Bush Administration Proposing Speeding Up Phase Out of Ozone Destroying Chemicals

The Bush administration plans to push for speeding up -- by a decade -- the global phaseout of chemicals that destroy the ozone layer and contribute to global warming. But it is likely to run into opposition from China, which stands to profit more if current treaties hold.

The administration's proposal will be presented at a meeting opening Sept. 15 in Montreal, where representatives from 191 nations that have signed the treaty will discuss toughening the 20-year-old Montreal Protocol. The treaty was designed to reduce the use of chemicals that have created holes in the ozone layer that shields the Earth from the more-damaging parts of solar radiation.

Though a dozen countries are expected to offer proposals to tighten the treaty, the U.S. plan is regarded as the most aggressive. It would shift the deadlines for phasing out a family of chemicals called hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs, to 2020 from 2030 for industrial nations and to 2030 from 2040 for developing nations. In addition, the proposal would require developing nations to shrink their production of the chemicals by stages before the 2030 deadline.

"We believe that we can reach phaseout 10 years faster than the current agreement because the technology is now available," said Kristen A. Helmer, a spokeswoman for the White House Council of Environmental Quality. She said Mr. Bush has been promised support from a variety of nations.

Nevertheless, the proposal's fate is unclear because the conference usually operates by trying to reach a consensus. One of the original targets of the Montreal Protocol was chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which are chemicals that had been used since the 1930s as refrigerants in cooling systems. These chemicals, originally designed to be safer than ammonia and other refrigerants, released chlorine, and were later discovered to be destroying ozone in the upper atmosphere.

The treaty called for the use of HCFCs as transitional chemicals because they released less chlorine into the upper atmosphere. But scientists discovered that some HCFCs accelerate global warming far more than carbon dioxide, which is thought of as the main culprit in trapping the sun's heat in the Earth's atmosphere. Now the effort among diplomats and chemical companies is to shift to newer chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, which contain no chlorine and have less effect on global warming.

The Bush administration is being backed by chemical manufacturers, including DuPont Co. The companies see a tougher treaty as a way to bolster global demand for newer, less harmful refrigerants. "What we want is continuously lower impacts on the ozone layer," says Mack McFarland, chief atmospheric scientist for DuPont.

But China is expected to resist. Under the treaty, developing nations are allowed to continue making HCFCs based on 2015 production levels until 2040. That has been an unintended bonanza for several nations, particularly China, which has built a number of refrigerant factories. A byproduct of China's process is a gas called HFC-23, a chemical that is 11,700 times more powerful in global warming as CO2.

This has made the gas very popular under an emissions-trading regime created by a second treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, to curb global warming. Traders estimate China has earned more than $4 billion by installing incinerators to destroy the potent gas.

China's effort is being financed by companies in Europe and Japan, which buy the resulting emission-reduction credits and use them to meet their domestic greenhouse-gas restrictions because they are cheaper than emissions reductions that can be obtained elsewhere.

In Montreal negotiations, China is expected to oppose attempts to accelerate the phaseout. Beijing wants to protect its income from the Kyoto treaty, which some environmental groups and scientists call a "perverse incentive" because it makes the harmful byproduct far more valuable than the refrigerant.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. An official in the air-quality department at China's State Environmental Protection Administration said he was unaware of the Bush administration's plan. But he said that China's government "has been trying to reduce related chemicals according to the Montreal Convention," and that China is "trying hard on ozone-layer protection."