“I worry about her ability to have enough cocktails with enough Republican senators to get this over the hump. That’s a heavy lift.” Michael Wara
United Nation diplomats finalized a deal Saturday in Rwanda to phase out the use of most HFCs. HfC’s are the chemicals that we use in our refrigerators to keep our food cold and air condition our homes.
Hope for the agreement is that it will “accelerate a shift to safer substitutes for some of the world’s fastest growing and worst greenhouse gases”. Climate Central reports on the good news in the agreement:
The agreement reached in the Rwandan city of Kigali on Saturday would expand the kinds of gases covered by the Montreal Protocol. That was a 1987 agreement that helped save the ozone layer by nearly eradicating the use of chemicals called CFCs. Countries and companies often complied with the agreement by switching to HFCs, which are safe for the ozone layer but contribute to global warming.
As demand for air conditioners and fridges has been growing, including in rapidly developing countries, HFCs have been escaping into the atmosphere. The HFC pollution has been helping to heat the planet — further increasing demand for air conditioning.
By limiting the use of HFCs, the new Montreal Protocol amendments could reduce global warming by 1°F by 2100. They could also drive investments in research and development, making alternative products more affordable.
The bad news is that the GOP never misses an opportunity to obstruct and sabotage the world in it’s efforts to tackle global warming. We know that cities such as Houston, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, Tehran, Bagdad and many other once-bustling cities will not be inhabitable in the near future. For example in July, the air in the city of Bandar Mahshahr Iran, felt like a blistering 165 degrees (74 Celsius) factoring in the humidity. People will not be able to survive such heat and humidity without air conditioned indoor spaces to seek shelter. With the present upward trajectory of rising temperatures people will not be able to survive seasonal heat waves and they will be forced to abandon places such as Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Washington Dc and on and on. Large expanses of Africa, Asia, South America and Australia will be no go zones as well.
What will likely happen is that as the planet heats, more and more people will demand air conditioning in order to survive. This fact will make the situation even worse, because more and more air conditioning use will release even more Greenhouse gases creating a very grim future for the biosphere.
The agreement was struck weeks before a more all-encompassing global climate deal, the Paris agreement takes legal force, following its hurried ratification in recent months by President Obama and other world leaders. Global temperatures have risen about 2°F since the 1800s, with heat-trapping air pollution making heat waves, floods and destructive storms more likely and more severe.
The Paris agreement calls on countries to voluntarily reduce their overall climate impacts, focusing heavily on electricity, clean transportation and land clearing. The voluntary nature of the agreement was accepted by other countries in part to help Obama avoid the need for lawmaker approval prior to U.S. ratification of the pact.
Climate Central notes that unlike the voluntary Paris Climate Agreement, international environmental law requires that countries will have to ratify the new HFC agreement. Unfortunately that will require a two-thirds vote from the Senate.
“This is different from Paris, in that it requires ratification — and that’s concerning to me,” said Michael Wara, and expert on energy and environmental law at Stanford. “This is going to require getting Republicans to vote for it.”
I’m not holding my breath that Republican Senators will ever do the right thing to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Pys.org Interview with Matthew Eckelman, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Northeastern University.
Where do alternatives to HRCs currently stand?
There has been a good amount of field research. This is an area where there has been a lot of testing beforehand, because it's an obvious point that came up during the Kigali negotiations—which have been ongoing for several years. Researchers have been smart about the way they've approached this. They've looked at the performance of alternatives in some hot climates—places where there is both greater projected population growth than the rest of the world and also places where you need A/C units to live comfortably. And there have been some encouraging results that show that some of the alternatives perform better than what we currently have now in terms of energy use. It's really a win-win: We reduce electricity use and associated upstream emissions for A/C units and refrigerators, and we reduce direct emissions due to the refrigerants themselves. When you reduce greenhouse gases on both sides, it's a good story.
Many of the alternatives have been under development for a long time. Honeywell has been very active as have some of the other large chemical companies in the U.S. and elsewhere. Some of these chemical companies see this as a way to make money, and that's one reason why they've been supportive of the deal. It helps the negotiations, of course, to have industry calling for a switch-out.
How have these kinds of refrigerants evolved over the years?
It's interesting to look at the history of refrigerants. It's been one of unintended consequences. Ammonia was a popular refrigerant in the early part of 20th century. It's both a toxic and corrosive chemical, and researchers started looking for alternatives. They settled on chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs and hydro-chlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs. These were used for decades until people figured out they were depleting the ozone layer. Then they were phased out in favor of HFCs. And now we're realizing that HFCs are potent greenhouse gases, so we're trying to phase them out. Now we're at the next transition, and it's important to choose the next generation of refrigerants wisely so that we avoid unintended consequences as much as possible.
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