Shattered Sky: PBS final script
53:30

A film by Steve Dorst and Dan Evans

“When I was Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, the United States played a leading role in addressing a critical global environmental challenge—preserving the Earth’s ozone layer, which protects us from the sun’s harmful radiation. I look back at the US leadership in securing [the Montreal Protocol] as one of my proudest accomplishments as Secretary of State. A new documentary film, Shattered Sky, tells this story. It also explores parallels with the current challenges we face in addressing global climate change and developing clean and secure energy supplies for the future. I urge you to watch this film. It shows what we can do when we actively work together to make a difference.”
--former Secretary of State George Shultz

TABLE OF CONTENTS



Shattered Sky: The Battle for Energy, Economy and Environment (01:26)    2
Better Living Through Chemistry (05:47)    4
Coal at a Crossroads (15:04)    7
Chapter break, no text (21:48)    9
The ozone hole changes everything: 1984-86 (28:30)    12
U.S. Climate Action Partnership, Washington, DC, January 16, 2009 (33:31)    14
An American responsibility: 1986-88 (38:08)    16
Montreal, September 14, 1987 (42:38)    17
Montreal, September 15, 1987 (46:24)    19
Charlotte, NC (49:38)    20
Shattered Sky FINAL GRAPHIC (53:26)    22



Dan Rather (archive, CBS News): A research team is leaving Los Angeles tonight bound for the South Pole. The scientists are worried by a mysterious, massive hole high above the ice.

TEXT: In the 1970s and 80s, America led the world to save the ozone layer.

Susan Solomon (archive, CBS News): Nobody predicted this. It’s like a bomb falling out of the sky.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: The ozone hole changed everything.

Susan Solomon, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: The ozone issue was extremely personal.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: Skin cancer, cataracts

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: We were all doomed if we lost the ozone layer. So there was real pressure now to get something done.

TEXT: Today, will we rise to the challenge of energy and climate change?

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: It is clear to us that climate change is an issue that we must face up to.

Robert Watson, Chief Atmospheric Scientist, NASA: Climate change costs society economically.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: And yet, president after president, whether it's energy policy or climate policy, has not solved the problem.

President Obama 2009: So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that drives the production of more renewable energy in America.

Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House: I want to make this quite clear. This bill is an energy tax.

Unknown Representative: There are going to be big winners and big losers in this bill. Big winners and losers.

Archive audio: Overlapping debate.

TEXT: Why isn’t Congress acting?

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change: I think it's really important for members of Congress and the administration to hear people say that they want this problem solved.

TEXT: 1987

Tom Brokaw (archive, NBC News): A long-sought multination agreement aimed at safeguarding the ozone layer, that agreement finally has been achieved.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: What the international community did to come together to solve the problem of the ozone hole was a perfect model for climate change.

Shattered Sky: The Battle for Energy, Economy and Environment (01:26)
TEXT: Unchained Goddess, Produced by Frank Capra 1958: Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which helps air absorb heat from the sun, our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.

TEXT: Muir Glacier 1902

TEXT: Muir Glacier 2005
 
Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: As we look back to what presidents have done in the last century, we went all the way back in 1965, Lyndon Johnson, who as far as I can tell was the first president whose science advisers said, we have a problem. His science advisers said that by the turn of the century 2000, climate change could be varying beyond our control. And yet, president after president, whether it's energy policy or climate policy, has not solved the problem.

TEXT: This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through…a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. —President Johnson, 1965

President Nixon 1970: The great question of the 70s is, Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water.

President Carter 1978: I know it is hard for the Congress to act, but the fact remains that on the energy legislation, we have failed the American people.

President George H.W. Bush 1990: We all know that human activities are changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in unprecedented ways.

President Clinton 1998: The vast majority of scientists have concluded unequivocally, that if we don’t reduce the emission of greenhouse gases at some point in the next century, we’ll disrupt our climate and put our children and our grandchildren at risk.

President George W. Bush 2008: The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change. And the best way to meet these goals is for the United States to continue leading the way toward the development of cleaner, and more energy-efficient technology.

President Obama 2009: To truly transform our economy, to protect our security and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.

TEXT: The United States generates almost 50% of its electricity from burning coal.

TEXT: Coal is the biggest source of burning emissions.

Bruce Nilles, National Coal Campaign Director, Sierra Club: There is a pretty unholy alliance between the electric providers who are burning the coal, the coal industry that is mining the coal, and the railroads that are shipping the coal from the mines to the power plants. They all are very invested interest. They have a lot of influence on Washington and they are the ones who are opposing tooth and nail any action on global warming.

TEXT: ACCCE “Clean Coal” 2008: You’re looking at 50 percent of our electricity! Coal. It’s the fuel that powers our way of life.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: Clean coal is an advertising slogan. It's not a thing. It’s something that was cooked up in a focus group by the coal industry as a way to sell coal. They needed to give people the idea that this is not your grandfather's coal industry.

TEXT: GE Energy “Model Miners” 2005: Now, thanks to emissions-reducing technology from GE Energy, harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day.

Bruce Nilles, National Coal Campaign Director, Sierra Club: There is no such thing as clean coal. When you look at the life cycle of coal from the moment it's being mined and the devastation we're seeing in places like Appalachia where they’re blowing up the tops of mountains. When you look at the burning of coal and the mercury pollution that's contaminating every lake, river and stream in the country, the 22,000 people a year dying from air pollution associated with coal plants...there is no way anyone with a straight face can say there's such a thing as clean coal.



Better Living Through Chemistry (05:47)
Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: CFCs were really considered a wonderful product. They were used to make things. They were used to keep things running.

TEXT: CFCs were the key ingredient in air-conditioning and refrigeration.

TEXT: These products revolutionized the American economy and our way of life.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: In consumer products like spray cans, it made a big difference in people's lives. They were considered convenient and helpful to the consumer as our society became more modern.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: At the time, DuPont which was one of the—the biggest maker actually of CFCs—their slogan was "Better living through chemistry." And that sort of summed up that whole era ,where we really had faith that we would find all these modern new conveniences that were based on science and chemistry and we really didn't look for any negative or any downside to these things, just what we could get out of them.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: The ozone layer is critical for life on earth. It's a very fragile layer of gas surrounding the earth. I think of it as a dusting of snow, almost in terms of how fragile it is. But it's vital to life on earth, because it protects us from the sun's ultraviolet light.We had already been using CFCs for several decades before there was even a suspicion that they could damage the environment.

TEXT: University of California, Irvine, 1974

Sherwood Rowland (archive, 8MM): Man-made chemicals, used extensively in aerosol sprays and in refrigeration units, pose a threat to the fragile ozone layer that shields the earth from the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.

Dr. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1995: I think the first question was what, what did we do wrong?

Dr. Mario Molina, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1995: I was surprised, surprised enough that I double-checked the calculations several times to say how can this possibly be the case?

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: We had already released tons and tons of these chemicals into the atmosphere and they drift very, very slowly to the stratosphere. It takes 50 to 100 years.

Sherwood Rowland: And in the stratosphere when they get above an altitude of about 20 miles, they start running into radiation from the sun that is energetic enough to cause the CFC to break up.

Mario Molina: You change from a very stable compound to a very reactive one, which are these chlorine atoms.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: At the time that this theory came out there was a popular video game called Pac Man and it was this little bubble on the screen and you would use the bubble to gobble up all these other little bubbles as fast as you could. And that was a useful analogy for what was happening in the stratosphere with ozone. It wasn't just that one chlorine atom destroyed ozone. It was a process that went on and on and on.

Walter Cronkite (ARCHIVE, CBS News): A federal task force said today there’s reason for concern about the damage to the atmosphere that may be caused by fluorocarbons, the propellant gas in many aerosol cans.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: Immediately, there was a reaction from industry that this sounded like science fiction.

ARCHIVE, CBS News, narration only: Industry representatives argue most strongly that the case against chlorofluorocarbons is not proven.

Frank Bower, DuPont (ARCHIVE, cont., CBS News): The approach to regulation that was described today is premature and is absolutely wrong. It has the potential of destroying a perfectly good and useful product without an adequate basis in scientific fact.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: There was a huge potential for economic pain, because CFCs were used in so many industries.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: Industry including some companies that later were helpful like DuPont, launched a kind of a vicious anti-science campaign to try to undercut the significance of the scientific findings.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: They tried to even hire some scientists who would cast doubt on the theory.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: And it carried some of the same hallmarks of the recent campaign that was funded by fossil fuel interests to undermine the science behind climate change.

Name, TBA, Atmospheric Sciences Council (archive, NBC News): There is a significant body of scientists who are not in accord with the hypothesis.

James Lodge (archive, NBC News): I am not sitting here saying look fellas, I know there is no effect. I did not say that. What I am saying, what I have been saying all along, is that the cost of waiting until we know better is trivial.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: The effect was I think to try to confuse the public, make them think there were really more sides to that debate and they were.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: And it was really just a way of postponing action on the basis of what we already knew.

Susan Solomon, Atmospheric Scientist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: The fact that there was a clear link between ozone depletion and human health, I think was very important. It was clearly well recognized at the time that increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation would have a potential to increase skin cancer, to cause cataract damage, so the ozone issue was extremely personal; in a way that frankly most people have a hard time seeing when they look at climate change.

TEXT: All in the Family, “Gloria’s Shock” 1974: Oh yeah, what about spray cans? What? Yeah, yeah, right here, this is a killer. Oh, so now my hairspray’s a killer? Yeah, your hairspray, my deodorant, all spray cans. I read that there are gases inside these cans, Gloria, that shoot up into the air and can destroy the ozone.

TEXT: Day of the Animals 1977: You know, this ozone thing has got something to do with it, I don’t know what it is, but I feel it.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: The government received more letters from people concerned about CFCs and banning CFCs than any other issue except the Vietnam War.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: People didn't wait for governments. They went out and stopped buying aerosol spray cans.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: And you can't underestimate how important that is. Because as soon as consumers say, ‘I'm going to stop buying this product,’ then industry is forced to do something about it.

ARCHIVE, NBC News, John Chancellor: This is NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor and David Brinkley. Tonight, Wednesday, May 11th, reporting from the NBC news center in New York. Good evening, David Brinkley will be back tomorrow. And the news today is that the government wants aerosol sprays using fluorocarbons banned in two years.

TEXT: People thought banning CFCs in aerosols had solved the problem.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: In the late 1970's, once aerosol spray cans were banned, DuPont started developing a substitute, which eventually, years later, became the primary substitute for CFCs.

TEXT: But industry stopped researching CFC alternatives once a new administration came to power.

ARCHIVE, APTV: I Ronald Reagan do solemnly swear…

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: When the Reagan administration came into power things kind of came to a grinding halt. This was an era where there was an administration in place that was loath to have more government regulations.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: DuPont decided, "Hey, they're not going make us do a thing." So they put these new developments on the shelf and didn’t push them through to a conclusion.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: It was four or five years of seeing very little progress in terms of any government action.



Coal at a Crossroads (15:04)
Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: I had no idea that we burn coal in America. I thought it went out with top hats and corsets. I thought it was something you read about in Charles Dickens novels. I had no concept of it. And I think that most Americans don't have any idea that we burn coal, that half of their electricity or more, depending on what state they live in, comes from coal.

Daniel Dudek: The United States' fundamental strategy for macro-development even before World War II has been founded on a policy of cheap energy. We, you know, viewed capital and labor as more valuable, more scarce. They ought to be priced and shepherded. But that what we could do is throw energy at the problem. And I think that strategy served us well for a while. But now we're coming to reap the harvest.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: One of the things that's happened with the coal industry that goes all the way back to the beginning of the industry is this idea that it's sort of too cheap to meter and that we just consume, consume, consume. We don't even think about how much it costs. We have no idea. If you ask, stop people on the street, and say how much electricity does your stereo use? No one can answer that. How much electricity does your TV use? No one can answer that.

Bruce Nilles, National Coal Campaign Director, Sierra Club (689): The single biggest part of pollution in the United States that's causing global warming is burning coal. Coal is the dirtiest fuel of all and it emits much more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil and natural gas.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: Coal has to be mined in Wyoming, loaded on to a railroad, hauled across country, most of the coal plants are...east of the Mississippi. That has to be dumped out at the coal yard, hauled into the power plant, burned in the power plant, you know where it creates steam, turns a turbine, turns a generator, goes out on the wire, goes to the wire transmission grids, into your neighborhood, broken down through various transformers and finally into your home lighting up your incandescent bulb. This is an enormously inefficient process in that only about 3 percent of the chemical energy that's in that coal originally ends up lighting your light bulb.

Bruce Nilles, National Coal Campaign Director, Sierra Club: There are many in the fossil fuel industry who are trying to turn the tables and say that the entire problem is with us as consumers versus the companies that are providing these services. Problem is in most places we simply have no choice how we light our homes or heat our offices. We have to rely on the local utility.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: You can't solve the problem of coal yourself. I cannot solve coal by changing my habits in my house. Really, this is a big industrial infrastructure problem and you can't solve that kind of a problem without big-picture political, industrial kind of solutions.

Daniel Dudek: If we're talking about the fossil fuel industry, I think the stakes for them are business-as-they-know-it.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: Starting in around 1990, the fossil fuel industries teamed up to fight the movement to do something about climate change. A lot of effort was focused on undermining the science, and the mainstream scientists—well, there was an attempt to marginalize them.

Susan Solomon: And I was shocked when I was a young scientist and began to see that some of the people who wanted to push a counterargument against the ozone would actually lie. They would actually present material. You would explain to them why it was wrong. They would actually in some cases listen to you and say, “Oh, thank you very much I didn't know that,” And then, you know, two weeks later they would say the same lie again. And I was absolutely stunned. I couldn't believe it.

TEXT: Like the CFC industry, the fossil fuel industry has employed scientists to advance its agenda: delaying action on climate change.

TEXT: The Greening of Planet Earth, 1992, Produced by a coal cooperative: The Western Fuels Association

ARCHIVE, The Greening of Planet Earth: I probably share the puzzlement of a lot of people in wondering why modest warming is treated as one of the gravest dangers facing mankind. Our world will be a much better one. A doubling of the CO2 content of the atmosphere will produce a tremendous greening of planet earth.

TEXT: The Greening of Planet Earth Continues, 1998

ARCHIVE, The Greening of Planet Earth Continues: And if warmer is better than colder, than why all this controversy? Because of computers. People have to understand that the entire global climate change hysteria is driven by computer models.

TEXT: The Great Global Warming Swindle, 2007

ARCHIVE, The Great Global Warming Swindle: We imagine that we live in an age of reason. And the global warming alarm is dressed up as science, but it’s not science, it’s propaganda. We’re just being told lies, that’s what it comes down to.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: Skepticism is always part of scientific debate. It's what makes science science. There's nothing that's too holy to be challenged. What is not scientific is contrarianism and that's different. That's no matter what evidence I show you, you're not gonna give me the point.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: But it works at the level of delay. And just like with ozone depletion the undermining of scientific arguments became one key arrow in the quiver of industry to slow down regulation and for them, time is money. Even if they're gonna lose in the long term, hey, they gained 10 years. That's a lot of money.
Chapter break, no text (21:48)

Daniel Dudek, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund: When we think about America, how does America makes its living in the world? We don't make our living in the world by our brawn. We make it with our brains. We make it with the innovations, the intellectual property, the new things that we create and sell to the rest of the world. And when we look at this problem, could there be any more significant market opportunity than the transformation of the energy industry?

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: Just like the US got into the Internet, just like the US got into mass production of automobiles a hundred years ago, just like the US won the race into space, there's a race on now for which country is gonna have the new technologies that are gonna let all countries get off fossil fuels. Whatever country does that is gonna make a lot of money at it. There's gonna be new jobs, it's gonna boost our competitiveness.

Daniel Dudek, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund: And I think we see this in the interest that Silicon Valley has placed on this issue. They look at the transformation of the energy industry, much like they looked at the assault on the mainframe computing industry, which used to be highly centralized, highly capital-intensive, until some folks sat around in a garage and invented little boxes that everybody runs with—or carries around now and transformed completely that entire industry. We can and will—if we have the political will—do the same thing to energy.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: This is not going to be solved out of the goodness of everyone’s heart. This is an economic issue when it really comes down to it.

Eileen Claussen, President, PEW Center on Global Climate Chnage: We don't have good estimates of the cost of doing nothing. Really when you're looking at the cost of doing something, you should compare it to the cost of doing nothing.

Robert Watson, Chief Atmospheric Scientist, NASA: Climate change costs society economically, and therefore the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action. But that was never part of the equation until quite recently.

TEXT: “If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP—now and forever.” –Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change

Hunter Lovins, President, Natural Capitalism Solutions: We're kidding ourselves. We pay these costs. We just pay them out of a different pocket.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: Traditional economics doesn't count a lot of the cost that actually are associated with what we do. For example, let's take oil. The price we pay for gasoline, a gallon of gasoline at the pump doesn't reflect the cost of protecting those oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. The cost of coal—electricity in other words—doesn't reflect the fact that we're blowing up mountaintops in West Virginia and dumping the waste into streams and on and on and on.

Hunter Lovins, President, Natural Capitalism Solutions: We pay those costs. We pay them out of our tax dollars. They're very real costs.

General Gordon Sullivan (Ret.), Chief of Staff of the US Army, 1991-1995: I must say I was a skeptic when I came because of all of the noise that's out there on climate change.

TEXT: Senior military officers argue that climate change threatens our national security.

General Gordon Sullivan (Ret.), Chief of Staff of the US Army, 1991-1995: We looked at what we could see and what we could feel. And we listened to people who—frankly we wouldn’t let ‘em burden us down with these esoteric discussions of graphs and charts. What did we see? What we saw wasn’t good.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: Climate change is going to be disruptive in some of the most volatile regions of the world. It's gonna destabilize governments. It's going to create breeding grounds for terrorism and terrorism recruiting.

General Gordon Sullivan (Ret.), Chief of Staff of the US Army, 1991-1995: Climate change is a threat multiplier and if there is instability in the world, in many cases the United States will become involved in one form or another.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: Imagine for a moment what would happen if Mexico had tremendous climate impacts—drought, wild fires, couldn't grow crops anymore ,and there are a flood of refugees pressed against our border trying to come across. Think of what the reaction would be. We're gonna see that on a massive scale if climate change continues.

General Gordon Sullivan (Ret.), Chief of Staff of the US Army, 1991-1995: You go from Somalia across Africa—Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad—and you start to see the implications of drought, no jobs, no work, nothing to do. We cannot afford to have failed states dotting the world And you cannot afford to have bad things growing in these countries, in this globalized world we live in.

TEXT: On this day in 2007, Marines intercepted oil smugglers in Iraq’s Anbar province.

Cameraman (off camera): What is it?

Marine: It’s dark and it smells like gas. It smells like fuel. I’d say it’s oil.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: If you set the economic argument, environmental argument aside there is a very strong reason from a national security perspective to act on this immediately and internationally.

General Gordon Sullivan (Ret.), Chief of Staff of the US Army, 1991-1995: Okay, let me give it to you straight: Pay now, pay later. If we are not willing to pay now, if we are not willing to sacrifice now, and we are not willing to pay for what we have to do, today, we're gonna pay later. And we may pay in ways that none of us can predict.

The ozone hole changes everything: 1984-86 (28:30)

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: The ozone hole changed everything. There was an outcry from the public, from environmentalists, that this was unacceptable. We were all doomed if we lost the ozone layer. So there was real pressure now to get something done.

David Doniger, Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council, 1978-1992: Even though the production of CFCs had dropped after the aerosol ban, over time, the amount used in all these other uses, refrigerators, in electronics manufacture, in foam blowing—was growing.

TEXT: CFCs were pervasive. By 1985, global CFC use surpassed the peak levels of the 1970s.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: Everyone had thrown away their aerosol spray cans, and now we were back to where we started.

TEXT: CFC production for use in air-conditioning, refrigeration and manufacturing was skyrocketing.

Dan Rather (archive, CBS News): A research team is leaving Los Angeles tonight bound for the South Pole. The scientists are worried by a mysterious, massive hole high above the ice.

Susan Solomon (archive, CBS News): Nobody predicted this. It’s like a bomb falling out of the sky.

Roan: What Susan Solomon proposed is that you had ice crystals in the atmosphere that served as a platform for the chemical reaction to take place.

Susan Solomon: The reaction happens when hydrochloric acid and chlorine nitrate can combine together on the surface of a polar-stratospheric cloud.

Susan Solomon: The only other ingredient you need after that is sunlight. And so, when the sun comes back, the ozone starts dropping like a rock.

Susan Solomon (archive, NBC News): We observed a 35 percent decrease in the total ozone overhead. Three different and independent sets of observations showed this change.

Robert Watson (archive, NBC News): We’ve heard from Dr. Solomon that we’ve seen large changes in ozone in the Antarctic. These were completely and utterly unexpected.

Robert Watson: And so that was the first experiment which clearly indicated it was indeed chemical loss due to human activities. That is to say the chlorine containing compounds. But it wasn't to some people's mind definitive.

ARCHIVE, WGBH, Elwood Blanchard, DuPont: I am very comfortable that current levels of chlorofluorocarbons emissions and modest growth in those levels does not represent a threat to the health of our human race.

ARCHIVE (cont.), CBS News, Richard Barnett, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: If in fact there is no need to change, what you’re doing is penalizing the consumer with a higher cost product, maybe unnecessarily.

David Doniger, Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council, 1978-1992: It was the threat of action under the clean air act that helped get the Reagan Administration moving forward for an international treaty.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: They did sue us, and you know actually EPA is sued frequently. In this case, NRDC was basically saying, “Look, you need to move further. There’s a mandate. EPA needs to take action.”

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: I kept hearing from industry that, “We want to invest in the research necessary but we really don't know that we're gonna have a market for our product when they're developed.”

David Doniger, Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council, 1978-1992: If you had a transitional period where the amount was brought down, they would still be able to make the chemical for a period of time, but slowly the amount would go down, the price would go up, and you could transition from the old to the new.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: So I became convinced that, well we needed to have a major step forward. In my mind that became at least 50 percent phase down in the first step and an overall phase out as the ultimate goal.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: Once it became clear that regulation was once again looming, DuPont in 1986 let it be known that, “Well, maybe we can produce a substitute.”

TEXT: In 1986, Dupont surprised everyone by changing its stance to officially support international negotiations.

Elwood Blanchard, DuPont (archive, WGBH): There is no way that we can solve a stratospheric problem by taking a unilateral action in the United States and have chlorofluorocarbons production and emissions continue to grow around the world. It all ends up in the same stratosphere. As a result, we have to approach the problem globally.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: My suspicion was—inside DuPont anyway. They came to the conclusion that there was a scientific basis for the whole depleting theory. And second, we've been developing substitutes and we think if there's a market out there, we can get this substitute to market.” And that's my sense of the two things that were going on. And I took that away from the conversation I had with DuPont.

U.S. Climate Action Partnership, Washington, DC, January 16, 2009 (33:31)
Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: There are number of companies that have begun to step up and say we need to deal with the problem. Matter of fact, there's an overall climate action group made up of companies all the way from General Electric to Duke Energy.

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change: And I think you can see in the 25 companies that are part of USCAP all kinds of companies. You've got electric utilities who burn coal. You have electric utilities who have a lot of nuclear. You have a mining company.

Eileen Claussen (archive, USCAP conference): In fact, one of the reasons that a group as diverse as this can advocate such aggressive targets and timetables is because we believe that we can keep the costs at manageable levels.

James Rogers (archive, USCAP conference): I’m the CEO of Duke Energy. We’re the third largest consumer of coal, providing electricity to 11 million customers in the Midwest and the Southeast. We believe strongly that reducing the emissions of CO2 from coal is critical to our ability to achieve our 2050 goal of an 80 percent reduction.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: It is clear to us that climate change is an issue that we must face up to. It is also clear that the scientists have done their work, they have spoken, and we're really acting based on the work that they have done.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: In the United States, our per capita emissions of CO2 is the highest in the world. Our company is the third largest emitter of CO2 in the US. I think it's critical to have cap and trade. We need a price on carbon, but we also need a cap on emissions that will decline over time.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: Because at the end of the day for us, particularly as a power supplier, we have to make tradeoffs between affordability, reliability, and clean. And not every way we make electricity is equal with respect to each of those. Should we build clean coal plants? Should we build nuclear plants? Should we build natural gas? How much should we invest in wind or solar? Those choices will be made in the context of regulation.

Bruce Nilles, National Coal Campaign Director, Sierra Club: When you look behind the rhetoric and what Duke Energy is actually doing, they're one of the largest burners of coal in United States. Unlike most other investor-owned utilities in the country, they're actually building new coal plants.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: One of the problems with someone like Jim Rogers or Duke Energy building a new coal plant is because that coal plant is going to be in the ground operating for 40, 50, 60 years, who knows how long. And so once it's up and running, that CO2 is heating up the atmosphere for my kids and my grandkids.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: My hope is, is that we can develop a technology that will allow us to use coal.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: If they can figure out a way to burn coal that doesn’t trash the atmosphere, that perhaps captures the CO2 and buries it safely underground, and that can deal with some of the—or all of the—mining effects, especially mountaintop removal mining, and deal with the CO2, then great. There’s no reason that coal can’t have a place in a world that takes global warming seriously. But that’s a big big challenge.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: I think the sooner we start in addressing climate, the higher the probability we can minimize the cost impact on our consumers, the higher the probability that we can reduce the impact on our economy. So that’s why I’m an advocate for going to work now.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: What’s going on now is that carbon dioxide is being dumped in the atmosphere for free. There’s no penalty to doing that, but there is a very large penalty to you and to me and to my children and to your children and to their grandchildren. So there’s a real huge social and environmental cost to this in the long run. But there’s no immediate cost to the companies that are doing this at this moment. That is the fundamental thing that has to change.

An American responsibility: 1986-88 (38:08)
Kevin Fay, Counsel, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: We look at issues like climate change today and it's enormously complicated in terms of its breadth and reach and then the number of industries it touches. But at that time, this was considered to be an extraordinarily complicated issue.

Jane Bryant Quinn (archive, CBS News): Before the aerosol ban, the U.S. and Canada produced half of the world’s CFCs. After it, production here dropped substantially, but except for Scandinavia, the rest of the world did not follow.

Richard Benedick, Chief US Negotiator, Montreal Protocol, State Department: We had Canada, the Nordic countries, Australia, New Zealand, there was basically a handful of countries that were interested in taking actions. And the other major producing countries in Europe, Russia, Japan were hostile.

Jane Bryant Quinn (archive, CBS News): In Europe, CFCs are still widely used in aerosol sprays, and the industry is constantly creating new markets. Japan now sees CFCs as the ideal solvent for cleaning computer chips. These nations do not want to give up profits and jobs.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: We weren't really having a debate about the fact that chlorofluorocarbons were gonna impact the stratospheric ozone layer. That wasn’t the debate. It was the risk management decisions we were discussing.

Richard Benedick, Chief US Negotiator, Montreal Protocol, State Department: What are the risks of not doing anything and the risks of acting. Too often, both in politics and in business, people are more concerned with the short term—you know, the next election on the one hand or for industry, the next quarterly profit and loss statement. And you lose sight of the long term.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: The fact that we had long timeframes for the molecules of those CFCs to get up into the stratosphere said that if we waited for absolute certainty we may be waiting far too long.

TEXT: Controversy raged over the need for U.S. regulations and an international treaty.

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change: We had lots of internal battles during the Reagan administration.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: There were forces in the Reagan Administration that didn't wanna see anything done on ozone depletion like Donald Hodel with the classic story of the hats and sunglasses.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: There was this Personal Protection Plan was how it was phrased.

Cartoon: Interior Sec Hodel Suggests Sunglasses, Hats, and Suntan Lotion as an Alternative to World Agreement to Save the Ozone Layer.

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change: I guess if you were putting it in the climate context, it was adapt, right? I mean the way to deal with skin cancer or anything else that might be an impact from the depletion of the ozone layer was hats and sunglasses.

Music break

Richard Benedick, Chief US Negotiator, Montreal Protocol, State Department: I think that Reagan was actually more pragmatic than people generally appreciated.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: You gotta understand that the approach he took really was a cabinet approach. He had a cabinet council. He heard the various sides. He heard the various issues.

Richard Benedick, Chief US Negotiator, Montreal Protocol, State Department: Other agencies were either drastically opposed or indifferent and the President signed off on our position for the final negotiation at Montreal in September of 1987. Point for point.

Kevin Fay, Counsel, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: There were a lot of other things going on at the time. Lawsuits had been filed against EPA under the Clean Air Act trying to force them to regulate. Unilateral regulation made no sense and we were better off pursuing it at the international level.
 
Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: I think the case we made was the strongest case.

Richard Benedick: President Reagan, to his credit, absolutely endorsed the strong treaty.

Montreal, September 14, 1987 (42:38)
Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: When the parties came together to try to enact the Montreal Protocol, there was a lot of disagreement in the first few days of negotiations. It was very tense. It got very nasty.

Kevin Fay, Counsel, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: There was a great deal of tension at the time between U.S. industry interests and European industry interests.

John Mills, Imperial Chemical Industries (Archive): There is no environmental case for limiting CFC emissions to present day levels.

Kevin Fay, Counsel, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: The aerosol users in the United States were for the most part already gone. And in Europe, it was still the single largest source of emissions. So, it immediately created economic winners and losers depending on which way you went in the negotiation. The industry groups from Europe were intensely lobbying their delegation. The U.S. industry groups were doing the same.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: Some of the countries were represented more by their trade ministers than they were by their environment ministers. This was as much an economic and trade issue as anything else.

Kevin Fay, Counsel, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: Frankly, going into that last day, I don’t think any of us knew. I think it was a genuine cliffhanger.

TEXT: During the ozone crisis, the United States had to convince Europe to act.

TEXT: Today, the United States and China are lagging behind.

Daniel Dudek: This problem, because it's global, can't be solved without the United States and China. We are the two biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Daniel Dudek: We cannot expect the Chinese to do something, which we ourselves are not willing to do.

TEXT: The United States and China are responsible for 44% of global CO2 emissions.

Eileen Claussen: Climate change is an issue where cumulative emissions really count. It's not just what you emit today, it's what you have over time because everything lasts for so long up there in the atmosphere.

TEXT: From 1850 to 2000, the United States and the European Union were responsible for about 60% of energy-related CO2 emissions.

TEXT: China contributed 7% and India 2%.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: A lot of people say that the solution lies not with the G20, not with the G8, but with the G2. So I believe China and the U.S. need to work closely together to solve this problem.

President Obama: So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon emissions and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.

Henry Waxman, U.S. Representative, D-MA: Today the committee is meeting to mark up the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009...

TEXT: June 2009

Edward Markey, U.S. Representative, D-CA: We have a chance now to help make a better America.

Archive, FOX News: The House of Representatives has voted to pass the historic energy and climate control bill. Take a live look at the floor where the voting is just wrapped up. The bill would create a framework for capping carbon emissions and set renewable energy standards.

GRAPHIC: Climate bill faces hurdles in Senate

Sen. John Kerry, D-MA: Today, we begin the formal legislative process to lead the world in rolling back the urgent threat of climate change.

GRAPHIC: Republicans give global-warming hearing the cold shoulder

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: The central issue in solving this problem is what is America going to do. I mean this is the American moment.

Montreal, September 15, 1987 (46:24)
Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: I can remember going late at night and finally breaking with the understanding that we basically were at an impasse. And it was kind of the U.S. on one side with some countries and the European Union on the other side with some countries.

Kevin Fay, Counsel, Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy: And it ultimately came down to this final session between Lee Thomas and Laurens Brinkhorst in the middle of the night.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: The U.S. lead negotiator Lee Thomas and the EEC's lead negotiator Laurens Brinkhorst decided at the end of a very long and trying day to go talk privately.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: And we pulled a table over to the side, Laurens and I did and we had a good long talk and we ended up with an agreement. And I said, "I'm gonna have to call back to the U.S. in the morning to make sure that this is consistent with what we wanna do.” And he said, "Well, I have to do the same thing.”

TEXT: Thomas and Brinkhorst agreed to cut CFC production by 50 percent and eventually stop using CFCs altogether.

Tom Brokaw (archive, NBC News): A long-sought multination agreement aimed at safeguarding the ozone layer, that thin layer in the stratosphere that protects life on earth, that agreement finally has been achieved.

TEXT: All 192 countries in the United Nations have signed the Montreal Protocol.

ARCHIVE (cont.), NBC News, Canadian representative: The Montreal Protocol is a triumph in international cooperation.

TEXT: The ozone hole is shrinking.

TEXT: It will close completely this century.

Lee Thomas (archive, NBC News): I fully intend to sell it to the United States Congress as a strong protocol and one that’s in the best interests of the world and the United States.

Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator, 1985-89: I am absolutely convinced that if the U.S. had not established itself as a major leader on stratospheric ozone, we would not have gotten the Montreal Protocol.

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences, Princeton University: So there's an interesting interaction between regulation and technology development. Lo and behold, Dupont came up with this chemical, which was able to substitute for most of the uses of chloroflourocarbons, but without destroying the ozone layer.

TEXT: Dupont testimony before the U.S. Senate, March 30, 1988

Elwood Blanchard, DuPont (archive, C-SPAN): We are firmly convinced that the most effective action to address this challenge is the early ratification of the Montreal Protocol by as many of the countries of the world as possible.

Sharon Roan, Author, Ozone Crisis: The Montreal Protocol was so significant because it was really the first time that internationally we had some commitment to do something about an environmental problem that affected everybody. So it was a huge success.

Charlotte, NC (49:38)
Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: The virtue of capitalism is if the game can be changed so that, you know, putting CO2 into the atmosphere or contributing to global warming becomes an expense, then you incentivize away from that.

TEXT: After the Montreal Protocol, Dupont started phasing out CFC production in 1988.

TEXT: Energy companies like Duke Energy now face a choice: whether to continue building coal-fired power plants.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: I think as I look into the future, it will be a mix of nuclear, wind, and solar.

TEXT: On January 21, 2010, in the Wall Street Journal, 50 of America’s biggest corporations asked Congress to pass bipartisan energy and climate legislation.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Big Coal: If you can incentivize different behavior, make it profitable to do other things, then absolutely they will change. There’s no question about it. They'll change in a heartbeat. The question is how quickly can you flip that switch.

James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy: The important thing is for the government to have clear goals, clear regulations so we can make investments. It is that certainty that provides a roadmap for investments in the future.

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change: I think it's really important for members of Congress and the administration to hear people say that they want this problem solved, that they view it as a priority and that it is really important that we have a policy that makes a difference. That is a way to work with the rest of the world. It is a way to revitalize our economy. It is a way for them to live a better life.

TEXT: On July 22, 2010, the Senate abandoned energy and climate legislation, leaving industry in the dark about future CO2 regulations.

Sen. John Kerry, D-MA: We today have support from industries and stakeholders that have opposed previous bills. And that is a very, very important achievement. But we’ve always known that in order to pass comprehensive energy-climate legislation, you gotta reach 60 votes.

TEXT: The Reagan Administration solved the ozone crisis.

TEXT: When will we solve the energy and climate crisis?

General Gordon Sullivan (Ret.), Chief of Staff of the US Army, 1991-1995: As a military officer, if I was in an operational command, I may know 50 percent, 50 or 60 percent of what's happening and the rest is kind of intuition. But based on what I know in my intuition, I have to make a decision and if I wait for 100 percent certainty, the likelihood is I'm gonna be overrun or something. You have to act. You have to have a propensity for action.

Sharon Roan: What is the alternative? The alternative is to let the problem go on and on because we're not exactly sure what's going to happen, but then when we're finally sure…we've done so much damage we can't recover from it.

Bill Becker, Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project: The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones, it ended because we found a better way.

Shattered Sky FINAL GRAPHIC (53:26)


[CREDITS]
Directed by
Steve Dorst and Dan Evans

Written and Produced by
Steve Dorst and Dan Evans

Cinematography and Editing by
Dan Evans

Additional Photography
John Collin
Steve Dorst
Stefan Wiesen

Original Music Composed by
Steve Steckler
Fritz Stolenbach

Executive Producer
Jeff Cohen

New York City Production Unit
Director: Tim Betler
Special thanks: Christopher Schram

Iraq Production Unit
Director: Richard MacKenzie
Producers: Richard MacKenzie and John Collin
Footage courtesy of MacKenzie Productions

Appalachian Aerial Photography Team
Director: Adolfo Doring
Aerial Cinematographer: Michael Kelem
Producer: Amanda Zackem
Made possible by:
Appalachian Voices
Wallace Global Fund

Associate Producer
Claire Darby

Research Assistant
David Bruggink

Production Assistants
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Tim Evans

Sound Mixed By
Steve Steckler

Legal Services Provided by
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Special thanks to:
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With Thanks to:
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William Becker
Richard Benedick, PhD
Eileen Claussen
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Ross Gelbspan
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Jeff Goodell
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John Negroponte
Bruce Nilles
Michael Oppenheimer, PhD
William Reilly
Shari Roan
James Rogers
F. Sherwood Rowland, PhD
George P. Shultz
Susan Solomon, PhD
James Gustave Speth
General Gordon Sullivan (retired)
Lee Thomas
Robert Watson, PhD

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SUNGLASSES & HATS
Written by Steve Dorst and Steve Steckler

Additional Music by
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