Evolution of the US-USSR Draft Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques: New International Environmental Law

• Main Author: April, Howard L.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@URI 1976
• Subjects: environmental modification techniques; international environmental law; environmental protection; United States; USSR; EPA; Natural Resources Management and Policy; Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology; Arctic; Coleman; Weir
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/ma_etds/9; https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/context/ma_etds/article/1009/viewcontent/April__1976__D_.pdf; https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/context/ma_etds/article/1009/filename/0/type/additional/viewcontent/April__1976__D_.pdf

One cannot pick up a newspaper or news magazine at this time in early 1976 without reading about possible threats to the environment such as Concorde SST's potential impact on the ozone layer or the possibility that the fluorocarbon propellants in aerosol cans will deplete the ozone layer. In February 1976, Secretary of Transportation Coleman in announcing his decision to permit the Concorde to land at Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. and at JFK Airport in New York considered that the impact of the 16 months of test flights on the stratosphere would be miniscule and the speculation of a slight risk of increased cancer cases did not justify his withholding approval for the Concorde landing rights. Russell E. Train, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in October 1975, considered fluorocarbons as possibly the first truly global environmental problem and called for some kind of international mechanism to deal with the chemicals. A U.S. Coast Guard scientist C. R. Weir reported to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 9,1975, that oil spills in the Arctic could conceivably melt the ocean ice, and thus affect the earth's climate. Bombarded by these reports in the media, one may wonder what laws there are to prevent such potentially damaging modification of the environment.