Quotes About CFCs

Back when the EPA proposed phasing out ozone-depleting CFCs, the chemical industry howled that refrigerators would fail in America's supermarkets, hospitals and schools.

Though banned in most of the developed world, millions of pounds of destructive CFCs, often made by Western companies, are still legally sold in the third world each year.

The thinning of the ozone layer is blamed on logging of tropical forests. The fact that the burning of fossil fuels and release of CFCs (chloro-fluoro-carbons) into the atmosphere occur largely in the rich countries are significantly ignored.

The verdict was obvious: CFCs were staying in the atmosphere, and because of their inertia nearly their entire post-1930 output was accumulating aloft. But did the presence of these compounds, as Lovelock's group concluded, pose "no conceivable hazard" because they did "not disturb the environment"—or could their accumulation have undesirable consequences?

In "My Adventures in the Ozone Layer," he cast the scientific community as dominated by self-interest. "It's not difficult to understand some of the motivations behind the drive to regulate CFCs out of existence," he wrote. "For scientists: prestige, more grants for research, press conferences, and newspaper stories. Also the feeling that maybe they are saving the world for future generations."69 (As if saving the world would be a bad thing!)