President Reagan and his Secretary of State George Shultz.
When Ronald Reagan got behind the effort to save the ozone layer, there was much less scientific consensus than there is now on climate change.
“I had two private meetings a week with President Reagan,” said George P. Shultz, the former president’s secretary of state. “We talked about it. He became convinced that it was a real big problem.”
But not all scientists were convinced, and their uncertainty was holding up action.
“And then he did something that nobody ever does anymore,” Shultz said. “He went to the scientists who didn't agree and put his arm around them and said, ‘We respect you, but you do agree that if it happens it's a catastrophe, so let's take out an insurance policy.’”
The scientists couldn’t argue with that.
“That didn't get them on our side,” Shultz said, “but it got them off our back.”
The Montreal Protocol, signed by Reagan in 1987, enacted international controls on the man-made compounds, such as chlorofluorocarbons, that created the ozone hole. Since its adoption, ozone depletion has ceased, and ozone holes over the poles have begun to recover.
It was important, Shultz said, that the protocol prescribed specific actions for countries to take.
“We had something that people could agree to actually do, and it worked. It really worked.”
Arun Majumdar, the director of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, calls the Montreal Protocol “arguably the most impactful global environmental agreement that the world has ever seen.” He discusses it and the climate crisis with Shultz in a vide0 (below) that Stanford released last week.
Shultz has a specific fix for the climate crisis, too: a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The tax would be collected on activities that produce greenhouse gases and returned to taxpayers as a dividend.
“We made it revenue neutral so there's no fiscal drag connected with it,” Shultz said, “so it's not a tax in the usual sense of a claw in the economy, and also it’s distributed in equal numbers, equal amounts of money to each person with a social security number, so you make it a progressive tax.”
Even free-market economists overwhelmingly support a price on carbon. And not only do scientists share a consensus, but the problem should be obvious, Shultz said, to anyone:
“I think that it's obvious, first of all, that there is a deep problem, and it has severe consequences going forward. And with all due respect to the science, which I appreciate, you don't have to rely on science. All you have to do is use your eyes. There is a new ocean being created in the Arctic. Why? The ice mass over Greenland is melting fast. Why? The Great Barrier Reef and other reefs in the Caribbean are all deteriorating. Why? And the answer is always the same. There is no question, no question, that the earth is warming, and there's no question that there are consequences.”
Watch George P. Shultz at Stanford:
