5 Topic Commentaries

Why Refrigerants Are the Next Critical Sustainability Frontier

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  Jarad Mason, PhD

  Chemistry; materials for cooling and refrigerants

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  Harvard University

  Shifting away from the vapor compression systems that have been in use for a really long time is a crucial part of the overall push toward a more sustainable future.

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  Matthew Rigby, PhD

  Atmospheric chemistry; greenhouse-gas monitoring

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  University of Bristol

  Per ton of emissions, HFCs are much more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, and are very good at trapping the radiation that heats the Earth,”

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  Ronald Prinn, ScD

  Atmospheric science and climate policy

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  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Addressing HFCs, and other SGHGs, now will ensure that they don’t contribute significantly to warming in the future,”

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  Veerabhadran Ramanathan, PhD

  Climate science; atmospheric science

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  Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

  It is still possible to avert disastrous climate changes including extreme sea-level rise,” “We have to simultaneously cut down CO_{2} and short-lived climate pollutants including HFCs, methane, tropospheric ozone, and black carbon. HFC mitigation emerges as an attractive low-hanging fruit for mitigating warming.

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  Mario Molina, PhD

  Chemistry; atmospheric chemistry

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  University of California San Diego

  We’ve known for several decades that some of the HFCs developed to replace ozone-depleting CFCs are powerful climate change agents, but this is the first calculation showing how much global warming we can avoid by reducing emissions of these chemicals, helping us to address the challenge in the near-term as well as through the end of the century,”

  Source