I never knew, until I read Kara Swisher’s ‘Burn Book’, that Al Gore, when senator of Tennessee, played a key role which birthed the Internet.

As a senator from Tennessee, Gore crafted and pushed through the “High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991,” aka the “Gore Bill.” This legislation funded initiatives like the game-changing Mosaic browser and was critical to the commercialization of the now indispensable medium.

I was working at a university 1992 – 1995 and was lucky enough to use the university’s JANET system, then the early Internet. As an information specialist, this inspired me. Of course, it was, like all innovations the beginning of huge leaps in technological achievements to the present day. We now have a vast wealth of knowledge being acquired at a rapid rate. We could save this dying planet with what we know; but sadly, that opportunity seems to be overtaken by a desperate death spiral motivated by human envy and greed.

Kara met Gore in 1989, and he must have picked up on the British Antarctic Scientists discovery:

A mere decade later, in 1985, the British Antarctic Survey confirmed a hole in the ozone layer and suggested a link to CFCs – vindicating the work of Molina and Rowland, who were eventually awarded the 1995 Noble Prize in chemistry. Even worse, the depletion was happening much quicker than had been anticipated. “It was really quite shocking,” says Shanklin, now an emeritus fellow at the British Antarctic Survey.

As she relates:

I met Gore in 1989 while reporting a story about his efforts to limit the use of chlorofluorocarbons that were depleting the ozone levels. He was right about climate change, too. Really, even though he sounded like an idiot when he said he invented the Internet, we should probably thank the guy for all he’s done and for being one of the few in D.C. who took an interest in the tech at all.

I wrote a blog some years ago about the gradual realisation that a gas used to cool fridges, in aerosols and other common products, used extensively since its invention, was causing a depletion in the ozone layer which protected us from direct rays of the sun.

https://borderslynn.com/2021/03/27/will-we-be-fishless-xi/

It was a global emergency and required a global response:

During the 1990s and early-2000s, the production and consumption of CFCs was brought to a halt. By 2009, 98% of the chemicals agreed to in the treaty had been phased out. Six amendments — which the treaty allows when scientific evidence shows further action is needed — have led to ever-tightening restrictions on substances introduced to replace CFCs, such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). While good for the ozone layer, these replacements turned out to be bad for the climate. The global warming potential of the most commonly used HCFC, for example, is almost 2,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

The treaty’s climate benefits have been a positive side effect. In 2010, emissions reductions due to the Montreal Protocol were between 9.7 to 12.5 gigatons of CO2 equivalent, approximately five to six times more than the target of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty adopted in 1997 that aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The 2016 adoption of the Kigali Amendment, which will limit the use of HFCs, will help avoid up to 0.5 C of global warming by 2100.

“You could argue [the Montreal Protocol] is a much more successful bit of climate protection legislation than any of the other [climate] agreements we’ve had to date,” says Revell.

Since its adoption, the Montreal Protocol has been signed by every country on Earth – to date the only treaty to be universally ratified. It’s widely considered a triumph of international environmental cooperation. According to some models, the Montreal Protocol and its amendments have helped prevent up to two million cases of skin cancer yearly and avoided millions of cataract cases worldwide.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole

And as we tried to find replacements – HCFCs, we made matters worse.

Technological advances are often full of good intentions – the splitting of the atom was about studying how life on earth began, but the legacy is the development of a weapon which can destroy all life.

Albert Einstein famously said, after the advent of the nuclear weapons that his genius helped make possible, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking. And we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”