Interview with Nobel Laureate F.S. Rowland
Introduction  Email : rowland@uci.edu  Home Page  CV
1. We have been talking about the Global Environmental problems for more than 25 years. A number of international conferences have been held and decisions taken to implement certain measures to control the pollution of the environment. Where do you think that we stand today?
2. Now one of the major problem sources of pollution in atmosphere is fossil fuel burning. Countries like India and other developing countries, have very few other energy sources. How do you think that these problems can be solved?
3. The problems that many of the developing countries face is that the many of the pollution control technologies are very expensive. For instance that in India we have cars coming which are EuroII compliant. They are very expensive and are beyond the means of average man. So how do you think that this problem be solved?
4. You see one of way preventing carbon dioxide pollution is to use nuclear power. What is your opinion about the future of nuclear power?
5. Looking at the global situation, political, social and others, what do you think of the Environment of earth 20 years from now?
6. We are optimistic and we can only keep trying.......

F. SHERWOOD ROWLAND was born on June 28, 1927, in the small central Ohio town of Delaware, the home of Ohio Wesleyan University. He recived his elementary and high school education in the Delaware public schools from an excellent set of teachers. As per Delaware school system who believed in accelerated promotion, he could enter first grade at age 5 and skipped the fourth grade entirely, with the result he entered high school at 12 and graduated in the age of sixteen.

In early teens, the high school science teacher entrusted to him during his two week vacations, the operation of the local weather station. This was his first exposure to systematic experimentation and data collection. By the age of 18, he got into graduation and in his 21st year he joined Department of Chemistry, Chicago University to continue his studies.

From the year 1973, his research group got involved more in atmospheric chemistry than in radiochemistry. The work covered radioisotopes associated with atmospheric chemistry. This research work has been conducted at the University of California Irvine by a strong, hard-working group of postdoctoral and graduate student research associates, together with some able technical specialists.

For their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of Ozone, Prof. F. Sherwood Rowland, J. Paul Crutzen and J. Mario Malina, awarded Nobel Prize for Chemistry in the year 1995.

This Interview was conducted when Prof Rowland was visiting this country to attend a conference on Sustainable development organised by the Tata Energy Research Institute, Delhi.


ComCom: We have been talking about the Global Environmental problems for more than 25 years. A number of international conferences have been held and decisions taken to implement certain measures to control the pollution of the environment. Where do you think that we stand today?

Prof Rowland: There are wide variety of environmental problems that are covered by that and progress is made in some cases and not in others. Usually progress come in steps. I can illustrate this with Southern California where I live where a small problem was first identified about 50 years ago. There were a series of steps taken . First to stop backyard burning of trash which was banned. Then after they established that automobiles were the major source they put in controls on the automobiles. Now we have banned the use of organic solvents for paints. And there is a whole set of things in the Los Angeles area things have got somewhat better in the last ten years. Even though the amount of traffic has gone up substantially as also the amount of industries and the number of people. But it has been a long hard fight and it is not something where overnight you get a solution. We have to decide that this is a major problem.

In Delhi you bviously have a serious pollution problem in the city itself. There isn't any simple solution to that to turn it around. Probably there is a summation of a large number of solutions you can make it better. But that requires the Governments willingness to do it and the people to accept it. It is a competition between how much smog is and what we have to do about it ? Normally every body would like to have regulations. Now in the specific case in the Montreal protocol for control of cholorofluro carbons, the situation was very different. There was a solution that was agreed to by all the countries of the world and that solution is being followed. And we know that by looking at the atmosphere that Montreal protocol is working. That was a success on a very short time scale. But the effects of the materials that are still there are going to be with us in the 21st century also.


ComCom: Now one of the major problem sources of pollution in atmosphere is fossil fuel burning. Countries like India and other developing countries, have very few other energy sources. How do you think that these problems can be solved?

Prof Rowland: In the case of Carbon dioxide emissions, the first solution is to make things more efficient. That is a situation which is favourable to everybody. If you use your fuel efficiently that benefits the consumer directly. That requires thinking about and learning from other places what the most efficient things are to do. The hope would be that not everybody makes the same mistakes. In the western world people developed the need for this extra energy and built into the society before they realised what the environmental problems were. Now everybody knows what the environmental problems are and you can see what the future is and if you follow the same path then you will get the same problems. We would hope that the solutions we have found and are finding and that you find get implemented globally , rather than just the industrial world and later on somewhere else. There is an interesting set of evaluations that I saw at the world economic forum in which there is a phraseology 'first you have to be dirty and then you can worry about environment'. That polluting is the route to better standard of living. There was n't much correlation in their measurements between the rate of growth for various countries and the degree of pollution. It seems once you are worried about environment and had much scores on that, then you are advancing at the same rate. Why that is that we have been closely looking at the individual societies but it isn't necessary that you have to necessarily pollute in order to get richer.


ComCom: The problems that many of the developing countries face is that the many of the pollution control technologies are very expensive. For instance that in India we have cars coming which are EuroII compliant. They are very expensive and are beyond the means of average man. So how do you think that this problem be solved?

Rowland: There is no expectation that in any city anywhere that all polluting cars go out in two months and are replaced by clean cars. What you do is to introduce clean cars and progressively the old cars go off the road. So you put-in the highest standards that you can and as you get wealthier you put higher standards. In southern california, if the standards are 50 times more severe, still my car will meet it because it is a relatively new car. It is really the old cars that don't meet it and they are going to go off the road. You don't clean it up in 5 years. You look at it 15 or 20 years then things are better.


ComCom: You see one of way preventing carbon dioxide pollution is to use nuclear power. What is your opinion about the future of nuclear power?

Rowland: My own feeling is nuclear power is underrated in the United States. By the way the nuclear work was handled ,in 1940s and 50s, enough mistakes were made that people don't trust it. So it requires time to pass . I think it is possible to do nuclear power in a reasonably safe way just as it is possible to do fossil fuel power in a reasonably safe way. There is no form of energy that does not have any punishment associated with it.


ComCom: Looking at the global situation, political, social and others, what do you think of the Environment of earth 20 years from now?

Rowland: It is probably going to be worse. The intensity of development is very strong all the way round in the world. The drive to get that development even though you get pollution seems to win out. There are a few places where they have done advance studies and put in the appropriate municipal transport systems near the beginning .Not very many systems have done that. I would think that most of the major cities as they grow up in the world are going to get worse pollution as you go along. Only when they get to a level that is really harmful to their citizens , then they will really try to cut back in a serious way . Everybody says that they don't want more pollution but everybody says that they want more cars. They want the cars without waiting until they figure out how to prevent pollution. I don't see that on a global basis that much progress will be made in the couple of decades.

ComCom: We are optimistic and we can only keep on trying............

Rowland: Some places we will succeed. People out there have realised that there are solutions and that may be hard to implement. But there are ways to avoid pollution and the problems that come within.

The interviewer was Dr. Biman Basu,Editor Science Reporter. The full version of interview was telecast on Doordarshan's News channel by IGNOU in their daily current affairs programme Darpan.