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Landmark Agreement Reached
Some good news.
Nations, Fighting Powerful Refrigerant That Warms Planet, Reach Landmark Deal
KIGALI, Rwanda — Negotiators from more than 170 countries on Saturday reached a legally binding accord to counter climate change by cutting the worldwide use of a powerful planet-warming chemical used in air-conditioners and refrigerators.
The talks in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, have not drawn the same spotlight as the climate change accord forged in Paris last year. But the outcome could have an equal or even greater impact on efforts to slow the heating of the planet.
President Obama called the deal “an ambitious and far-reaching solution to this looming crisis.”
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking to fellow negotiators in Kigali, said, “It is likely the single most important step we could take at this moment to limit the warming of our planet and limit the warming for generations to come.”
“It is,” Mr. Kerry added, “the biggest thing we can do in one giant swoop.”
While the Paris agreement included pledges by nearly every country to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the fossil fuels that power vehicles, electric plants and factories, the new Kigali deal has a single target: chemical coolants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, used in air-conditioners and refrigerators.
HFCs represent just a small percentage of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but they function as a sort of supercharged greenhouse gas, with 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide.
And while the Paris pledges are broad, they are also voluntary, often vague and dependent on the political will of future world leaders. In contrast, the Kigali deal includes specific targets and timetables to replace HFCs with more planet-friendly alternatives, trade sanctions to punish scofflaws, and an agreement by rich countries to help finance the transition of poor countries to the costlier replacement products.
So, narrow as it is, the new accord may be more likely to yield climate-shielding actions by industry and governments, negotiators say. And given the heat-trapping power of HFCs, scientists say that the Kigali accord will stave off an increase of atmospheric temperatures of nearly one degree Fahrenheit.
That represents a major step toward averting an atmospheric temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which scientific studies say the world will be locked into a future of rising sea levels, severe droughts and flooding, widespread food and water shortages and more powerful hurricanes.
Over all, the deal is expected to lead to the reduction of the equivalent of 70 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — about two times the carbon pollution produced annually by the entire world.
The Kigali accord is “much, much, much stronger than Paris,” said Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a research organization. “This is a mandatory treaty. Governments are obligated to comply.”
The Kigali deal has been seven years in the making. It is not a stand-alone agreement but an amendment to an existing environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol, the landmark 1987 pact designed to close the hole in the ozone layer by banning ozone-depleting coolants called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
Chemical companies responded to the Montreal agreement by developing HFCs, which do not harm the ozone layer but do trap heat in the atmosphere. Under the Montreal treaty, nations can amend the original accord to phase out substitute chemicals that also harm the environment, even if they do not affect the ozone layer.
That means the Kigali Amendment maintains the legal force of a treaty, even if that treaty was ratified by the Senate during the Reagan administration.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- Rongone
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Re: Landmark Agreement Reached
This is good news if you believe that global warming exists and that human activity is a major cause of the rising temperatures worldwide.
I worked for York International in the '70's & 80's and remember the consternation the ban on CFC's caused along with the scramble to find a replacement refrigerant. While banning HFC's is good, I'm pretty sure DuPont or some other manufacturer is already developing Moroflourocarbon refrigerant (or something like it) that will replace HFC. In another twenty years scientists will come to the realization that MFC's also have a detrimental effect on the climate. As long as you understand that air conditioning is basically exchanging warm air inside your building with cool air manufactured by chemicals that cool the air and the process expels hotter air, created in the exchange process which contains remnants of the cooling chemical, to the outside atmosphere. So, until they find a chemical that will complete that exchange without possible climate change repercussions, this will continue to occur. Unless you can convince people that their comfort in hot weather is less important than destroying the Earth's atmosphere, I'm afraid this will continue.