The 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out chlorfluorocarbons has been by far the most effective step ever taken to reduce cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, The Economist reports in an analysis published September 23. At a saving of 5.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the agreement was followed by world hydropower capacity at 2.8 billion tonnes, world nuclear capacity at 2.2 billion tonnes, and China’s one-child policy at 1.3 billion tonnes. “Governments are persistently averse to providing estimates of how much carbon a policy saves,” the magazine states. “The end result is that while the world’s governments have hundreds of policies for tackling climate change, some of them very expensive…it is hard to say which policies are having the greatest effect.”
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