CFC and Stratospheric Ozone Depletion

Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) concentrations are also increasing, and they have a long half-life in the atmosphere (Table I). They are used as refrigerants, blowing agents, and cleaning chemicals in the microelectronics industry. Two of the most widely used are CFC-11 (, trichlorofluoromethane) and CFC-12 (CFªClª, dichlorodifluoromethane). Due to their persistence in the lower atmosphere, they are transported into the stratosphere where they deplete the ozone layer that shields us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 and subsequent amendments (London, 1990; Copenhagen, 1992) have banned the production of CFCs by the year 2000. From conception of the problem by Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland17 in 1974, to measurement of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985, and acceptance of the problem by industry and the scientific community in 1987, the control of CFC chemicals is one of the major success stories of international environmental cooperation.18 19 Methyl chloroform, a potent ozone-destroying chemical, is now decreasing in the atmosphere19 as a result of the Montreal Protocol (Figure 15). Fortunately, the problem is not irreversible, and the stratosphere is responding to decreased loadings of methyl chloroform. Other CFC chemicals will do likewise within the next couple of decades. For their analysis of the problem, Molina, Rowland, and Paul Crutzen were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and environmental science came of age in 1995! Still, due to long half-lives of the chemicals in the stratosphere, ozone depletion will continue for some years. CFC chemicals also account for a significant fraction of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas effect.

Biodiversity, Habitat Alteration, and Species Extinctions

Globally, the clearing of land for agriculture and commerce amounts to ~50,000 per year or roughly the area of the State of lowa.20 It results in destruction of habitats for plant, animal, and microbial species. Approximately 100,000 species per year are thought to become extinct, from a total of perhaps 4-40 million species. 20 Half of that biodiversity is in the tropics and developing countries, so the clearing of tropical rain forests is of particular concern. Nations are clearing roughly 0.5% of the forests each year. If this causes a loss of half of all natural species present, the rate of extinction would be ~0.25% per year, a very grave long-term problem.

The calamity of species extinctions is that it is truly irreversible. Once we have lost the species, we cannot bring it back (Jurassic Park notwithstanding). In 1961, President John F. Kennedy designated Cape Canaveral on Merritt Island, Florida, as the permanent site of our new space program. He could not have known that near the path of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo rockets lay a tiny sparrow with one of the smallest ranges of any known animal, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow. At that time, there were approximately 6000 sparrows in the nearby marsh along the Banana River, according to an account by Jonathan Wiener in The Next One Hundred Years ,21 but each expansion at Cape Canaveral required more highways, development, and marshes to be drained. By 1968 a census counted 2000 Duskies. However, in 1986, despite a reserve program by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, zoologists scoured the mile-and-a-half range to find only six individuals remaining, all males. Their fate was sealed. The last individual was named Orange Band, and he was still living in a cage on Paradise Island at Walt Disney World in 1986. He was a little overweight, with the gout, and partially blind, and he didn't fare too well on take-offs and landings, but he was truly one of a kind. Orange Band died in June of 1987. Who cries for a sparrow? This is not to suggest that President Kennedy should have done anything differently even if he had known about Orange Band. Rather it is the story of inevitable conflict between human development and habitat fragmentation.

The story is not meant to be a metaphor for our own fate. Quite to the contrary, we are a tremendously successful species, and I fear more for our own success and the slow, almost imperceptible, decline in the quality of life as we lose other creatures. A colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin, John Magnuson, calls it the "invisible present," when events move too slowly to be appreciated in real time, yet their accumulation results in real change over decades. Special precaution must be taken to avoid irreversible environmental changes such as the extinction of species because there is nothing that we can do to make amends. We grow slowly poorer.

Environment and Development

Global poverty is perhaps the greatest environmental problem of them all.  1.3 billion people lack safe drinking water; 2.3 billion lack access to sanitation facilities; 1.5 billion do not have enough firewood or fuel for cooking and heating; and 13 million children die each year from diarrhea, dysentery, and hunger.22 I was fortunate to go to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 with Burns Weston and Geoffrey Palmer from our College of Law and Dorothy Paul, Director of the United Nations Association-Iowa Division. Naive though I was, I thought that maybe I could contribute to the discussions of how best to limit our carbon dioxide emissions. I learned quickly that the meeting was not just about the environment; it was really about power, politics, and social justice. At the Earth Summit, I first understood what the developed countries were asking of the developing world. The developed world has put all of the CFCs into the atmosphere (at great profit) and 75% of the excess carbon dioxide. We have cleared most of our native forests and emitted most of the pollution. Now we bring to the table, to poor developing countries, treaties that specify that everyone must change their ways because we are harming the atmosphere and biodiversity. But their children are dying! They call our problems the "loud problems" because of all the noise that we make about them. Their problems have to do with basic sanitation, education, and health. Thus, we have no credibility.

The United States releases about 30 times as much carbon dioxide per person as India. Because our population is approximately 250 million, and theirs is almost one billion, we emit roughly seven times more than they do. Their population is growing much faster than ours. But even though our population grew by 1.3 million last year compared to India's 18 million growth, we still added about twice as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as they did from intrinsic population increases. It really hit home for me when one gentleman from a developing country asked me, "Professor Schnoor, how many children do you have?" And I said quite proudly that I had only two. "Well, that would be equivalent to 18 children in resource equivalents for my country," he replied good-naturedly.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but this much is clear: 1) Western countries must decrease their consumption patterns, and 2) developing countries must limit their population growth if we are to limit pollution and enhance the quality of life. Developing countries need investment in their infrastructure, schools, hospitals, water supply and sewage treatment. Education, particularly education of women, will accomplish the decrease in birth rates that is desired, and there has been progress. At the recent Beijing World Conference on Women, it was pointed out that females have advanced twice as fast as males in literacy and school enrollment in developing countries. This is, in part, because they were so far behind their male counterparts, but there are some encouraging signs. China has raised women's literacy rates from essentially zero percent to 82% literacy in the past 50 years. Many of the world's poorest countries have raised female literacy by as much as 30 percent since 1970.

There is a natural succession that takes place as countries develop (Figure 16). First, some improvement in basic sanitation and drinking water occurs with initial development and increases in the GNP per capita. Meanwhile, urban pollution becomes more acute with dirty, extractive industries often characterizing early development. Finally, as per capita income reaches a threshold level, urban air and water pollution begin to improve as the country has more capital to invest in pollution control and infrastructure improvements. Unfortunately, consumption per capita continues to increase with continued development, much as it has in the United States. And why not? We have never developed the culture necessary to change consumption patterns. In the future, progress for a developed nation should mean limiting waste products and making optimum use of natural resources for future generations.

We must decouple consumption from GNP and quality of life, and it is possible to do so.

Earlier, I mentioned that control of carbon dioxide concentrations in the environment would require a 70% decline in fossil fuel emissions. This is not likely, considering the need for South Asia, Africa, and Latin America to develop. By the year 2020, Asia's emissions of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides will be greater than those of North America and Europe combined! 26 They are the elephant in the bathtub. They are at the second stage of development, where basic sanitation has been achieved but emissions are only just beginning to be controlled. The best scenario involves developing countries helping them with technology transfers at little or no charge. In this manner, Asian countries become good trading partners, and the environment is protected in the best way possible. Developing countries should be able to "leap-frog" many of the environmental mistakes that we made in the past.

Energy intensity (energy consumed per $ GDP) has declined among Western countries about 25% during the period 1970-1988, while quality of life indices have improved .22 For the first time, nations have been able to decouple productivity from energy consumption. This means that the conventional wisdom that you must expend a lot of energy to live better is no longer true. A key question is whether and how quickly developing nations like India and China can do the same. Think globally, act locally. One of our students, Richard Ney, and I recently completed a report on emission of greenhouse gases in Iowa .23 Because of Iowa's sparse population density (meaning long travel distances), continental climate, and high-input agriculture, we are 15th worst among the 50 states in greenhouse gas emissions per capita. Each Iowan emits, on the average, 29 tons of carbon dioxide per year to the atmosphere. Every time we fill up our car with gas (10 gallons), 190 pounds of C02 is released upon combustion! On a per capita daily average, we generate 5 lbs of garbage, 5-10 lbs of hazardous waste, 160 lbs of carbon dioxide; and dispose to the sewer 150 gallons of water (more if you have teenagers). Each person in Iowa generates more than their weight in waste each day! There is plenty of room for improvement.

Louis Licht, a student of mine in the mid-1980s, had a simple idea. He wanted to plant trees. I tried to dissuade him¾it wasn't "academic" enough¾but he was persuasive, and I acquiesced. At first, we planted trees for agricultural runoff control at Amana, Iowa. Then, we estimated the huge amount of carbon dioxide that fast-growing hybrid poplar trees could sequester out of the atmosphere and into woody tissue, and we planted more trees for carbon dioxide sequestration. And, most recently, we have been planting trees at hazardous waste sites because, it turns out, they are capable of metabolizing a wide variety of toxic organic pollutants. In total, we have planted more than 200,000 trees in six states and three countries.

Sometimes it helps to list hopeful prospects now that we have delineated our environmental nightmares. Table IV is such a list of hopeful signs in the world of global change. Some have said that environmental science has displaced economics as the dismal science. (Not at all: we can merge the two into environmental economics and really get depressed!) Whether deep ecologists will admit it or not, civilization is making some progress, at least in the areas of pollution control, human health, life expectancy, infant mortality, democratization, and education. Whether conservative fundamentalists will admit it or not, environmental controls have been quite successful at a cost of only 2% of GNP; environmental technology represents a new area of business expansion in the 21st century; and preservation of species has been relatively inexpensive, unobtrusive, and successful.

For example, the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), contrary to much of its recent publicity, has been quite successful and cost-effective. It was signed in 1973 by President Richard Nixon, who said, "Nothing is more priceless than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many faceted treasure." Of the 909 species listed as endangered, more than 99% continue to exist and 41% of the plants and animals are stable or improving .27 Eight species, including the brown pelican, Arctic peregrine falcon, and the Palau dove, have completely recovered and been removed from the endangered list. The American alligator, bald eagle, black-footed ferret, gray and red wolves, whooping crane, and southern sea otter have all improved markedly. All of this protection came at a federal cost of $57 million dollars in FY 1996. (One C-17 transport plane costs $300 million.) The Endangered Species Act has had very little impact on economic development. It only affects about one percent of all projects and most of those continue with modifications. It has claimed about 9000 jobs, and those were all connected with the Northern Spotted Owl and small sawmills that were already in decline, unfortunately. 27 There will be conflicts in the future because the opportunity for tension between human development and animal habitat becomes greater as we develop more land. The environment and the Endangered Species Act enjoy enormous public support for reasons that defy political strategists¾people are quite intelligent and they have a real sense of the sacred. There are some aspects of the human experience that are just too precious to toss away.

Prospects for the Future

Untold future generations have the right to enjoy a high quality of life, as we in the developed world have. This concept embodies the "Sustainable Development" movement, which dominates environmental political discussions today. It was first stated in 1987 in a seminal document, Our Common Future by Gro Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, as "Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." We should not foreclose on our children's future by preemptive utilization of resources that they will need. While conceptually powerful, it is a difficult paradigm to implement because we do not know exactly how our actions today will affect future generations nor what resources they will need. Quite anthropocentric, it encompasses the desire for ecological preservation only through the needs of future generations. Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, thought that there are four basic human needs in successive order: 1) food and water, 2) safety and shelter, 3) love and family, and 4) self-actualization or fulfillment. It is only the final human need that may touch on sociological goals of harmony in our society and ecological harmony (?) between humans and our environment.

I might go further in defining the needs of future generations. In this kind of "Eco-logic," the following questions would be relevant to any action taken by individuals, government or industry: