At school, I was the one phoning up the deodorant company to find out if their products contained CFCs.
Q: Merchants of Doubt looked at the role of think tanks, vested interests and free market ideologies in attacking the science linking fossil fuel burning to climate change, smoking to cancer, pollution to acid rain and CFCs to the ozone hole.
Resources For the Future, an American think-tank, looked at regulations on things such as asbestos, power-station emissions and CFCs (refrigerant gases) and found that 12 of the 25 sets of rules it looked at were less expensive to implement than expected and only six were dearer.But some economists think Lord Stern's cost estimates are too low.
CFCs are greenhouse, as well as ozone-depleting, gases.
The chairman of DuPont, a chemical company, called their idea "a load of rubbish .Eleven years later, scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, and two years after that governments negotiated an agreement, the Montreal protocol, to phase out CFCs.
Even more important, it also won support from large chemical companies (including DuPont) which made money producing substitutes for CFCs.
And it is one that few people other than climate-policy specialists will have thought of in this context: the Montreal protocol, a 1987 agreement to phase out substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in air conditioners, refrigerators and so on.
The penalties included trade sanctions against products containing or (more controversially) made by using CFCs.
And the costs of climate mitigation are far higher than those of giving up CFCs.
In Montreal, the threat came mainly from the harm that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) do to the ozone layer; in Kyoto, from gases such as carbon dioxide that many scientists say are changing the climate.Both treaties thus tried to tackle problems that potentially affect every country, and are caused by activities that occur in every country.
Packing them all up together gives the Kyoto protocol an elegant framework which in theory should solve the problem with a single set of numbers the national caps that are designed to cut the whole range of greenhouse gases.Critics point out that the Kyoto protocol has achieved a great deal less than the Montreal protocol, which was designed to prevent the use of ozone-depleting CFCs.
