Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Record
I don’t think I’ve heard this side of the story:
Ronald Reagan was as good a listener as he was widely read.
That’s why , despite his well founded skepticism of the UN environmental bureaucracy , his science advisers had no difficulty persuading him to sign off on the Montreal Protocol, and stop the flood of spray-can and refrigerant Freons into the air. This , the National Academy of Science now reports, did more than curb the photochemical erosion of the ozone layer. Because the now-banned Freons absorb radiant heat thousands of times more strongly than CO2 , Reagan’s prescient environmentalism more took a huge bite out of the rate of global warming-- a lot more in fact than the much touted Kyoto Convention that the Senate overwhelmingly rejected .
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Velders et al. reckon stopping CFC production here and abroad has removed the equivalent of about 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By comparison, had the Kyoto Protocol been fully ratified , only about 2 billion tons of equivalent carbon dioxide emission would have thus far been saved —without firing a shot in the Climate Wars , the Cold War ‘s victorious Commander in Chief did five times as much environmental good as Former Next President Gore aspired to when he spearheaded the Clinton administration’s drive to ratify the Kyoto treaty .
Of course if environmentalism wasn’t about politics and socialism the Greenies would be lauding Reagan rather than heaping scorn on him, right?
Sparkie Arbuckle
Lestat
Blue Eagle Six
FlyOnTheWall
