{"id":566629,"date":"2010-05-17T09:04:27","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T13:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthportal.org\/news\/?p=3337"},"modified":"2010-05-17T09:04:27","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T13:04:27","slug":"ozone%e2%80%99s-joined-up-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/566629","title":{"rendered":"Ozone\u2019s joined-up climate"},"content":{"rendered":"

BBC News:<\/a> Remember the unseemly rush to biofuels<\/a>? The sudden impetus from all kinds of bodies including UN institutions, the EU, and governments such as the UK that began about four years ago to ramp up the growing of fuel crops and to adopt liquids made from them as the low-carbon transport panacea?<\/p>\n

While the enthusiasm was understandable given the absence at the time of other low-carbon transport “solutions”, the thinking was also full of holes.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Some biofuel systems would actually increase<\/a> emissions, peoples’ rights (particularly in rural areas of developing countries) were potentially compromised<\/a>, and the impacts on biodiversity<\/a> of coating the surface of the planet in monocrop plantations were also potentially horrible.<\/p>\n

You can argue that this state of affairs would never have come about if “the environment” had not been chopped up and partitioned into segments called “climate change”, “forests”, “biodiversity” and so on.<\/p>\n

More holistic thinking – more integrated thinking structures at national and international level – would perhaps have ensured that the downsides were seen earlier in the day, and there would have been no over-eager policy-making and subsequent retrenchment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Something potentially analogous has been happening with the international agreements that are supposed to deal with climate change and ozone depletion – the UN climate convention (UNFCCC)<\/a> and the Montreal Protocol<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The latter has met with some success at progressively phasing out ozone-destroying chemicals such as cholorofluorocarbons (CFCs)<\/a> and methyl bromide.<\/p>\n

The job isn’t done yet – not least because developing countries have needed more time to make changes than industrialised nations – but it’s been going in the right direction, with CFCs themselves due to be eliminated this year apart from a few uses where there’s no alternative.<\/p>\n

However, there’s been a problem. The replacement chemicals, HCFCs, are – like CFCs themselves – potent greenhouse gases; molecule for molecule they are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. They also cause some ozone depletion, though far less than CFCs.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, governments decided to accelerate the phase-out of HCFCs too, with target dates of 2020 for industrialised countries and 2030 for the developing world.<\/p>\n

But the most likely replacements for HCFCs – HFCs<\/a> – would still contribute substantially to the man-made greenhouse.<\/p>\n

One study published last year<\/a> concluded that if there were to be a meaningful global agreement to tackle greenhouse gases such as CO2, then by 2050, HFCs could be contributing anywhere between 9% and 45% to the man-made greenhouse effect.<\/p>\n

A companion study<\/a> concluded that by reducing CFC emissions to the atmosphere, the Montreal Protocol had done more by accident to curb global warming than the Kyoto Protocol had achieved intentionally.<\/p>\n

Read more>> <\/a><\/p>\n

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BBC News: Remember the unseemly rush to biofuels? The sudden impetus from all kinds of bodies including UN institutions, the EU, and governments such as the UK that began about four years ago to ramp up the growing of fuel crops and to adopt liquids made from them as the low-carbon transport panacea? While the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7025,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7025"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}