"Critical use" exemptions and the methyl bromide blues.

• Author: Bartlett, Sarah
• Position: Biodevastation

In the same spirit with which it attacked the Kyoto Protocol, policy-makers in the second Bush Administration have decided to undermine yet another important international agreement protecting the global enviromnent. Ironically, this time the treaty is one of the few environmental policy successes of the first Bush Administration--the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Under revisions to this treaty adopted in 1997, methyl bromide was scheduled to be phased-out entirely by 2005. But on Feb. 2, 2003, the US Enviromnental Protection Agency requested 54 "critical use exemptions" from the treaty for the use of this ozone-depleting chemical between the years of 2005 and 2007.

Methyl bromide is used primarily as an agricultural fumigant, a highly toxic gas injected into fields before crops are planted to kill insects and nematodes. Strawberry growers in California, tomato growers in Florida, and tobacco growers in Virginia are all major consumers for that purpose. Massive amounts of the chemical are also used on golf courses for aesthetic purposes. Although it beggars the imagination, the EPA even included the use of methyl bromide on golf courses as one its "critical use" requests. Better evidence of current EPA's betraying its organizational mission to protect the environment would be hard to find. (That the senior political appointees at EPA manage to look at themselves in the mirror every morning is a cautionary lesson in the moral peril inherent in individual ambition unrestrained by ethics.)

Although methyl bromide was not proscribed in the original text of the Montreal Protocol with chlorofluorocarbons and halons, policy-makers recognized a decade later that it was a powerful ozone-depleting chemical that had destroyed as much as 4% of the planet's ozone layer over the previous two decades. The use and effect of the other ozone-depleting agents has declined since the adoption of the Montreal Protocol and the relative damage caused by methyl bromide had in turn increased. Continued massive use of methyl bromide will inevitably delay the full restoration of the ozone layer, which was not expected until mid-century even with full treaty compliance.

The political and economic power of the US is such that its 54 critical use exemption "requests" function as official notification to the Ozone Secretariat of the United Nations that the US will not be meeting some these responsibilities under the international...