the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 32
By the early 1970s, the manufacture of CFCs had become an $8-
billion-a-year industry. An estimated two hundred thousand jobs de-
pended upon their manufacture, sale, and distribution. Entire regional
economies were built around them. According to Sharon L. Roan, author
of Ozone Crisis: The 15-Year Evolution of a Sudden Global Emergency, “By
1973, more than 2 billion aerosol cans rolled off production lines, which
meant the average American purchased about 14 aerosol cans a year.”
The Sunscreen Generation
Every party has a pooper, but in this case the party pooper may
have saved the world. His name was F. Sherwood Rowland, and in 1972
the avuncular chemist began to question the seemingly unshakable belief
that lighter-than- air CFCs were harmless. That year he met a British scientist
who had documented an odd phenomenon: the amount of CFCs
drifting slowly up into Earth’s stratosphere—good old nontoxic, nonfl ammable,
inert CFCs—was approximately equal to the amount of CFCs produced
to that point by the chemical industry. This wasn’t surprising,
since, once released, the chemical compound basically hung around doing
nothing. That inert quality had been Midgley’s main selling point in 1930,
and ever since had been considered the primary advantage of CFCs.
But Rowland wondered what might happen when that massive,
rising cloud of CFCs reached the stratosphere, between twenty and thirty
miles above the planet. Up there, environmental conditions are quite different
than on Earth’s surface. Would the CFCs still be inert? In June
1973, Rowland, a professor of chemistry at the University of California,
Irvine, recruited a postdoctoral student name Mario Molina to help him
investigate what might happen when the CFCs reached the upper atmosphere.
As it turns out, CFCs do react with something: intense sunlight.
That’s not a problem on the ground, because the atmosphere fi lters the
sunlight to a point where it has no effect on a CFC molecule. But when a
CFC molecule finally reaches the outer limit of the stratosphere, the sun-