Our Climate Campaigner, Natasha Hurley, reports on the 18th Conference of the Parties (CoP18) to the UNFCCC in Qatar. While some progress was made including a deal on a 'Loss and Damage Mechanism' and acknowledgement of the need for HFC phase-out, an overall lack of urgency and mitigation pledges was disappointing.
The Montreal Protocol’s relatively unblemished record of forging consensus looks as though it could be severely compromised by the actions of just a few countries – particularly India, China and Brazil – to block agreement on a proposal to globally phase down HFCs, the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions
EIA’s F-Gas team hosted a debate in the European Parliament to discuss the forthcoming revision of the F-Gas Regulation. They are a huge amount of work building up to something that lasts just a couple of hours, and right up to the event you have no idea how they will go
I spent last week in Canada attending one of the regular meetings of the Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund (MLF), the body established to help developing countries meet their commitments under the global ozone treaty
This week saw the death of one of the great scientific pioneers of modern environmentalism – F Sherwood Rowland, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who, along with his student Mario Molina, identified the link between CFCs and ozone destruction
What is the most environmentally destructive industry? After oil and gas, a strong contender has to be ‘Big Fluorine’, a collection of chemical companies that have profited, and continue to profit, from some of the most environmentally damaging technologies on the planet