GREENS HAIL ACCELERATED 'FREEZE AND PHASE OUT' OF OZONE KILLING CHEMICALS

NEWS: Green Party in England & Wales

GREENS HAIL ACCELERATED 'FREEZE AND PHASE OUT' OF OZONE KILLING CHEMICALS
Amid growing concern over the impact of hydrochlorflurocarbons (HCFCs) on the earth's ozone layer, an important agreement has been reached by governments attending the Montreal Protocol's 20th Anniversary Celebrations. (1) Nations signed up to an accelerated freeze and phase out of HCFCs under the 20 year-old Montreal Protocol - the treaty established in 1987 to protect the Earth’s ozone layer from chemical attack. HCFCs emerged as replacement chemicals in the 1990s for air conditioning, some forms of refrigeration equipment and foams following an earlier decision to phase-out older and more ozone-damaging chemicals known as CFCs or chloroflurocarbons. The decision, including an agreement that sufficient funding will be made available to achieve the strategy, follows mounting evidence that HCFCs contribute to global warming. Governments meeting in the Canadian city agreed at the close to freeze production of HCFCs in 2013, whilst the deadline for phasing out production and use of HCFCs for developed countries will be moved up to 2020 from 2030 and to 2030 from 2040 for developing nations. Green Party Principal Speaker Dr. Derek Wall welcomed the decision: "The success of this agreement contrasts with the lack of international progress on climate change generally. "The Kyoto protocol needs to be toughened up if we are to have a realistic chance of avoiding catastrophe. "Montreal restricted ozone damaging gases, if we were trading them like Kyoto's approach to carbon dioxide, just think of the danger we would still be in. "We have to move beyond buying and selling the right to pollute with greenhouses and start cutting them back by investing in alternatives, this is exactly what happened with Montreal and its extension. "In the run up to the UN climate convention negotiations in December, decisions like these send a clear signal to world leaders that working together can be an effective way of achieving solid reductions in dangerous greenhouse emissions." ENDS Notes for Editors: (1) More details can be found on the the United Nations Environment Programme's website at: http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp? DocumentID=517&ArticleID=5671&l=en Green Party Press Office020 7561 0282http://www.greenparty.org.uk