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Green News: Obama administration calls to drastically reduce HFCs

2009-05-06 18:19:03 (GMT) (Caymanmama.com - green News)

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Albuquerque, New Mexico (CaymanMama.com) –  The Obama administration is following up with the campaign promise to actively work on improving the environment, calling hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) which are predominately used in refrigerators and air conditioners “a very significant” threat to climate change Monday.

In addition, the administration noted that it will work to considerably reduce the HFCs which are promoted under the U.N.’s ozone treaty instead of phasing them out completely.

However, a senior State Department official was hesitant to endorse a formal proposal by the two tiny island nations of Micronesia and Mauritius to modify the ozone treaty known as the Montreal Protocol by slashing HFCs by 90 percent by 2030.

According to the Associated Press, “The treaty promotes the use of HFCs, a class of powerful greenhouse gases, to replace ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, that have now been virtually eliminated. But while HFCs do not harm the ozone layer, they are especially potent greenhouse gases — up to 10,000 times more so than carbon dioxide.”

Micronesia and Mauritius asked to include an HFCs phase-out in the ozone treaty discussions slated for later this year, calling the phase-out a critical issue of survival for their island inhabitants as sea levels continue to rise.

The deadline for making such a proposal was this week.

But time for the U.S. expired “to complete the analysis needed to understand the potential impacts of such an approach or to consider how amending the Montreal Protocol to address HFCs would affect negotiations … with respect to the post-2012 period,” Daniel Reifsnyder, a deputy assistant secretary for environment and sustainable development, said in a letter to U.N. Ozone Secretariat Marco Gonzalez.

“We plan to continue actively studying and analyzing this issue,” he wrote.



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