EPA Decision Near on Curbs Against Ozone Depletion

The Environmental Protection Agency will decide by May whether new government restrictions are required on the use of chlorofluorocarbons, the widely used chemicals implicated in the depletion of the Earth’s protective layer of ozone, EPA Administrator Lee M. Thomas told a congressional subcommittee Monday.

In describing this issue as one of the agency’s “top priorities,” Thomas told the House subcommittee on health and the environment that the EPA is nearing the end of an 18-month study of the scientific evidence linking chlorofluorocarbon (often referred to as CFC) chemicals to diminished levels of ozone in the stratosphere and of the long-term health and environmental risks that may result.

Unilateral Action Opposed

Thomas warned, however, that unilateral action by the United States to control production of CFC chemicals at home may reduce pressures on other countries to reach a global control agreement.

Richard E. Benedick, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told the same hearing that an international agreement to curb production of these chemicals--for applications ranging from aerosol spray propellants to the coolant in refrigerators and air conditioners--may be ready for signing by September.

“All the movement is in the right direction,” Benedick said of negotiations that began last December in Geneva. But he cautioned that “we must be sure that our actions domestically support, and do not undercut, that international process, since this is clearly a matter which the U.S. cannot resolve alone.”

Worldwide Reduction Urged

The United States has proposed a worldwide freeze on CFC production at 1986 levels, with output to be reduced by 95% over a period of 10 to 15 years. Amounts released into the atmosphere are expected to persist for as long as a century because the substance decomposes only gradually.

Ozone, a form of oxygen, screens out some of the sun’s ultraviolet light at high altitude. In a preliminary estimate last November, the EPA predicted that, if emissions of CFC chemicals continue to grow at recent rates, the resulting ozone depletion could lead to an additional 40 million cases of skin cancer and 800,000 deaths in the United States by the year 2075.

Dr. Darrel Rigel, a New York University dermatologist, told the subcommittee that skin cancer is currently rising at “near epidemic rates” in the United States, with the incidence of melanoma, an often fatal form of skin cancer, up 83% in the last seven years.

Rigel offered no evidence of a link between the current incidence of skin cancer and variations in the ozone layer, but he said that it is possible to imagine a future in which the Earth’s natural sunscreen was so depleted that “people in their everyday activities alone might receive enough (ultraviolet) radiation to develop skin cancer.”

In 1978, the United States unilaterally banned the use of CFC chemicals as aerosol propellants in non-essential applications, but few other countries have followed suit. About 70% of CFC production occurs outside the United States, chiefly in Western Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union. According to the chemical industry, the advantages of these chemicals over cheaper substitutes available for some applications are low toxicity and non-flammability.

Production Increasing

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), the subcommittee chairman, noted that, despite the 1978 propellant ban, U.S. production of two chlorofluorocarbon chemicals implicated in ozone depletion, known as CFC-12 and CFC-11, grew 14% and 24% respectively last year.

When asked if this were acceptable, EPA Administrator Thomas told the subcommittee that it “absolutely” was not. He said the EPA would decide by May whether new regulations are required and, if so, would take final action by November.

Concern about the global effects of CFC pollution has taken on new urgency with the recent discovery of a vast “hole” in the ozone layer over Antarctica that opens and closes with the seasons. It appears to have emerged about 1975, a year after scientists first suggested that CFC chemicals could destroy ozone in the stratosphere.