It’s almost 100 years since Thomas Midgley Jr. first synthesised chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It was 1928 and he was working for General Motors, looking for a safe refrigerant to avoid using flammable or toxic alternatives. General Motors and Dupont soon began producing ‘Freon’ chemicals, which quickly dominated the market for refrigerants and also found wide use […]
Saturday (22 March) is the 40-year anniversary of the signing of the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, an achievement which has stood for four decades as an inspiration for multilateral environmental action. The Vienna Convention was established in response to scientific evidence that man-made chemicals, particularly chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), were causing significant […]
China’s emissions of key super-polluting hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants now represent more than 20 per cent of the global total. In a newly published study, Xiaoyi Hu and colleagues reported on new observations of three of the main HFCs in use today – HFC-125, HFC-134a and HFC-143a – showing that emissions had increased to 206.4 million […]
As we approach the end of another year defined by record-breaking global temperatures and deadly natural disasters, turbo-charged by the escalating climate crisis, some 50,000 people have descended on Baku in Azerbaijan for the 29th annual UN Climate Change Conference (CoP29). For the third year in a row, EIA has looked into the systems being […]
The world’s pressing climate targets are being jeopardised by huge rogue emissions of a potent greenhouse gas. HFC-23 emissions reached a record high of 17,300 tonnes in 2019, equivalent to more than a quarter of a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The climate super-pollutant is produced and emitted primarily as an unwanted byproduct of manufacturing […]
LONDON: The world’s pressing climate targets are being jeopardised by huge rogue emissions of a potent greenhouse gas. HFC-23 emissions reached a record high of 17,300 tonnes in 2019, equivalent to more than a quarter of a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The climate super-pollutant is produced and emitted primarily as an unwanted byproduct of […]