On 11 October, by summarizing some new conventional media wisdom, a Reuters report stepped into a renewed media controversy. “The best precedent for a climate treaty,” it declared, “appears to be the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which outlawed chemicals widely used in refrigerants or air conditioning that were damaging the planet’s protective ozone layer.”
The controversy’s renewal took place at Republican presidential candidates’ September 16 appearance in a televised event widely called a “debate” at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi, California. A day earlier, Lawrence J. Korb had argued in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that the contenders “have little in common” with an exemplar whom many of them invoke regularly, the late President Ronald Reagan.
Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, whose motto centers on the phrase “progressive ideas.” But he served as an assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985 during the Reagan administration. Just before the “debate,” he wrote:
Most of the Republican candidates not only oppose confronting the challenges posed by climate change—whether by undermining international agreements or EPA regulations—but some even deny its existence. Fortunately, Reagan ignored the advice of many of his own climate-denying advisors and launched the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the use of nearly 100 dangerous gases. Today, the Montreal Protocol is widely seen as one of the most successful global environmental treaties in history.
And indeed a 2014 World Meteorological Organization report opened by declaring that the protocol “led to decreases in the atmospheric abundance of controlled ozone-depleting substances” and enabled “the return of the ozone layer toward 1980 levels.”
At the Reagan Library event, CNN moderator Jake Tapper posed this climate-change question:
Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, reminds us that when Reagan was president he faced a similar situation to the one that we’re facing now. There were dire warnings from the mass consensus of the scientific community about the ozone layer shrinking.
Shultz says Ronald Reagan urged skeptics in industry to come up with a plan. He said, do it as an insurance policy in case the scientists are right. The scientists were right. Reagan and his approach worked.
Secretary Shultz asks, why not take out an insurance policy and approach climate change the Reagan way?
Tapper was alluding to this key passage from Shultz’s March op-ed “A Reagan approach to climate change” in the Washington Post:
Many scientists thought the ozone layer was shrinking. There were doubters, but everyone agreed that if it happened, the result would be a catastrophe. Under these circumstances, President Ronald Reagan thought it best not to argue too much with the doubters but include them in the provision of an insurance policy. With the very real potential for serious harm, US industry turned on its entrepreneurial juices, and the Du Pont company developed a set of replacements for the chemicals implicated in the problem along a reasonable time frame and at a reasonable cost. It came up with something that could be done then—not some aspirational plan for 2050. Action is better than aspiration. As matters turned out, the action worked and became the basis for the Montreal Protocol, widely regarded as the world’s most successful environmental treaty. In retrospect, the scientists who were worried were right, and the Montreal Protocol came along in the nick of time. Reagan called it a “magnificent achievement.”
We all know there are those who have doubts about the problems presented by climate change. But if these doubters are wrong, the evidence is clear that the consequences, while varied, will be mostly bad, some catastrophic. So why don’t we follow Reagan’s example and take out an insurance policy?
Shultz went on to call for “significant and sustained support for energy research and development” and for a carbon tax, just as he had urged two years earlier in a Wall Street Journal op-ed—another article that illustrates his special position in the climate wars. Before serving in the Reagan administration for more than six years, he served in Republican president Richard Nixon’s administration as labor secretary, Office of Management and Budget director, and treasury secretary. More recently, he came to be listed prominently as a backer of the report Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States, which former Republican treasury secretary Henry Paulson announced in “The coming climate crash,” a June 2014 New York Times piece. The New Republic explained that Risky Business aims at Wall Street, attempting "to put a dollar value on the risk climate change represents.”
The Washington Post’s opinion-page editors—veteran climate warriors in support of scientists’ consensus—sought to capitalize on Shultz’s symbolic importance with an editorial playing off his ozone-memories op-ed. They wove Reagan’s name throughout the short piece. “Pretty much every Republican politician insists that the country should return to ‘the Reagan way,’” it began. “Few have first-hand knowledge. An exception is George P. Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state and one of the Republican Party’s most distinguished senior members.” The editors asserted that concerning climate, “Reagan would have acted on the best conservative principles: prudence, practicality and a reverence for free enterprise.” They emphasized that Shultz saw first-hand what Reagan “did when confronted with warnings about a thinning ozone layer: He acted, buying the nation an insurance policy it turned out to need, and he marshalled private businesses to help.”
Pundits on the right also recognize Shultz’s symbolic importance. At the American Thinker following the Tapper incident, a posting headlined “Ozone Shultz rides again” charged that both the ozone and the climate “issues involve a lot of junk science hocus-pocus.” At Power Line, Steven Hayward wrote, “I used to like Jake Tapper. Not any more. He was squalid. The worst moment was his total misrepresentation of Reagan, the 1987 ozone treaty, and climate change.”
The editors of the Wall Street Journal weren’t happy either. Using measured language rather than vitriol, their 3 October editorial “The hole in Tapper’s ozone tale” carried the subheadline “The Montreal Protocol is not a model for climate-change policy.” They declared that the ozone comparison “misapplies history” and that “Montreal is no blueprint for climate change, for several reasons.” Here’s the heart of their argument:
One [reason] is scale: Changing the refrigerant in home appliances is hardly the same as phasing out fossil fuels, a foundation for global economic growth, especially in developing countries. Even the Montreal Protocol allowed developing countries more time to weed out chemicals; imagine how long India would need to dump coal.
Then there are the alternatives. In the 1980s the DuPont company rolled out chemicals that could replace chlorofluorocarbons at a decent price. There isn’t a similar elixir for fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources—wind, solar, biomass—generate 13% of US electricity, says the Energy Information Administration, and half of that comes from hydropower. Solar energy cranks out less than 1%, even with enormous government subsidies. It isn’t always sunny and breezy, one reason no one suggests renewables could replace fossil fuels any time soon.
The climate brigade retorts that the US could make carbon more expensive by taxing it or make renewable energy cheaper with even more subsidies. Neither option would have passed muster with the Gipper. Our friend Secretary Shultz has argued for a carbon tax in these pages, and we might agree if it replaced another major tax. But the likelihood is we’d end up with one more tax to feed government spending and hurt economic growth.
Federal and state governments already prop up renewables with billions in tax credits, guaranteed loans and mandates. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2012 that there are hundreds of federal initiatives across some 20 agencies for solar alone, and don’t forget solar net-metering for local consumers.
But that editorial got rebutted by another veteran of the Reagan administration, Lee Thomas. He was identified beneath his WSJ letter to the editor as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during Reagan’s second term and as the chief US negotiator for the Montreal Protocol. Here’s the heart of his letter:
Few would argue that climate change and the ozone hole are exact parallels, yet there are lessons to be learned that deserve thoughtful attention: the effectiveness of a willingness to act on scientific evidence, international engagement by the United Nations with US leadership and ultimately cost and environmentally effective engagement by industry that rose to the challenge.
Just as with ozone deterioration, early indicators are becoming clear. Back then it was the hole over the Antarctic. Now we see a sea-level rise, rapidly rising temperatures and ocean acidification. Just as in the past, there are economically viable alternatives.
Most important of all, there is growing consensus among national leaders, echoing the long-standing scientific consensus, that we must act. This is a global problem. It requires a global solution.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
