Bush's stealth attack on the atmosphere

The same administration that denies global warming now wants to dramatically increase the use of an ozone-eating chemical. Agribusiness is very happy.

By Glenn Scherer

Aug. 20, 2003 | Day and night, ships arrive from around the globe at America's ports. Sealed steel boxes are hoisted from hulls onto waiting trains and trucks that roll to every state in the nation. Roughly 21,000 such containers enter the country each day, packed with millions of wooden crates and pallets. Along with their cargo, they can also hold invasive insects like the Asian long-horned beetle, which if it escaped to U.S. forests, could defoliate millions of trees and do billions of dollars in damage.

The Bush administration, to combat this very real problem, wants to force foreign countries and American ports to fumigate nearly every last board-foot with methyl bromide, a deadly pesticide. There's just one catch: methyl bromide is a direct, dangerous threat to the ozone layer, and because it's mandated for a total phaseout under both the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol ozone-protection treaty, a massive production increase would violate both U.S. and international law. Bush's plan, which purports to benefit the environment, instead appears calculated to undermine the Montreal Protocol while wildly profiting some of the GOP's staunchest financial backers -- a handful of methyl bromide manufacturers and the agribusiness interests that are the biggest users of the chemical.

The Montreal Protocol has been called the greatest environmental victory in history and hailed as a triumph of international cooperation. Starting in 1987, the United States, under the Reagan administration, worked with 166 other nations, plus corporations like DuPont, to ban manmade chemicals that were allowing more deadly ultraviolet rays to reach the earth.

Now the Bush strategy could delay or even reverse the healing of the ozone layer, scientists say. It could derail the treaty itself, posing a significant health risk to humans and other life across the globe. The administration has launched a two-pronged attack on the protocol: A newly proposed rule by the Department of Agriculture would demand methyl bromide fumigation for nearly all imported raw-wood packaging, and the Environmental Protection Agency wants to allow U.S. farmers and businesses to use millions of added pounds of the poison on crops and golf courses.

"I think it is quite serious," says Don Wuebbles, a University of Illinois researcher who has studied the ozone layer for 30 years. "I would be concerned about anything that will lead to a potential increase of methyl bromide ... It's still one of the most important contributors to ozone depletion."

Methyl bromide is an odorless, colorless, little known but lethal agricultural pesticide. And its byproduct, bromine, "kills ozone something like 50 times more effectively than chlorine on an atom-for-atom basis," says William Randel, the senior atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The Bush initiative comes at a time when reports and studies show that, after years of concern and global action, Earth's protective ozone layer is starting to heal. Human output of chlorofluorocarbons has fallen dramatically; atmospheric levels of methyl bromide have been falling, too, as the phaseout of the chemical is beginning to take effect.

Just this month, the Christian Science Monitor reported that scientists have found "unambiguous evidence that Earth's sunscreen, the tenuous shield of ozone in the stratosphere, is slowly beginning to recover from nearly thirty years of human triggered loss." One key reason for the recovery, said the newspaper, is the declining use of methyl bromide, one of the most worrisome gases now threatening the ozone layer.

"Methyl bromide has decreased [in the atmosphere] more than 10 percent since 1998," Steve Montzka, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who made the discovery, told Salon. "We think the most likely explanation of where that decrease in atmospheric methyl bromide is coming from is due primarily to the Montreal Protocol restrictions on its production."

If all human production of methyl bromide ceased today, says a 2002 World Meteorological Organization scientific assessment, global ozone depletion would be reduced by 4 percent. That doesn't sound like much, but a total ban could curb harmful ultraviolet rays, cutting non-melanoma skin cancers by about 8 percent and eliminating up to 600,000 cases of cataract-induced blindness annually, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Under the Montreal Protocol, methyl bromide production has already been curtailed by 70 percent of 1991 baseline levels, with a total ban due in 2005. But by playing a cagey numbers and lawyers game with the treaty, the administration hopes to keep the chemical in use at high levels after the phaseout date both in the United States and abroad, pleasing its agribusiness patrons while maintaining the appearance of staying within the letter of the law.

"There is no question that this is a case of another big polluter, of an industry well connected to the administration -- just like coal or oil -- looking for multimillion-dollar favors," says David Doniger, policy director of the Climate Center of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The new rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fumigate all raw solid-wood packaging shipped into the United States, could skyrocket global methyl bromide production. (While heat treatment is a suggested alternative, its higher cost would likely result in methyl bromide being the method of choice.)

The department says it is merely implementing a mandate of the U.N.'s International Plant Protection Convention, agreed to by 118 nations. But that agreement offers only guidelines, not strict rules, and it allows for multiple forms of treatment, including the use of chemicals that wouldn't damage the ozone.

The Agricultural Department concedes that its universal fumigation plan could raise methyl bromide's use from current global levels of roughly 55,500 metric tons to as much as 158,500 metric tons. That worst-case scenario could triple production of the pesticide worldwide, and in the department's own estimation, increase human-made methyl bromide emissions by a staggering 155 percent, enough to cause significant harm to the ozone layer. The Agriculture Department did not respond to several requests by Salon to speak with the lead scientific author of this damning report. However, the agency insists that this scenario is unlikely.

Next page: What if other nations follow Bush's example?