rest of the world continued to use CFC-based aerosol cans, and overall CFC production kept growing. The threat became far clearer in 1985, when researchers reported a "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Although the size of the hole varies with the seasons and weather patterns, at times Antarctic ozone has been depleted by as much...
That is not good enough, however. The same stability that makes CFCs so safe in industrial use makes them extremely long-lived: some of the CFCs released today will still be in the atmosphere a century from now. Moreover, each atom of chlorine liberated from a CFC can break up as many as 100,000 molecules of ozone...