Ozone layer ‘sacrificed’ to lift re-election prospects

By Geoffrey Lean

Nov. 23— President George Bush has brought the international treaty aimed at repairing the Earth’s vital ozone layer close to breakdown, risking millions of cancers, to benefit strawberry and tomato growers in the electorally critical state of Florida, the British newspaper The Independent revealed on Sunday.

The Bush administration is insisting on a sharp increase in spraying of the most dangerous ozone-destroying chemical still in use, the pesticide methyl bromide, even though it is due to be phased out under the Montreal Protocol in little more than a year. And it has threatened that the United States could withdraw from the treaty’s provisions altogether if its demand is not met.

Talks on the unprecedented demand broke down without agreement at the conference in Nairobi this month as US delegates refused to consider any compromise. They even rejected a European Union proposal that would have allowed farmers to use the same amount of the pesticide as at present, even though this, itself, would violate the spirit of the protocol.

The crisis has come to a head at a particularly embarrassing moment for Tony Blair, who this week played host to George Bush on the first state visit by a US President. For three years, the Prime Minister has been quietly attempting to persuade him to stop trying to kill the Kyoto Protocol, designed to combat global warming. But now Bush is trying to weaken what the UN regards as the most successful international environmental agreement ever made.

It also comes at a critical time for the ozone layer. Scientists had hoped that it would be beginning to heal by now, but this autumn the ozone hole over Antarctica was at near-record levels.

Ironically the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987, was only brought about through the drive and commitment of the Reagan administration — in which George Bush Sr. served as Vice-President. It was rapidly agreed after the shock of the discovery of the ozone hole — the size of the US — and findings that the layer had thinned worldwide.

The layer is made up of a type of oxygen so thinly scattered through the upper atmosphere that, if gathered together, it would girdle the globe with a ring no thicker than the sole of a shoe. But it screens out harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun that otherwise would wipe out life. As the layer weakens, increasing amounts of rays get through, causing skin cancer and blindness from cataracts.

The provisions of the treaty, forecast to prevent two million cancers in the West alone, have been progressively tightened as the use of ozone-destroying chemicals has been phased out in industrialized countries, with developing countries to follow after a period of grace. Methyl bromide, which has also been linked with prostate cancer, is one of the last to be controlled; developed countries agreed in 1997 to stop using it by the end of next year. So far they have succeeded in reducing it to 30 per cent of its former level by introducing substitutes.

Several countries, however, foresee difficulties in completing the phase-out in time, and have asked for year-long “critical exemptions” for some limited uses, as permitted under the treaty. But uniquely, the US, which already accounts for a quarter of the world’s use of the pesticide, is demanding that it should indefinitely increase its use.

It is responding to pressure from farmers, particularly in Florida and California. While the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor has bolstered the Republicans’ hopes in California, Florida is expected to be critical in next year’s presidential poll — as it was in 2000.

When EU and Third World governments refused to agree to the demand at the meeting, the US said legislation had been introduced into Congress to exempt it from the treaty’s provisions on the pesticide altogether. Claudia McMurray, the head of its delegation, said that this would “either put us out of compliance or would lead us to violate the protocol.”

When all attempts at compromise failed, the meeting agreed to defer negotiations to a special “extraordinary” conference in Montreal in March. But unless Bush has a change of heart, the world will then be faced with choosing between two alternative means of undermining the treaty: allowing the US to reverse the process of phase-out, with the risk other nations will follow; or seeing it ignore the agreement altogether.



Source: Independent (UK)

Italians battle to thwart burying of nuclear waste

By Sophie Arie

Scanzano Jonico, Nov. 22— In the past week, a group of southern Italians have invented a new selection of local culinary delights: “atomic spaghetti”, “char-grilled Berlusconi ribs”, and “explosion pie with plutonium sauce”. Their menu is fantasy antipasto, a foretaste of what the inhabitants of Scanzano Jonico fear is to come if the government carries out its plan to dig a deep hole on the outskirts of their town and bury the entire country’s nuclear waste in it.

“We can’t stop thinking of new dishes,” said Lucia Cucci, chief cook for the scores of protesters who have camped in shifts for the past week in the middle of an olive grove destined under the government’s plan to become a nuclear wasteland.

“They have condemned us to death,” she said, preparing a spicy sauce for some “penne all’arrabbiata del sud” (“angry south” pasta).

“This is the garden of Italy. Don’t turn it into a graveyard,” reads a huge poster at another camp nearby. “This is not the toilet of Italy,” reads another, complete with illustration.

Across this small region, squeezed between Italy’s heel and toe, an army of angry protesters is manning roadblocks of tractors and parked cars, turning backtrucks from the north. Others are picnicking on deckchairs on railway tracks, bringing trains to a halt.

Eerily deserted roads stretch through the sandy moonscape of inner Basilicata, monitored by amused and sympathetic police. “I might be a policeman but I cannot help but feel sorry for these people,” said an officer supervising one of four roadblocks along a main road. “There is no way I will lift a hand to stop them doing this. If it comes to it, I’ll even help them.”

Since Italy abandoned nuclear power in 1987, it has struggled to find a way to get rid of the waste generated during its 20-year nuclear experiment and the continuing waste generated mainly by disused hospital equipment.

There are more than 100 sites dotted around the country, some of which hold radioactive stocks with a shelf life of hundreds of thousands of years. But under a decree issued by Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government on Nov.13, around 80,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste would be transferred to secure bunkers in the area over coming years and buried in a converted rock-salt mine, under 800 meters of clay, by 2008.

According to the government, the clay that would encase the waste makes the site “ideal” and totally safe. Even the environment minister has backed the plan, saying the chosen site was ideal and warning that Italy faces growing risks from some of its existing nuclear sites.

The suntanned, cigar-chewing Scanzano mayor, Mario Altieri, cannot quite make up his mind. One minute he declares the site is a death sentence for this town of 7,000 people. The next minute he confides that the locals do not know what’s good for them because the state will pay $25 million annual rent for use of the underground space.

“But I can’t tell people that. If I do, they will eat me,” he says, as his aides shuttle to and from roadblocks and prepare faxes to government offices in Rome.

The fact is that since Sept. 11, 2001, fears have grown that such sites could make ideal targets for terrorist attacks -- further fuelling the concerns of people in Scanzano.

The protesters say they will not give up until the plans have been abandoned. They argue Scanzano is not the answer to Italy’s nuclear problems: the site has been chosen without sufficient research or consultation, they say, and the plan fails to recognize that the region has recently been classified a low-risk earthquake zone.

Environmentalists are calling for a European waste disposal site to be created, possibly in Russia, using technology Italy does not have. “The site they want to use is only 100 meters from the sea,” said Michele de Capua, local representative of the World Wildlife Fund, the conservation organization. “The worst scenario is that because of erosion, you could have radioactive waste polluting the whole of the Mediterranean.”

Louise Loscalzo, a 31-year-old lawyer whose emigrant parents returned from France to plant vines here in the 1970s, said: “We are here for as long as it takes. We have made this land worth living in over the past 50 years. We are ready to die for it now.” Fontanarosa wines, Loscalzo says, have already received cancellations from clients as far away as Brazil, put off by the nuclear plans.

Women with babies sit around huge campfires while campaigners print off leaflets and watch themselves on the news in tents equipped with generator-run fridges, televisions and photocopiers.

“They think we are all peasants here,” said Elionora Marato, a 35-year-old Scanzano housewife. “So they thought, ‘Why not make them radioactive peasants?’”

In fact, half a century ago Basilicata was a desperately poor collection of scorched dry hills and marshy plains, where peasants lived with their goats in caves and children died of malaria. The novelist Carlo Levi, who was exiled to the region during the second world war, described its grinding poverty in his classic book Christ Stopped at Eboli.

Today Basilicata is a warm and fertile land often described as Italy’s California. Palm trees and giant cacti line sandy beaches and crystal seas. Along roadsides, trees drip with lemons and oranges. Tourists from all over Europe have begun to discover the region in recent years.

Under pressure to defuse the row, the government agreed on Thursday not to transfer the waste to the site until it is ready for use. Meanwhile, it has agreed to study the site further to establish whether it really is the best spot.

But the protests are expected to continue, with groups occupying an existing nuclear site and threatening to take control of the region’s oilfields, among the most productive in Europe. “They have confirmed the death sentence,” said Filippo Bubbico, president of the region. “But the execution has simply been postponed.”

Source: Guardian (UK)