The Undoing of Thomas Midgley

139   “has suddenly moved to the forefront”: John Noble Wilford, “His Bold Statement Transforms The Debate On Greenhouse Effect,” The New York Times, August 23, 1988.

 

139   “shook Washington and the world”: Andrew C. Revkin, “Years Later, Climatologist Renews His Call for Action,” The New York Times, June 23, 2008. “To many observers of environmental history,” Revkin writes, “that was the first time global warming moved from being a looming issue to breaking news. Dr. Hansen’s statement helped propel the first pushes for legislation and an international treaty to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.”

 

140   Midgley came from a family of inventors: J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World in the Twentieth Century, Norton, 2001, Chapter Four, “The Atmosphere: Regional and Global History,” 111.

 

140   inventing leaded gasoline: Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Basic Books 2002. Chapter Three, “How to Become a Statistic,” 63.

 

140   spread lead everywhere a car could go: And to many other places. Lead concentrations, writes King’s College environmental scientist Gary Fuller, were 100 times above normal even in Greenland ice.

Fuller’s chapter on the effects (Chapter Four, “The Madness of Lead Gasoline,” 55) is very strong. Gary Fuller, The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution — and How We Can Fight Back, Melville House 2019.

Dr. Fuller answers a question I’ve always had: what made kids eat paint chips? The “sweet taste encouraged children to chew the lead paint on their toys and cots,” he writes, “because it tasted like lemon drops.” 52.

 

140   Salesmen called the no-sputter gasoline: David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz, “A ‘Gift of God’?: The Public Health Controversy Over Leaded Gasoline During the 1920s,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 75 No. 4, April 1985.

 

140   “a gift of God”: J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World in the Twentieth Century, Norton 2001. Chapter Three, “The Atmosphere: Urban History,” 62.

 

140   The fuel was banned: Philip J. Landrigan, “The Worldwide Problem of Lead in Petrol,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Vol. 80, 2002.

J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World in the Twentieth Century, Norton 2001. Chapter Three, “The Atmosphere: Urban History,” 62

 

140   six years: The New York Times, “Priestly and Midgley,” January 9, 1941. Midgley had just received the Priestly Medal, the American Chemical Society’s highest honor.

“It is fitting,” explained the Times, that the year’s recipient “should be a man who made it possible for automobiles and airplanes to go many miles farther on a gallon of ‘gas.’” The paper added, “The nation owes much to Mr. Midgley.”

 

140   a house-to-house search: The New York Times, “Thos. Midgley Dies; Noted Chemist, 55,” November 3, 1944. He died as president of the American Chemical Society.

 

140   three days: Kat Eschner, “One Man Invented Two of the Deadliest Substances of the 20 Century,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 18, 2017.

 

140   At a meeting of the American Chemical Society: Midgley had understandable faith in the gesture. He’d performed the same crowd-pleasing trick a half-decade earlier. With his God-given fuel.

“Midgley was so confident in the use of his product that he poured it on his hands and took deep sniffs in front the of press,” writes Gary Fuller, “despite having only just returned from time away from the plant to recover from an earlier bout of lead poisoning himself.” People repeat what works. Fuller, The Invisible Killer, 54.

 

140   breath of his own compound: Time Magazine, “Science: Chemists in Atlanta,” April 21, 1930.

The annual ACS meeting. “Frequent have been deaths attributed to escaped gas from mechanical refrigerators. In many of the 22 commercial types poisonous gases are used,” Time reported. “Thomas Midgley Jr., Dayton chemist, inventor of ethyl gasoline, placed a dish of a new refrigerant devised by him on a table before his section. Leaning low over the boiling dish he inhaled the white gas given off by the steaming liquid. Through a rubber tube he then blew the gas out of his lungs into a dish containing a burning candle, extinguished it.”

J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World in the Twentieth Century, Norton 2001. Chapter Four, “The Atmosphere: Regional and Global History,” 113.

 

140      “made office work conditions ideal”: H.G. Moulton, “Air Cooling Opens New Era in Business and Domestic Life of Nation,” The Washington Post, August 27, 1933. With its subhead, “Making Office Work Conditions Ideal Through Air Cooling.”

Midgley understood the kind of damp barrier he’d broken. He referred to the condition he’d made possible as “synthetic weather.”

And wrote, “Like many other synthetic materials, synthetic weather is still inferior to the best that nature has to offer.”

Eric Dean Wilson, After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, Simon and Schuster 2021, Chapter Two, “The Age of Freon,” 141.

 

140      the GI’s bug bomb: The New York Times, “‘20 Degrees Cooler Inside,’” June 17, 1945.

 

140      doubled, then redoubled: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

.

140      In 1940, age fifty-one: In his fascinating story, Eric Dean Wilson notes a nearly novelistic irony—the kind with which the sciences seem rife. “Coincidentally, the Freon he’d developed would become the key to keeping cool—and thus effective—the vaccine that would soon eliminate polio in the United States.” Wilson, After Cooling, “The Age of Freon,” 149.

 

140      Midgley hanged himself with the cords: Wilson, After Cooling, “The Age of Freon,” 150-1.

 

140      who aimed to improve things: The eulogy and after—again, from Wilson’s stirring book.

 

At Midgley’s graveside, the priest read from the Bible, the First Book of Timothy: “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” On his drive home from the funeral, Kettering—who’d been present as boss, colleague, and friend—realized that “in Midge’s case, it would have seemed so appropriate to have added this: ‘but we can leave a lot behind for the good of the world.’ ” In the histories written before 1974, before the first detection of Freon’s effect on the ozone, Kettering’s remarks acted as a well-made coda, a chord major and closed to criticism. In the accounts since, given what we now know, the same words bend below the staff with sour dissonance.

Some have cast Midgley’s life as the parable of a man who got what he deserved, a Faustian tale of selling one’s soul to the Devil and the just deserts that come with a fool’s bargain. . . . The historical record shows that Midgley died thinking that he’d made the world a safer place. He believed his work would open the door for the complete eradication of viral pandemics, the elimination of food spoilage, and increased comfort and health (for some, for some time) in an artificially cooler world.

 

“And in fact, it did,” Wilson notes, “though it’s now difficult to see his inventions beyond their environmental impact.” Wilson, After Cooling, “The Age of Freon,” 151–2.

 

141      “more impact on the atmosphere”: J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World in the Twentieth Century, Norton 2001. Chapter Four, “The Atmosphere: Regional and Global History,” 113.

Environmental Professor Gary Fuller quotes the McNeil assessment in The Invisible Killer. As of the mid-sixties, “The amount of lead currently entering the oceans each year was around eighty times greater than the historic rate. The waters at the top of the ocean contained up to ten times the amount of lead found in the depths. . . . The lead in Greenland ice was one hundred times greater than pre-industrial levels and snow in remote Antarctica contained ten times more.” All due to a single well-intentioned man. Fuller, The Invisible Killer, 55-6.

What do you suppose happened to the scientist who set out to demonstrate leaded gasoline’s effect on human beings? “The industry responded with unprecedented opposition and set out to discredit [him].”

And can you guess what got the fuel companies to drop it? Lead fouled up the new catalytic converter—that is, this is the second punchline to the Los Angeles smog story. The doctor who did much of the human-effects research, Pennsylvania’s Herbert Needleman, offered a bitter joke: “Apparently, poisoning a technology was more important than poisoning people.” 57.

 

141      “all of us took it for granted”: The Nobel Prize, “F. Sherwood Rowland: Biographical,” Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995, NobelPrize.org.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/rowland/biographical/

Accessed 11-10-22.

F. Sherwood Rowland – Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2021.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/rowland/biographical/
Accessed 11-10-22.

 

141      Fermi splitting the atom: Arthur H. Compton, “The Birth of Atomic Power,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1953.

 

“Some Punkins!”

 

A Russian newspaper, doing the best it could with the help of its dictionary, recently reported that the first atomic pile, located in the squash court of the University of Chicago, stood on a “pumpkin patch.” Is this perhaps why atomic energy has so early become associated with witch hunts?

 

Craig Nelson, The Age Of Radiance: The Epic Rise And Dramatic Fall Of The Atomic Era, Scribner 2014. 172.

 

141      “We’re here to find out”: “F. Sherwood Rowland,” NobelPrize.org.

It was the kind of sincere brusqueness that can be endearing, even activating. Then earn the below sort of tribute.

 

My randomly assigned mentor was Willard F. Libby, who had just finished developing the Carbon-14 Dating technique for which he received the 1960 Nobel Prize. Bill Libby (although I never called him anything but “Professor Libby” until I was more than 40 years old) was a charismatic, brusque (on first meeting, “I see you made all A’s in undergraduate school. We’re here to find out if you are any damn good!”) dynamo, with a very wide range of fertile ideas for scientific research. I settled automatically and happily into his research group, and became a radiochemist working on the chemistry of radioactive atoms. Almost everything I learned about how to be a research scientist came from listening to and observing Bill Libby.

 

142      He published in 1972: Sherwood F. Rowland et al, “Mercury Concentrations in Museum Specimens of Tuna and Swordfish,” Science, March 10, 1972.

Lee Edson, “Not With A Bang But A Pfffft?”, The New York Times, December 21, 1975.

 

142      how Rowland entered the environmental record: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Eight, “Ozone Holes,” 148.

Linda Dotto, Howard Schiff, The Ozone War, Doubleday 1978. Chapter One, “The Spray Can War Begins,” 24. 

Rowland’s work could then be enlisted for non-green causes, marching under banners like the following: Charles L. Gould, “The Environment: Ecology’s Prophets Peddle Needless Despair,” The Boston Globe, April 8, 1973.

 

142      scientists are loyal to facts: Fellow National Academy member and MIT atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon wrote of Rowland, his “work embodies the finest spirit of science in my view: to seek nothing but to understand and explore the truth.”

Donald R. Blake, Scott Rychnovsky, “In Memoriam: Frank Sherwood Rowland,” University of California Irvine, 2012.

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/inmemoriam/html/franksherwoodrowland.html

Accessed 11-12-22.

William Burton, “Clean-Up Hitter: Long Before F. Sherwood Rowland Began To Study Chlorofluorocarbons, The Man-Made Gases Were A Household Force. His Work In Atmospheric Chemistry Made CFCs A Household Word—And Halting Their Production A Global Issue,” The University of Chicago Magazine, August 1997.

“He even drew the ire of environmentalists,” Burton reports, “by showing that levels of mercury found in tuna were in fact no higher than those in specimens preserved decades earlier.”

 

142      About eight hundred thousand tons of Freon: Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Basic Books 2002. Chapter Nine, “A Grand Experiment,” 250.

CFCs—“Freon” here for the chemical compound, like “Kleenex” for tissue. This is per the Times: “The substances, widely known by their trade name as Freons . . .” Walter Sullivan, “Studies Are Cited to Show That Effects of Fluorocarbons on Ozone Layer May Be Cut ‘Nearly to Zero,’” The New York Times, May 13, 1976.

F. Sherwood Rowland, “Chemist Who Discovered Danger To Ozone: Evidence Supports Immediate Action,” The Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1975. “Last year, the world used more than 800,000 tons of the two compounds known technically as chlorofluoromethanes, primarily as propellant gases in aerosol sprays and as coolant fluid in air conditioners and refrigerators.” (Chlorofluoromethane was known as Freon 31.)

 

142      Where did that gas go?: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986. “Rowland,” Brodeur writes, “wondered where the gases were going and what would become of them.”

 

142      “I wonder where that speck”: Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, Doubleday 1957, Chapter Seven, 176.

 

142      He took another grant: Burton, “Clean-Up Hitter.”

 

142      First two months, boring: Steve Thomas, “A Modern Galileo: How UCI Chemist F. Sherwood Roland Saved the World,” The University of California Irvine News, August 29, 2002.

Linda Dotto, Howard Schiff, The Ozone War, Doubleday 1978. Chapter One, “The Spray Can War Begins,” 15. “It was a systematic approach to the problem and, Molina rather sheepishly admits, ‘a bit boring. It was rather frustrating because I kept coming up with all sorts of possibilities and working out each of them and saying no, it cannot be very important.’”

 

142      Third month, terrifying: Thomas, “Modern Galileo.”

 

Over the next two months, the pair systematically investigated all the ways that CFCs might be destroyed on or near the surface of the earth.

“It was sort of boring work.” Rowland says. “We had to calculate or look up the amount of various chemicals in the atmosphere and then go through chemical journals to research possible reactions of those chemicals with CFCs. Gradually it became clear that CFCs would not begin to break down until they circulated up into the stratosphere where they could absorb enough solar radiation to make them reactive.”

 

The Nobel Prize, “F. Sherwood Rowland: Biographical,” Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995, NobelPrize.org.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/rowland/biographical/

Accessed 11-10-22.

 

142      The ozone layer: “Peak concentrations,” explains NASA on its Ozone Facts website, “an average of 8 molecules of ozone per million molecules in the atmosphere, occur between an altitude of 30 and 35 kilometers.”

Goddard Space Flight Center, “NASA Ozone Watch: Ozone Facts,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html

Accessed 11-11-22.

Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

And as the ozone story took its shape, that was the number Associated Press put in hundreds of papers: 20 miles up. For example, Associated Press, “Fluorocarbons Destroy Earth’s Ozone Faster,” November 9, 1979.

 

142      the sun’s ultraviolet radiation: This number is generally given as 99 percent, but you’ll see 97-99 percent, too.

“The ozone layer absorbs all but a small fraction of the UV-B radiation from the sun,” report Madhava Sarma and Stephen Anderson, in their definitive Protecting the Ozone Layer, “shielding plants and animals from its harmful effects. Stratospheric ozone depletion: increases skin cancer, cataracts, and blindness; suppresses the human immune system; damages natural ecosystems; changes the climate.”

Stephen O. Anderson, K. Madhava Sarma, Kofi A. Annan (Foreword), Protecting the Ozone Layer: The United Nations History, Routledge 2002. Chapter One, “The Science of Ozone Depletion: From Theory to Certainty,” 3.

 

142      blur you with cataracts: In the livestock world, this is called, horribly, “cancer eye”—and in Australian cattle is the most common form of cancer. The antipodes have higher UV levels; cows spend all day in the sun. (Pigmentation, breed, and age all being additional risk factors.)

 

142      a single chlorine atom: This is such a surprising number that journalists would sometimes—see the Times, “Not With a Bang But a Pfffft?”, December 21, 1975—assume the last “0” to be a typo and print “10,000 molecules.”

You’d find this in books, too. Robert E. Krebs, The Basics of Earth Science, Greenwood 2003. 270.

Per scientists, it really is that freakishly large figure. NASA splits the difference and goes with “10,000 to 100,000 molecules.”

Dr. Jack Fishman, “‘Bad’ Ozone Threatens Human and Plant Health,” Ask An Expert, NASA, August 25, 2010.

https://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/bad_ozone_chat.html

Accessed 11-11-22.

But 100,000 is the EPA’s number—“One chlorine atom can destroy over 100,000 ozone molecules before it is removed from the stratosphere”—and it’s Rowland’s too.

F. Sherwood Rowland, “Chemist Who Discovered Danger To Ozone: Evidence Supports Immediate Action,” The Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1975.

F. Sherwood Rowland, “Stratospheric Ozone Depletion by Chlorofluorocarbons,” Ambio, Vol. 19 No. 6, 7. October 1990.

EPA, “Basic Ozone Layer Science,” Ozone Layer Protection.
https://www.epa.gov/ozone-layer-protection/basic-ozone-layer-science
Accessed 11-11-22.

Felicity Barringer, “F. Sherwood Rowland, Cited Aerosols’ Danger, Is Dead at 84,” The New York Times, March 12, 2012.

 

142      Then, very slowly, over three days: Steve Thomas, “A Modern Galileo: How UCI Chemist F. Sherwood Roland Saved the World,” The University of California Irvine News, August 29, 2002. “The ‘wait a minute, if this is true . . .’ realization came in early December 1973. Rowland and Molina looked at each other, took a deep breath, and redid all of the calculations over a period of three days, searching for an error that would invalidate their results. There was no error.”

 

142      “But it may mean the end of the world”: Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years, 149.

Michael J. Prather, Donald R. Blake, “F. Sherwood Rowland (1927–2012),” Nature, Vol. 484, April 11, 2012.

Steve Thomas, “A Modern Galileo: How UCI Chemist F. Sherwood Roland Saved the World,” The University of California Irvine News, August 29, 2002.

 

142      They published in June 1974: Mario Molina, F. Sherwood Roland, “Stratospheric Sink For Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Atom-Catalysed Destruction Of Ozone,” Nature, Vol. 249, June 28, 1974.

 

143      addressed the same American Chemical Society: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

 

143      “arouse a desire to sing or to recite poetry”: Time Magazine, “Science: Chemists in Atlanta,” April 21, 1930.

 

143      an immediate ban: Stephen O. Anderson, K. Madhava Sarma, Kofi A. Annan (Foreword), Protecting the Ozone Layer: The United Nations History, Routledge 2002. Chapter One, “The Science of Ozone Depletion: From Theory to Certainty,” 10.

 

143      loss between 7 and 13 percent: F. Sherwood Rowland, “Chemist Who Discovered Danger To Ozone: Evidence Supports Immediate Action,” The Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1975.

 

143      “several hundred thousand”: Grayson Mitchell, “U.S. Acts to Ban All Fluorocarbon Sprays by 1979,” The Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1977. Douglas Kennedy, FDA Commissioner: “We in the United States might ultimately expect up to 120,000 new skin cancer cases a year.”

One intermediate step was 100,000 new annual cases, predicted in a 1975 Harvard University study. Stephen O. Anderson, K. Madhava Sarma, Kofi A. Annan (Foreword), Protecting the Ozone Layer: The United Nations History, Routledge 2002. Dan Smith, Penelope Canan, Chapter Eight, “Media Coverage of the Ozone-Layer Issue,” 296.

In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences offered its “best estimate”: a 16.5% ozone loss. The New York Times, “Rate of Damage to Ozone Layer Termed Worse Than Believed,” November 10, 1979.

One result of the 16.5% ozone reduction being “several hundred thousand” additional incidences of skin cancer. Thomas O’Toole, “Scientists Say Ozone Risk Continues,” The Washington Post, December 22, 1979.

The National Academy report (Protection Against Depletion of Stratospheric Ozone by Chlorofluorocarbons, Committee on Impacts of Stratospheric Change and Committee on Alternatives for the Reduction of Chlorofluorocarbon Emissions, National Academy Press 1979) is quoted in Stephen O. Anderson, K. Madhava Sarma, Protecting the Ozone Layer: The United Nations History, Routledge 2002. Chapter One, “The Science of Ozone Depletion: From Theory to Certainty,” 13.

 

Next decade, with the ozone hole’s discovery, estimates would take another jump.

 

If present trends continue, there could be a many as 200 million additional cases of skin cancer and 50 million extra cases of cataracts among Americans during the next 88 years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a report issued last month.

 

Jim Detjin, “Mankind’s Activity is Altering Atmosphere That Sustains Life,” Knight-Ridder News, February 23, 1987.

 

143      more letters to Congress: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

 

143      “It was like finding out”: Editorial, “Re-examining the Ozone,” The New York Times, November 25, 1979.

 

143      a billion-dollar industry: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

In After Cooling, Wilson gives the figure eight billion. Eric Dean Wilson, After Cooling, Chapter Two, “The Age of Freon,” 214.

DuPont gave the figure themselves in a Times op-ed page advertisement. DuPont, “The Ozone Layer vs. the Aerosol Industry: Du Pont Wants to See Them Both Survive (Ad),” The New York Times, June 30, 1975. Du Pont calls it “an $8 billion segment of industry.”

 

Journalist Gary Taubes quotes a 1973 assessment of $3 billion.

 

The CFC industry was enormous, as it still is: in 1973, industry sources calculated that its aerosol business alone was worth $3 billion a year. (The same sources assessed the total employment related to CFCs at between 200,000 and one million, which prompted someone to remark to a Rolling Stone reporter, ‘‘They must be down to counting air-conditioner repairmen.’’) The industry was not about to give up without a fight, and the issue quickly got down and dirty.

 

Gary Taubes, “Made tn The Shade? No Way: Whatever the Implications of the Antarctic Ozone Hole Are, the Ozone Layer Is Being Ominously Depleted,” Discover, August 1987.

 

143      the campaign turns to rerun: The situations ran the same way. In 1986, Lee Thomas, the Reagan second-term EPA head, told The New Yorker, “We should recognize that we are conducting one giant experiment on a global scale.” Almost exactly what Roger Revelle had said thirty years earlier about carbon dioxide.

Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

 

The Too Late language that characterized so much climate change anxiety was part of the ozone story right from the beginning.

 

Scientists who have sounded the alarm on this issue in recent weeks fear that by the time it has been shown without question that such reactions are taking place enough fluorocarbons will have been released to produce a marked ozone reduction.

 

The New York Times, “Industry Doubts Threat to Ozone—Aerosol Bureau Quotes an Expert on Lack of Proof,” November 2, 1974.

 

143      advocacy groups: Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury 2010. Chapter Four, “The Fight Over the Ozone Hole,” 112. “The aerosol industry responds almost immediately to Rowland and Molina’s work,” Conway and Oreskes explain. In addition to their trade organizations, “the industry then established two more organizations for public relations purposes: the Aerosol Education Bureau and the Council on Atmospheric Sciences.”

Linda Dotto, Howard Schiff, The Ozone War, Chapter Seven, “The Sky Is Falling,” 150.

 

143      chlorine could have innocent origins: Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, “The Dangers That Come In Spray Cans: Aerosols and the Ozone Layer,” August 1975.

“The industry’s Aerosol Education Bureau notes that ozone-destroying chlorine detected in the stratosphere could have gotten there naturally from the activity of volcanoes and ocean salt-spray or from man-made sources other than aerosols.”

Linda Dotto, Howard Schiff, The Ozone War, Chapter Nine, “The Search for the Smoking Gun,” 220. One industry spokesperson (Du Pont’s Freon Products Division head), “argued, for example, that even in a quiet year, volcanos produce five to ten times more chlorine than fluorocarbons.” The authors quote a Du Pont brochure. “If the nature background of chlorines is large enough, the addition of fluorocarbons would have an insignificant effect on ozone.”

Oreskes and Conway point out the Council on Atmospheric Sciences worked the volcano angle too. “The industry’s Council on Atmospheric Sciences had an idea,” they explain. “To blame volcanoes.” Merchants of Doubt, 114.

Lanie Jones, “Ozone Warning: He Sounded Alarm, Paid Heavy Price,” The Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1988. Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water, 252.

 

It turned out to be what Huck Finn would call a stretcher:

 

Natural sources of stratospheric chlorine are important because it is reasonable to presume that the more is there naturally, the less a specified increase from human activity is likely to matter,” writes Edward Parson, in his history of the ozone issue. “But natural sources, like anthropogenic sources, can reach the stratosphere only if they have long tropospheric lifetimes. Most natural chlorine emissions, such as salt from ocean spray and HCl from volcanoes, are in chemical forms that quickly dissolve in rainfall, react chemically, or are deposited on surfaces.

 

Edward A. Parson, Protecting the Ozone Layer: Science and Strategy, Oxford University Press 2003. Chapter Three, “The Search For Knowledge-based Resolution: Science and Scientific Assessment, 1976-1985,” 64.

 

144      “The scientific debate is closing”: Frank Luntz, Memorandum to Bush White House, The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America, Luntz Research Companies, 2002.

 

144      “no thoughtful action”: Gary Taubes, “Made In the Shade? No Way: Whatever the Implications of the Antarctic Ozone Hole Are, the Ozone Layer Is Being Ominously Depleted,” Discover, August 1987.

 

144      long on theory: Stephen O. Anderson, K. Madhava Sarma, Kofi A. Annan (Foreword), Protecting the Ozone Layer: The United Nations History, Routledge 2002. Dan Smith, Penelope Canan, Chapter Eight, “Media Coverage of the Ozone-Layer Issue,” 296.

Lanie Jones, “Ozone Warning: He Sounded Alarm, Paid Heavy Price,” The Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1988.

 

144      simulations on a computer: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.

 

Meanwhile, the chlorofluorocarbon industry had responded to the situation by pointing out that ozone depletion by chlorofluorocarbons was a hypothesis based upon computer models of the stratosphere — that no real proof existed that the two gases could rise into the stratosphere, let alone that they could lead to the destruction of ozone.

 

And:

 

Du Pont issued a statement declaring—once again—that predictions of ozone depletion by chlorofluorocarbons were based not on actual measurements but on theoretical calculations. “No ozone depletion has ever been detected, despite the most sophisticated analysis,” Du Pont pointed out, adding that “all ozone-depletion figures to date are computer projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions.”

 

144      “The most important principle”: Frank Luntz, Memorandum to Bush White House, The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America, Luntz Research Companies, 2002.

 

144      Luntz’s 2007 how-to: Frank Luntz, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear, Hyperion, 2007. Per toothy self-help guru Tony Robbins, “A MUST read.”

 

144      “Perception is reality”: Nicholas Lemann, “Annals of Marketing: The Word Lab,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2000.

 

144      “Should the public come”: Frank Luntz, Memorandum to Bush White House, The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America, Luntz Research Companies, 2002.

 

145      the effect was “uncertain”: Walter Sullivan, “Studies Are Cited to Show That Effects of Fluorocarbons on Ozone Layer May Be Cut ‘Nearly to Zero,’” The New York Times, May 13, 1976.

 

145      “road to the rule of witchcraft”: Linda Dotto, Howard Schiff, The Ozone War, Chapter 11, “No Oscars for the Academy,” 264.

Barbara Freese, Industrial-Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, From the Slave Trade to Climate Change, University of California Press 2020. Chapter Five, “ ‘Our Free Enterprise System Is At Stake’: CFCs, Ideology, and Manipulated Uncertainty,” 149.

This was in January 1979; the letter-lobber was DuPont’s Director of Central Research and Development, Ted Cairns.

 

145      “We have the moral and rhetorical”: Frank Luntz, Memorandum to Bush White House.

 

145      “In general”: Nicholas Lemann, “Annals of Marketing: The Word Lab,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2000. This is the magazine’s Nicholas Lemann summarizing Luntz.

 

You can attract female voters by using the words “listening” and “children” a lot. (“Why do you think Hillary Clinton went on a ‘Listening Tour’ of New York?” Luntz asks.)

 

145      “The words on these pages are tested—they work!”: Frank Luntz, Memorandum to Bush White House.

 

145      “It was great language”: Frontline, “Hot Politics,” PBS, April 24, 2007.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/luntz.html

Accessed 11-12-22.

 

145      “utterly against American tradition”: Associated Press, “Industry Disputes Data on Aerosols,” October 1, 1975. This spokesperson is Dr. James P. Lodge Jr., described by the AP as “science advisor to the industry.”

 

145      “We would like a fair trial”: Walter Sullivan, “Studies Are Cited to Show That Effects of Fluorocarbons on Ozone Layer May Be Cut ‘Nearly to Zero,’” The New York Times, May 13, 1976. Dr. Lodge again. The press conference (under the auspices of the industry’s Council on Atmospheric Sciences) was at New York City’s Barclay Hotel.

 

145      leased a full page in the Times: “The Ozone Layer vs. the Aerosol Industry: Du Pont Wants to See Them Both Survive (Ad),” The New York Times, June 30, 1975.

 

146      Rowland had played baseball: The Times (London), “Professor F. Sherwood Rowland: Chemist Who Jointly Made the Discovery That CFCs Were Responsible for the Depletion of the Ozone Layer,” March 14, 2012. Hoops, too. “A keen athlete, he played in basketball and baseball teams at the Navy bases to which he was posted.”

A famous story about Rowland—he was the kind of big-living figure about whom stories are preserved—had to do with his, on an overseas trip, not being able to find kicks for his size-fourteen feet, then playing basketball shoeless against a team of Russian graduate students.

Linda Dotto, Howard Schiff, The Ozone War, Doubleday 1978. Chapter One, “The Spray Can War Begins,” 10-11.

Diane Pucin, “The Inside Track: Rowland Has Seen It All, From Curveballs to CFCs,” The Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2000.

 

And while we’re here, the Ozone War shoeless basketball story:

 

Rowland is a large man, more than six feet tall, with long, graying sideburns and a frequently furrowed brow. He carries his calculator in a hand-tooled leather holster slung around his waist. He wears size 14 shoes. The latter is not normally a statistic that matters to anyone, but Sherry Rowland’s feet have acquired a certain notoriety in some scientific circles as a result of an escapade in Russia in 1967. Rowland was among a group of Western scientists to visit the Soviet science city of Novosibirsk that year, and, during their stay, they were challenged to a game of basketball by the Soviet graduate students. Rowland, who had played college basketball, was captain of the Western team.

The Soviets were able to scrounge gym clothes and running shoes for most, but they were not equal to the challenge posed by the size of Rowland’s feet. So Rowland trotted out onto the floor barefoot — whereupon the Soviet captain immediately removed his own shoes.

After the game, Rowland returned to the locker room and calmly proceeded to peel a thick, single layer of skin off the sole of one foot. Unperturbed, he slapped the skin back on with cold cream and walked several miles in Moscow the next day. This sort of thing happened to him from time to time; his wife swears that before they were married, she had received letters from him written on the soles of his feet, or portions thereof.

 

146      he hitchhiked home: The Nobel Prize, “F. Sherwood Rowland: Biographical,” Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995, NobelPrize.org.

A major amount of this Navy time was devoted to competitive athletics for the Navy base teams, and I emerged after 14 months as a non commissioned officer with a rating of Specialist (Athletics) 3rd class. . . .I then hitchhiked 2000 miles back to Ohio, traveling through Yosemite and Yellowstone Park on the way.

 

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/rowland/biographical/

Accessed 11-10-22.

 

146      the Oshawa Merchants: William Burton, “Clean-Up Hitter: Long Before F. Sherwood Rowland Began To Study Chlorofluorocarbons, The Man-Made Gases Were A Household Force. His Work In Atmospheric Chemistry Made Cfcs A Household Word—And Halting Their Production A Global Issue,” The University of Chicago Magazine, August 1997.

Steve Thomas, “A Modern Galileo: How UCI Chemist F. Sherwood Roland Saved the World,” The University of California Irvine News, August 29, 2002.

 

After his second college baseball season, Rowland’s skills earned him a place on a minor-league team in Oshawa, Canada. Several weeks after he joined the line-up, the manager was fired for waffling a slide signal that caused a player to break his leg. Somebody savvy named Rowland as the replacement manager. Utilizing his growing self-possession along with the awesome quantitative abilities he considers to be his second most important mental attribute, the 21-year-old graduate student proceeded to manage his rag-tag bunch of American and Canadian players all the way to the semi-pro championship of Canada.

 

https://news.uci.edu/2002/08/29/a-modern-galileo/

Accessed 11-10-22.

 

146      “We know that a ban is inevitable”: Associated Press, “Industry Disputes Data on Aerosols,” October 1, 1975.

Dr. Rowland testified, saying basically the same thing, before Congress. In late September 1975, at the Senate hearings on stratospheric ozone depletion. The phrasing is haunting. “Once you realize that a ban is inevitable, you should ban.”

Dr. Rowland continued,

 

The particular consequence of increased human skin cancer, for instance, is simply progressive. The calculations indicate that the less ozone there is the more ultraviolet light comes through, the more human skin cancer. If you follow that logic, then there is a penalty for any period of time that you delay. So I think scientifically the case for a ban—for an ultimate ban is quite clear.

 

U.S. Senate, “Stratospheric Ozone Depletion,” Hearings Before the Subcommittee on the Upper Atmosphere of the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, September 23, 1975, U.S. Government Printing Office 1975.

 

146      Oregon passed the nation’s first: The New York Times, “Anti-Aerosol Bill Passed In Oregon,” May 28, 1975.

“Opponents, primarily manufacturers and retailers, were fearful that the Oregon law, like its famous ‘bottle bill,’ would become a model for other states.”

That is, in the same way fuel companies would fear ozone as a model for regulation on greenhouse gases, the recycling fight was an unnerving model for the CFC fight.

 

146      In 1993, Portland would become: City of Portland, “Legacy of Leadership,” Climate Action Plan.

“In 1993, Portland was the first U.S. city to create a local action plan for cutting carbon. Portland’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) is a strategy to put Portland and Multnomah County on a path to achieve a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels).”

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/index.cfm?&c=49989

Accessed 11-12-22.