It took Thomas Midgley just three days in 1928 to discover a stable chemical compound to cool refrigerators, later sold by DuPont and General Motors under the trademark “Freon.” All tests showed this new compound to be utterly safe—so safe, as Midgley would show the American Chemical Society in 1930, a person could breathe it in and blow out a candle. Before long, manufacturers everywhere were using similar compounds in a class known as “chlorofluorocarbons” not only as refrigerants in refrigerators and air conditioners, but also as propellants in aerosol spray cans and fire extinguishers and as foaming agents in foam insulation.
By the time anyone would begin to worry about the environmental consequences of consuming CFCs, they would be depleting the ozone layer, a consequence so startling it was beyond the hypotheticals of any scientist back in the 1930s. The silence of science for nearly a half century was not the result of industry control over research, as it was for leaded gasoline. Nor did Freon cause a tempest of controversy—or even calls for caution—as did ethyl gasoline. The specialists felt certain that Freon was an advance for consumer safety, replacing substances prone to explode and poison people.
The 1974 theory put forth by Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland of how and why CFCs could deplete ozone in the stratosphere was an inspired one—more than worthy of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.1 The ignorance that prevailed before 1974 shows how science can simply get it wrong, how it can concentrate on fragmentary parts of a problem and miss the complicated whole. Yet the scientific research on ozone depletion during the 1970s and 1980s also shows how science can discover causes of complex global ecological change. This period reveals as well how this way of knowing can contribute to a global consensus to eliminate ecological shadows in the global commons (rather than, as with leaded gasoline, the shadow effects within sovereign territories). In this case, even with firms like DuPont challenging and delaying research, a decade after 1974 governments were well on the way to negotiating a series of international agreements to phase out the CFCs depleting the earth’s ozone layer.
Many books survey the impact of these agreements on the consumption of CFCs. The next chapters take a different tack, narrowing the focus to the consequences for refrigerators. Chapters 11 and 12 analyze why these agreements were able to phase down the production and consumption of CFC refrigerators, while chapter 13 explores the environmental impact of replacing CFC refrigerators with “superior” CFC-free models—including, for example, the consequences for global energy consumption, natural resource use, recycling, and waste.
This approach allows for a more rounded analysis of how international agreements and new technologies interact with corporations and trade to change the ecological impacts of global patterns of consumption. It shows, again, how international law can accelerate efforts to replace consumer products harming the global environment with safer substitutes. It shows how international financial assistance can enhance the capacity of governments, firms, and consumers in developing countries like China and India to meet international environmental commitments. And it shows how, following international agreements, competition among corporations for trade advantages and shifting markets can improve the environmental efficiencies of producing, using, and replacing consumer products, with positive spillovers beyond just meeting international commitments.
The resulting efficiency gains per unit consumed can be significant. Yet such changes tend to rely on—and kindle—rising consumption, a fact that helps explain why the ecological shadow of the global refrigerator industry remains intense. As the following chapters will reveal, having all but phased out ozone-depleting gases, the industry is drawing down more natural resources, generating more waste, and producing more greenhouse gases the deeper it moves into the developing world. The analysis of this case begins by looking back at the refrigerator industry in North America over the first half of the twentieth century—a necessary step for understanding the initial reaction of governments, firms, and consumers to calls in the 1970s to phase out CFCs.
Down through the ages, people have kept food from spoiling in many inventive ways, from salting, drying, and smoking to storing in cellars, streams, and ice. Iceboxes, which allowed for longer storage during hotter months, did not become common in North America until the 1800s. These wooden cabinets—with ice on the top or bottom—were typically insulated with cork, sawdust, or seaweed and lined with tin or zinc. They were imperfect devices, requiring regular supplies of ice and subject to leaks, slime, and mice.
The search for a more efficient and reliable cooling unit for food was in full gear by the early twentieth century. General Electric began to market a machine in 1911 able to cool air by compressing chemical gases; a decade later, some 200 different refrigerator models were on sale in the United States. General Motors entered this emerging market by purchasing the Guardian Frigerator Company in 1918. Although some thought this an odd decision for an auto firm, there was a consistent logic to it: as with automobiles, GM could see a vast untapped consumer demand. Still, it was a risky investment. Like those of other firms, the refrigerators made by the Guardian Frigerator Company were bulky, wooden contraptions, unreliable, and susceptible to poisonous and smelly leaks. And the company had sold a mere dozen or so in two years of production, partly because the price tag, more than $700 ($11,000 in today’s money), was well beyond the means of most consumers. At the time, GM was clearly far from its goal of putting an affordable refrigerator in every kitchen.2
General Motors renamed the company “Frigidaire” and put Billy Durant in charge. Although Durant managed to raise sales over the next few years, the new models were still unreliable and expensive. By 1920, a discouraged Durant was ready to give up, when GM vice president Charles Kettering persuaded him to stay on. (As we saw in chapter 7, Kettering had been instrumental in Midgley’s discovery of leaded gasoline in 1921.) With Kettering’s backing, Frigidaire began to reduce the weight and size of its refrigerators. The company also became the first to start marketing more appealing metal cabinets (coated in porcelain). By the mid-1920s, Frigidaire was advertising these as cheaper, safer, cleaner, and more convenient—a must for any “modern” kitchen.
Frigidaire began to prosper. So did other manufacturers of mechanical refrigerators like Westinghouse and Kelvinator. As these firms began to mass-produce units with increasing efficiency, prices began to fall—from an average of $600 in 1920 to $275 in 1930—and sales began to rise. In 1925, 75,000 new refrigerators were sold in the United States; just five years later, the number had grown to 850,000. During the second half of the 1920s, most major refrigerator firms in the United States were experiencing annual increases in sales from 25 to 75 percent.3
Still, Durant and Kettering were unhappy with their refrigerators’ cooling systems, whose toxic, corrosive refrigerants prompted some city authorities to require labels warning consumers of the hazards. It was now obvious to both men that the next breakthrough in the massmarketing of refrigerators would require safer cooling systems. In 1928, Kettering turned to Midgley, and, with the assistance of Albert Henne and Robert McNary, Midgley discovered CFC-12.4
In 1930, DuPont (holding 51 percent) and General Motors (holding 49 percent) formed the company Kinetic Chemicals to manufacture CFC-12 under the trademark “Freon.”5 Inert and odorless, Freon was heralded as a great advance in refrigeration. At first, Frigidaire’s competitors tried to taint consumer reactions to Freon with reminders that it contained toxic fluorine. But this had little impact. Scientists were united: Freon was safe. And consumers could see it was far superior to earlier refrigerants. By the mid-1930s, all of the major refrigerator companies were purchasing Freon (or licensing the right to make it). Refrigerator prices continued to fall during this period, dropping on average to $165 in 1935 and to $155 by 1940. Sales took off at an even faster pace. By 1937, over 2 million Americans owned a refrigerator. Just 20 years later, 8 out of 10 households had one.6
Meanwhile, after World War II, sales of CFC refrigerators also expanded quickly in other (primarily developed) countries with rising personal incomes and reliable household electricity. Hundreds of millions of CFC refrigerators and CFC freezers were in use by the time scientists began to question the environmental safety of a chemical safe enough to blow out a candle.
Gracing the cover of the June 1974 issue of the British journal Nature were drawings of Galapagos birds—a blue-footed booby, a Galapagos penguin, a flightless cormorant, and a magnificent frigate bird, among others—by artist Hilary Burn. Inside this seemingly typical issue was an atypical article: a stunningly original two-page piece having nothing specifically to do with either birds or the Galapagos Islands. The title was hardly memorable: “Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Atom-Catalysed Destruction of Ozone.” The authors, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, were barely known outside the chemistry community. Rowland was a well-regarded 47-year-old professor of chemistry at the University of California at Irvine. Molina was a 31-year-old postdoctoral fellow, who had only joined Rowland’s research team a year earlier.
The theory first advanced in their article would one day change global relations.7 The core idea was easy enough to follow. The use of chlorofluorocarbons had been expanding exponentially over the previous two decades.8 Now, with millions of metric tons in use, and with producers adding more every year, an increasing amount was leaking from refrigerators, air conditioners, foam insulation, spray cans, and fire extinguishers. This might not seem worrisome, for CFCs were chemically inert in the earth’s lower atmosphere, or troposphere, where weather occurs. But, Molina and Rowland reasoned, the same properties making them so stable could mean that more and more would drift up into the stratosphere with each passing decade. Here, they reasoned further, the intense ultraviolet radiation of the upper atmosphere could, at least in theory, break the chemical bonds of CFCs. Split apart, free chlorine atoms would then trigger a chain reaction that would destroy ozone (by removing one of the three oxygen atoms in each of its molecules). Such a process, if it did occur, would steadily deplete the ozone layer 20-50 kilometers (12-30 miles) above the earth. Because this layer protects the lower atmosphere and the planet’s surface against the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation from the sun, its destruction would be catastrophic for life on earth.
Although Molina and Rowland had no evidence to support their claims, at a press conference during the 1974 meeting of the American Chemical Society, they made the natural leap from theory to policy. Because “the risks that are involved are too large,” explained Rowland, “we ought to discontinue putting chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere.” He pointed out that, if their theory were correct, 1 percent of the ozone layer was already gone. Swift action was vital. If CFC production were to continue to rise, 7-13 percent of the ozone would disappear in a century or so. The consequences for crops, the global climate, and human health would be devastating. Rates of skin cancer and cataracts would rise. Even losing 5 percent of the ozone layer could cause a 10 percent increase in skin cancer rates.9
Representatives from DuPont, the world’s largest producer of CFCs, listened politely as reporters scribbled notes. Then, for the very first time, DuPont responded. Yes, CFCs were drifting around the lower atmosphere and sinking into the oceans (DuPont had funded some of the research showing this). But no one had ever detected a single CFC in the stratosphere. How could CFCs reach such heights? Molina and Rowland’s theory was all conjecture—little more than the imaginative musings of ivory tower academics.
Where, DuPont demanded, was the evidence?10
Collecting and Contesting the Evidence
In July 1975, DuPont announced a multimillion-dollar research effort to test this theory. “We are trying to find the truth,” wrote Irving S.Shapiro, DuPont’s chairman of the board, in the Washington Post. “There are some who say that aerosols should be banned now even before the facts of the studies are known. DuPont wants to do what is right—for people, for the aerosol industry, and for ourselves—but we believe sincerely there is time to gather information and make a reasoned decision.”11
Others were soon conducting tests as well. Balloons sent into the stratosphere by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1975 found CFCs above 19 kilometers (12 miles), in “close agreement” with scientific predictions.12 Firms like DuPont were now, in the language of Rowland, “mobilizing”—deploying tactics to create uncertainties and delays.13 The corporate mantra was in place by the autumn of 1975: “Before a valuable industry is hypothesized out of existence, more facts are needed.”14
After a 1976 study by the National Academy of Sciences found clear evidence supporting Molina and Rowland’s theory, the United States did indeed ban the use of CFCs in aerosol spray cans in 1978, in part because affordable substitutes were readily on hand. A few other developed countries, as chapter 12 will elaborate, also took unilateral action to reduce CFC use in aerosol spray cans. But little was done to prevent the rising consumption of CFCs in other products, particularly refrigerators and freezers.
The governing council of the United Nations Environment Programme first raised the issue of ozone depletion at the international level in 1976. The following year, UNEP joined forces with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to begin assessing depletion rates. Intergovernmental negotiations for an international agreement on phasing out ozone-depleting substances started in 1981. Progress was slow in the first half of the 1980s, by which time over 100 million CFC refrigerators were operating in the United States alone. Total annual CFC production was rising, too, with the United States accounting for 30 percent, when, in 1985, British scientists found a giant “hole” in the ozone layer over the Antarctica—as big as North America and lasting three months. Finding this hole was a turning point and spurred an emerging consensus on the need for quick action.15
The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, a frame-work convention without legally binding targets, was adopted in 1985. Two years later, the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer was adopted to set binding targets to reduce the production of ozone-depleting CFCs and halons.16 In 1988, a year before the Protocol went into force, DuPont, responsible for between 20 and 25 percent of global CFC production at the time, announced it would move ahead with marketing affordable substitutes.17Then, in 1990, the governments of developing countries that were parties to the protocol signed the London Amendments to phase out consumption of CFCs and halons by 2010 (with “consumption” defined as production plus imports minus exports). The London Amendments set the year 2000 as a phaseout deadline for eight CFCs in developed countries—a date moved forward to 31 December 1995 in Copenhagen in 1992. Conferences in Montreal in 1997 and Beijing in 1999 further amended and strengthened the Montreal Protocol, adding other ozone-depleting substances and accelerating the phaseout schedules.
Results came quickly. By the mid-1990s, developed countries were no longer producing CFCs; by the second half of the 1990s, the developing world was steadily reducing its production as well. Globally, CFC production fell from a peak of nearly 1.1 million metric tons in 1987 and 1988 to just 80,000 metric tons by 1996. Over the next decade, progress was also made in reducing CFC use in the developing world, and, by 2003, the world was producing less than 20,000 metric tons of CFCs.18
Many factors made this international effort “a striking success.”19 The scientific community was able to collect compelling evidence within a decade after Molina and Rowland first published their theory. The causes (CFCs and halons) and consequences (skin cancer and cataracts) of ozone depletion were reasonably clear-cut, as was the solution (replace CFCs)—at least compared to the solution to climate change or deforestation. The small number of firms responsible for CFC production at the time of the Montreal Protocol—just 21 in 16 countries—made global negotiations considerably more manageable. Developed countries accounted for 88 percent of production, with only a handful of chemical producers in leading roles, notably, DuPont, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) of the United Kingdom, and Atcham (a subsidiary of Elf-Aquitaine) of France.
Thus the willingness of corporations and states profiting from CFCs to accept the theory and evidence of ozone depletion explains much of why the international community was able to negotiate—and then implement—binding targets to reduce CFC production. But why were these firms and states so willing? One reason was their strengthening environmental commitment. International financing, which helped bring some states and firms in the developing world on board, was another. But the primary reason was the capacity of the world order to substitute CFC-free consumer goods and produce them in ever greater numbers: global trade kept expanding, foreign investors kept competing, corporate profits kept rising, economies kept growing, and choices for consumers kept improving. The emerging political economy of CFC-free goods was able to counter resistance from the old political economy of CFC goods, as chapter 12, on the global phaseout of CFC refrigerators, will show.