CFCs Remembered: Oil Wells are Silenced.
Remember CFCs? They had the power to flavour teenage armpits and work wonders on refrigeration.
There’s two things I remember from when I was growing up. Well, not two things literally. That would suggest a woebegone adolescence. No, two things of environmental importance.
At 15, Chernobyl. A complete nuclear meltdown causing Europeans to duck for cover to avoid the prevailing winds.
Yeah, so plants are safer now, aren’t they? Well, look, personally, when you play with atoms, I still think of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, once smiling communities now nothing but cancerous shells of their former selves. Higher safety standards lead to greater complacency. No-one reading this can guarantee that another nuclear disaster won’t happen, so please, let’s leave that one alone. I’ve heard it all before.
(I don’t like things that glow in the dark really. I have innate misgivings.)
And as well as Chernobyl, we had an enormous hole in the ozone layer recognised for the first time.
But we often need a reminder of what ensued. The Montreal Protocol. Widely adhered to on an international level, a superb piece of cooperation and a credit to all involved.
Sure, the ozone layer is still in a poor state, but that should never reflect badly on what leaders are capable of when acting as one.
I guess the ozone layer was more tangible to the human eye. You see hurricanes, heat waves, enormous slabs of ice falling to the sea, you don’t see climate change. It’s not visible per se.
They’re still seen as natural events, two and two still equalling five for the oil baron, business as usual, money more important than hideous legacy.
Something’s going to happen. Something so cataclysmic. Maybe a global tempest, maybe the peaceful protests of millions acting as one, cooperating as leaders once did in Montreal.
It’ll happen. And when it does, I’ll be there with you, breathing deeply from the fresh air, oil wells silenced.
