6th Podcast: How Diplomacy Closed the Ozone Hole

We’ve just released the sixth episode of our podcast “Your Planet, Your Health”, titled How Diplomacy Closed the Ozone Hole.

You can listen at yourplanetyourhealth.com/6 or right here:

Check out our previous episode, Talking Climate With Conservatives, about building on the lessons of what worked in this case and how to enlist Republicans in the fight to protect our earth.

Or…

Check out an earlier episode, Gaslighting, about why this didn’t work for CO2: oil companies impeded curbing greenhouse gases through a sustained disinformation campaign.

Shownotes:
In this episode, Ralph and Luc spotlight an environmental success story: the Montreal Protocol's role in healing the ozone layer. We draw comparisons to the pitfalls of the IPCC's COP process and try to derive a diplomatic blueprint for climate policy.

We look into the science of how ozone and chlorine works in the stratosphere, the history of the activist scientists (Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina) who first sounded the alarm about CFC's destruction of the ozone layer, and the work of technocrats in devising their replacement. We also examine the geopolitical dynamics that were foundational to this planetary victory.

Sources:
• We sample clips from the 2019 PBS documentary Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet, written and directed by Jamie Lochhead — notably interviews with Mario Molina, Joan Roland (widow of Sherwood), Lee Thomas (administrator at the EPA), Crispin Tickell (adviser to Margaret Thatcher) and Bob Watson (NASA).
https://www.pbs.org/show/ozone-hole-how-we-saved-planet/

• We also sample clips from this 2021 interview with Susan Solomon (the atmospheric chemist who demonstrated CFC’s impact on ozone) and Stephen Andersen (leader of the Montreal Protocol and co-chair of its Technology and Economic Assessment Panel), by the Future of Life Institute, in which they share their roles in the closing of zone hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hwh-uDo-6A

• We cite elements from the 1998 book Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet, by Richard Elliot Benedick.

• We cite the 2002 book Ozone Connections: Expert Networks in Global Environmental Governance, by Penelope Canan and Nancy Reichman.

• We cite the 2019 book The Ozone Layer: From Discovery to Recovery, by Guy P. Brasseur.

• We cite the 2021 Nature article The Montreal Protocol protects the terrestrial carbon sink, by Paul J. Young, Anna B. Harper, Chris Huntingford, Nigel D. Paul, Olaf Morgenstern, Paul A. Newman, Luke D. Oman, Sasha Madronich & Rolando R. Garcia.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03737-3

• We refer to insights from the 2021 book Cut Super Climate Pollutants Now!: The Ozone Treaty’s Urgent Lessons for Speeding Up Climate Action, by Alan Miller, Durwood Zaelke and Stephen Andersen.

• We also cite from the 2023 book 35th Anniversary of Protecting the Ozone Layer, by Marco Gonzalez and Stephen Andersen.
 
Read more at:
https://ozone.unep.org/ozone-timeline
and
https://csl.noaa.gov/assessments/ozone/2022/downloads/twentyquestions.pdf