Regulating private rockets: Final green frontier?

Now the greens want to regulate rocket launches lest they damage the ozone layer.

Here’s the first few paragraphs from the University of Colorado media release:

The global market for rocket launches may require more stringent regulation in order to prevent significant damage to Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer in the decades to come, according to a new study by researchers in California and Colorado.

Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. The study, which includes the University of Colorado at Boulder and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, provides a market analysis for estimating future ozone layer depletion based on the expected growth of the space industry and known impacts of rocket launches.

“As the rocket launch market grows, so will ozone-destroying rocket emissions,” said Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. “If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs.”

My first reaction was, “Oh my, we’re going to be trapped forever on the same planet with the greens!”

But on second thought, since no one really understands the continual fluctuations in stratospheric ozone to start with, nor do they understand (simple chemistry aside) the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer, and since there’s no evidence that any harm was ever caused to anyone or to the environment by whatever spotty thinning may have occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, this new study seems to be nothing more than yet another green anti-technology moment.

Besides, private rocket launches can’t be evil — Google is for them.