John L. Perry, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2001

At the same time Beijing is berating President Bush for rejecting the accord – which no major industrialized nation has embraced – it is busy smuggling into neighboring Japan large quantities of dichlorodifluoromethane, known commercially as CFC-12, used as an air-conditioner coolant in outmoded automobiles.

A documented destroyer of the Earth's ozone layer, CFC-12 is described by environmentalists as a major contributor to a worldwide warming they delight in blaming on the United States.

So far, neither those same environmentalists nor any of the other countries denouncing the United States for refusing to adopt the Kyoto Protocol – notably those in Europe – has complained about China's heavy manufacture and flourishing illegal marketing of CFC-12.

Banned in Japan

Since 1995, Japan has prohibited by law the manufacture and importation of CFC-12 and stopped its auto manufacturers from producing air-conditioner units that use coolant containing CFC-12.

That has not deterred the People's Republic of China, which under terms of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has pledged to halt entirely its production of this deadly chlorofluorocarbon by 2010.

Faced with that deadline, China has been furiously producing, and smuggling out, the contraband product at the rate of at least 50,000 tons a year since 1997.

According to the Japan Times, which has been tracking this story, that accounts for two-thirds of the entire world's supply of CFC-12.

China Finds a Willing Market

So extensive is China's illegal smuggling of CFC-12 that Japanese authorities have now become alarmed. They discovered that at least 100,000 bottles of bootleg CFC-12 have been sneaked into Japan in the past eight months, mislabeled as motor oil.

Although Japan outlaws importation or domestic manufacture of CFC-12, it still permits it to be used in air-conditioners of old-model cars to consume the almost-depleted stocks on hand at the time of the ban.

This has caused Japanese motorists with older vehicles to face up to the choice of acquiring a new-model car or investing in a replacement air-conditioning unit that won't take CFC-12.

Adding to the pressure is Japan's economic slump. That means fewer late-model cars that do not use this variety of coolant and more older cars – some 15 million of them – that do use it.

In turn, that has put a premium on the smuggled jugs of the coolant.

China's Profitable Hypocrisy

The stuff isn't cheap, either. A bottle of bootleg coolant containing the banned dichlorodifluoromethane sells on the Japanese black market for as much as $42 – times those 100,000 smuggled bottles equals $4.2 million or 504 million yen.

Communist China is only too ready and willing to keep on meeting that demand by smuggling its banned coolant into Japan – so long as there's not a sufficient howl in the international community that might endanger its admission to the World Trade Organization.

Meanwhile, as Japanese motorists continue to send smuggled Chinese CFC-12 fumes up to eat away at the ozone layer, some of America's purported friends and allies continue to berate it for not adopting the same Kyoto Protocol they haven't seen fit to adopt either.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

China/Taiwan

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