Word: cfc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...reason politicians are acting so swiftly on the CFC problem may be that the threat is indisputable. Strong evidence of the effect emerged in 1985, when British researchers announced the existence of a seasonal "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. That was worrisome: ozone between ten miles and 30 miles up absorbs the sun's ultraviolet radiation, which has been linked to cataracts, skin cancers and weakened immune systems in humans and other animals, as well as to damage to plants. Data-gathering flights in the Antarctic in 1987 made the connection between CFCs and ozone destruction...
That prospect helped jolt the Europeans into moving on the CFC issue. And at a London conference on the ozone issue this week, E.C. ministers will try to persuade other nations to adopt the CFC ban. High on the lobbying list: developing countries, such as India and China, that are just starting to mass- produce refrigerators and other CFC-using products...
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...