From: France Benoit,
Yellowknife
Dear editor,
In the April 13 Yellowknifer column by city editor James O'Connor, he writes that in the midst of putting together the Earth Week edition of your paper, "Someone asked: What ever happened to acid rain? And what about the huge hole in the ozone that was supposed to fry us all? That's the problem when environmentalists over-hype their cause. It diminishes the impact of the next big end-of-the-world catastrophe they use to hype their cause."
I could not resist educating Northern News Services on some very basic environmental facts which a simple Google search would have answered. The identification of a problem and hard work towards finding solutions and implementing those solutions is what happened to acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer.
Reductions in the acidity of acid rain are due to reductions in emissions of sulfur dioxide. From Wikipedia: A number of international treaties on the long-range transport of atmospheric pollutants have been agreed for example, the 1985 Helsinki Protocol on the Reduction of Sulphur Emissions. Canada and the U.S. signed the Air Quality Agreement in 1991.
Also from Wikipedia: The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer is an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion. It was agreed on Sept. 16, 1987. As a result of the international agreement, the ozone hole in Antarctica is slowly recovering. Climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2050 and 2070. Due to its widespread adoption and implementation it has been hailed as an example of exceptional international co-operation.
When environmentalists "over-hype,” as you say, there is usually a reason and they often pave the way to world class solutions. So had I been in the room, I would have answered these two questions.
I would have expected a journalist to not leave the public with the impression that those two important environmental issues where just "hype," and that environmentalists had simply just moved to their next "hype."
By your silence, you gave the impression that nothing was done, which is not true.