A Kigali new climate deal will curb refrigerant gas

Recently, in a faraway land few think of, a powerful new agreement was forged to fight climate change.

CaliforniaGeo Reflections on an NYT article:

Climate deal to curb gases used as refrigerants

BY CORAL DAVENPORT The New York Times

Reprinted in the Sacramento Bee, 10-16-16

It took a few years of negotiations that led to a signing in a faraway place on a distant continent, but the Kigali, Rwanda agreement has bound 170 countries to a second major refinement of refrigerant gases in a single generation.

Negotiators from over 170 countries reached this accord on October 15th, and for those experiencing explosive growth in cooling and refrigeration equipment expansion—it represents a major concession along the pathway of that growth.

Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are a supercharged climate pollutant, and their negotiated replacement follows the Montreal Protocol of 1987 that eliminated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were depleting the atmosphere’s ozone layer (which has since begun to recover).

The Kigali Agreement is said to have more “teeth” than either the CFC Ban or the Paris Agreement of 2015.  Its roots date to the first meeting of President Barak Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.  Those meetings took place at the Annenberg’s Sunnylands golf estate in Palm Springs, CA, appropriately a 100% geo heat pump heated and cooled complex.  Who says climate-preservation diplomacy is impossible?

The Kigali Agreement is an amendment to the Montreal Protocol and since the latter was passed by the U.S. Senate during the Reagan Administration, it retains the legal force of a ratified treaty.  It was reported that facing a hostile Congress, Obama made this effort a top White House priority while trying “to build a legacy of tackling climate change.”

We can only hope that geo heat pumps are known to all those nations and that our industry can take a rightful place in boosting climate change defenses.

—Bill Martin