In the US at least, any refrigeration technician should already have passed his EPA 608 or 609 and be fully aware that venting a unit can cost him his card rendering him unable to buy refrigerants. Before working on all but small self contained units he must have access to a refrigerant recovery unit. This a compressor sort of thing that can move the gas from the installed unit into a tank for either reuse on site or taking to a reclamation center, where allegedly they can be paid for it.
(Yes, my AC units broke and the time to even get a technician to look at them, was so long I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification, bought a bunch of gear off Amazon and refrigerant from a “good old boy” at an exorbitant price (global shortage, plus most is sold in palette quantities), and fixed my own unit in half the time it would have taken to get an appointment with a professional company. The first unit is working. If I succeed at the second unit I’ll even be money ahead. Of course if my yak had already been shaved maybe it could have tolerated the heat.)
Well done! I took the 608 Type 1 exam (online open book) but never went beyond that.
Venting refrigerant is illegal in most of the world but it's almost impossible to enforce and compliance is typically quite low (good data is, as you can imagine, difficult to find). CARB in California now requires owners of large refrigeration systems (>250 lb of charge IIRC) to report all refrigerant recharge to the state so at least there's some efforts underway.
That is something that has bugged me. I have a leak in my car's AC. I have injected the dye, found where the leak is. All I have left is to open the system and replace some old seals, but I can't do that right as the equipment isn't available. So I'm stuck venting to the air as it is the only thing I can do. (I could of course take it in, but some combination of cheap and doing my own maintenance means I don't)
Note that the vacuum pump is often a free rental from the auto parts store, I don't know why they can't/don't rent the recovery equipment.
Try taking it to an AC shop & pay for a 2-part deal: evacuate it now, then fill it back up in a few days.
When you put it back together you can pull a vacuum on it, close it off and make sure it stays that way overnight. But you may still want to have a professional shop test with higher precision than whatever gauges you use.
Seconded. I found a local mechanic and it cost very little to have them remove the existing refrigerant. They also kept track of the amount removed (which ended up being very little) and offered to put it back in after the leak was fixed.
You're correct, however most aren't going to pay the big cost to do that. A better way is to be able to either borrow a recovery unit or rent it. The other problem is training someone how to use the unit and then know what to do with the freon after recovery. Until it's made cheap and easy to recover, venting will continue to happen.
Satellite surveillance is going through a capability explosion at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if it could spot venting in the present or near future.
Honestly, aggressive expansion of remote sensing is the only realistic way for humanity to coordinate on climate at all. There are too many opportunities to defect in the prisoner's dilemma otherwise.
Good idea! I looked into this when I first started thinking about the problem. MethaneSAT is launching this year, so I thought maybe we could do the same for refrigerants. Unfortunately I don't think it would work:
1. Methane is 1900 ppb in the atmosphere[1], refrigerants overall are ~12.5 ppb -- so a lot less out there to detect.
2. I think methane leaks tend to be from single, continuing, large point sources -- coal mines, oil wells -- whereas refrigerants are usually from these distributed small point sources which happen once. So by the time you detect it it's too late to intervene.
Regarding additionality: does this mean that, for purposes of the offset, you’re trusting that the technicians you train wouldn’t have properly recovered the refridgerant anyway? Do you have some rough statistics to suggest this? There’s also the issue of self-selection: the techs that work with you are probably more likely than the general population to be properly reclaiming already, for instance since the marginal gain from your program is greater for them (same money for no additional work). Have you considered this?
So what if they are picking too-low-hanging fruit initially? As long as their process can in principle scale to a point where genuine reductions are possible. And they do actually enter a legitimate certification process fairly soon. The certification authority will then become responsible for proper accounting.
In the mean time, they are asking for investors' trust without verification. Not ideal, but not unreasonable for a PoC / MVP.
Good questions, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to ensure the actual additionality of what we're doing. The most important consideration - we pay per kg, and less than the market rate of new gas. So a technician that was recovering gas before to reuse it would be taking a loss if they sold to us and then went out to buy new gas.
The EPA offers a reward to anyone who reports venting refrigerant. There are some exceptions such as R290 (propane) which you can freely vent.
A lot of the newer refrigerants are much safer for the environment, but you are still allowed to recharge and buy older refrigerants. Only the manufacture of new refrigerants is prohibited.
I took the 609 test and got my card. The test seemed to mostly check if you had a heartbeat and weren’t asleep. I went away without much confidence that 608/609 certification was really worth much in terms of trusting certified people to really be on top of the whys and how’s of proper refrigerant handling.
It’s an educational test, not a proof of knowledge.
If you came away knowing not to vent, to use the right refrigerant, not to vent, to take your waste to the reclaimer, not to vent, to leak test with nitrogen, not to vent, and that you can be fined $43,000/day for not having your paperwork in order… then it worked enough.
Technically, yes - "de minimis releases" are allowed because there's no practical way to avoid them. This is the small amount of refrigerant burped out to purge hoses, for instance.
This is downvoted but got a chuckle from me. Recently had to replace a radiator on a vw TDI and had a remove the A/C line, there was a little bit of venting that occurred (the A/C didn't blow cold before so thought there was little if any refrigerant in the system).
TLDR I suck!
I don't think there a mechanic out there who doesn't make doesn't accidentally break the integrity of those flimsy AC lines weekly. They are thin walled pipes, and connected with tiny green O-rings.
There are no standards on how many pieces of thin walled pipe a vechicle can use. It's usually a spiders nest of hoses.
You need to change you blower motor, or do anything that involves the dash, radiator, you are taking a calculated risk. Most mechanics might have a recovery system, but it's usually in the corner of the shop covered in dust.
It might help if the federal government standardized parts for the AC system?
I'm very careful, but the last time I changed my blower I borrowed a recovery system, but still made a mistake, and released all the gas. I was going to recharge it, but the generic evaporator core outlet to an ac line was 1" short. I had to go genetic because I couldn't find OEM.
And no don't make a mechanic's life harder with a bunch of regulations. They are already over regulated, and it's a hard job.
It’s just a card that can be used to beat someone over the head with the law harder because ‘they definitely knew better’. Eventually (seems like CA is trying?) there will be paperwork that needs to
be filed with fines attached, so maybe even 50% of folks will actually do it.
It's a certification that shows the technician is aware of the law, similar to no trespassing signs and lease agreements. If it's not enforced that a problem that needs to be fixed. If people aren't following the correct procedure because they know they most likely won't get caught and don't care then that's a problem with them.
The “starve the beast” legislators underfund the EPA to the point that there is no money for enforcement, and enforcement at the technician level is going to be really unpopular with lots of “The government fined me out of business” stories. The path I used to acquire refrigerant is a break in the chain that has been operating for years in the open and probably moved >100 tons of refrigerant. I was unreasonably disappointed that I didn’t have to provide my brand new EPA card number.
Specialized labor certification just requires that you memorize the safety requirements (that will almost always be obvious for engineers), and at most repeat a set of steps.
It can not be too onerous, because people need the work, and people capable of solving systems of differential equations have better opportunities than work on them.
Memorizing the location of fire exits is also obvious and yet we do drills to burn it in because when you’re in the shit it’s hard to think rationally about this kind of stuff.
> Memorizing the location of fire exits is also obvious and yet we do drills to burn it in
I don't think that's what the drills are for. You do drills so that everyone is familiar with an organized process of exiting the structure, so that an evacuation can occur quickly.
In the absence of drills, everyone will still know where the exits are, but they'll form giant traffic jams that block people from using the exits.
Its usually just one of the steps to doing it professionally. Most states AFAIK also have a licensing regiment required to work on anything not covered by the small appliance 608 type 1 which covers more theory of operation code compliant installation/etc.
So the EPA cert by itself isn't usually enough to work professionally (unless your repairing home refrigerators).
With a lot of older R22 units, you can "pump them down" where the compressor actually accumulates all the R22 and pulls a near vacuum. Then, if you disconnect it from the coolant lines you can bring the whole unit to a reclamation center. Even my old unit was able to pull a 1200 micron vacuum on the lines.
Unfortunately, my r410a units regularly vent to the atmosphere because flare fittings suck.
It’s common, but I wouldn’t call it an everyday occurrence at least, thankfully. A good barometer is actually the guys over at /r/HVAC who are in the field every day. Last time there was a thread on this a couple of weeks ago the general consensus was that really bad stuff like emptying of entire compressor units into the atmosphere does happen, but it’s more like a few times per career occurrence to witness rather than a daily or weekly thing.
Now it’s probably fair to say that /r/HVAC isn’t a completely representative sample, but at least it gives me a good feeling that the situation probably isn’t as catastrophic as this article indicates (in the states at least, it’s probably worse in Indonesia like in the article’s example)
Are these certificates difficult to get? I've considered getting stuff like that when I become an owner so I can DIY stuff because AC is a necessary luxury for me and I'd rather be able to repair/replace as quickly and cheaply as possible with no salesmen and middlemen invovled.
The basic small appliance grade, I the read the training material for a couple hours at night, paid $25 for the test, and passed with a 98% needing something like an 80%. You will need a "type II" to do modern home units. That is a proctored test, but Skill Cat will do you there from the comfort of your phone.
You will need something under $1000 of gear and supplies to get going, half that if you can rent an evacuation unit. (I can't find any near me.) You need to store your refrigerant outside where it won't get over 49°C, 120°F (assuming R410a) So it rates pretty high in the "pain in the ass" factor.
For modern home units, the circuit boards and motor controllers seem to be a common failure point and these are crazy expensive from the manufacturers anyway and hard for you to buy as an individual. If you have an older unit before variable speed compressors and fans then you can probably get commodity parts to replace them.
And in my jurisdiction, after I took a two year training school on my nickel, then work 7500 hours as an apprentice at slightly over minimum wage, then did the extra stuff to be a contractor… you'd be able to.
The requirements seem extreme, though I did break a fan blade in my indoor air handler while checking its temperature, total noob mistake. If I were hiring a trusted contractor I'd want someone better than me!
Ideally there might be room for a grade of lightly trained technician which can handle the easy stuff and do some of the time consuming diagnostics then just throw in the towel and say "You need a better man than I."
> If I were hiring a trusted contractor I'd want someone better than me!
I hire a contractor because they have the parts needed on the truck, or know where to get them fast. I also hire them for their insurance in case they screw up - I've hired someone saw them screw up and not paid for their mistake.
I've noticed that now that there's a shortage of everything not only is it hard to find a specialist who could do the work, products themselves often arrive somewhat defective.
The other day we bought an indoor tent for our toddler. The frame is composed of wooden sticks with some having an aluminium tube glued at the end to connect it to another stick.
One of the tubes was slightly damaged, so the other stick wouldn't go in.
Fortunately the ceramic base of a (broken) LED bulb is harder than aluminium, so after some twisting I managed to file down the tube to size.
> I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification
Please write more or make a video or something. I have been thinking very seriously about doing exactly this.
HVAC is an absolute racket in my area, and nothing is ever a single-visit fix. If you don't sign up for their "maintenance plan" the fix mysteriously doesn't last very long.
Not much to say. Pass the 608 (home hvac) or 609 (automotive). Buy the refrigerant at supplier. You can buy an expensive R134a refrigerant recycling system like the one I own for 609, but you can also use a less expensive refrigerant recovery system that's functionally a vacuum pump with built-in manifold gauges and a tank or just a vacuum pump, manifold gauges, and a recovery tank. Easy fixes are on YouTube. I am looking into setting up a refurbishment service for broken AC electronics. To me, it's just a motherboard and I can fix them with my soldering station.
I was really interested in getting my certification after I saw how much they wanted to charge me for refrigerant. Ended up finding someone else to do it but seemed not that difficult. Glad to know someone has done it outside the industry.
Nice! I was in a very similar situation. Got the EPA cert and all the equipment and replaced our central AC. Glad to see I'm not the only one crazy enough to go through all that trouble :)
I unfortunately got a technician who was so busy ranting against vaccines that he broke the schrader valve and vented a whole bunch of R22 into the atmosphere, while missing the real root cause of the failure i.e. the safety switch was triggering due to a clogged drain and preventing the compressor from running.
The problematic refrigerants are pretty diverse, being made up of short carbon chains (1-4 atoms typically) decorated mainly with chlorine or flourine atoms. For example:
Interestingly the best option for a refrigerant may be CO2 itself, which if collected from the atmosphere has no global warming or ozone depletion issues. The only drawback is CO2 refrigeration equipment has to operate at relatively high pressure, but this isn't a major problem:
More pressure means stricter requirements for all of those non-obvious steps like bending and soldering, and specialized hardware for things like joints and bearing.
Both of those mean specialized factories, supply chains, and labor. AKA higher prices unless it becomes the dominant option.
Also, in larger systems higher pressures is a safety concern.
None of that is a showstopper. But those are severe hindrances for a technology. A government can just fix every one of them, but then it would require government involvement.
Ages ago there was a company that planned to convert Tyson Chicken carcasses into gasoline via depolymerization. Problem was that’s a high pressure process, and they didn’t take that seriously enough at the start. Leaks everywhere. Neighborhood smelled like burnt chicken feathers.
They had to shut it down and redo all of the welding (I don’t recall if they fixed existing welds or pulled the whole thing apart). Afterward they still got complains about the smell, swore they’d fixed the leaks and the neighbors were imagining it. I suspect some esters were coming out the end of the pipe, and/or the dust everywhere around the place was saturated from the pilot project and every time the wind shifted they got another nose full.
There is one other refrigerant which very nearly checks all the boxes, but with a surprising structure: trifluoromethyl iodide. While non-combustible, it has an extremely short atmospheric lifetime of less than one month, giving it a GWP about half that of CO2 (and used in much smaller quantities).
CF3I is one of the components of R-466a (Honeywell Solstice) which will be the lower-GWP R-410a replacement. I am working with CF3I in a fire extinguishing application.
CO2 was used in the very early days of refrigeration, late 19th/early 20th century, in huge industrial installations. It was known as "carbonic acid" and you can find a lot of interesting books on archive.org about it. Pressures are about 10x higher than most other refrigerants so everything needs to be built that much stronger.
AFAIU CO2 refrigeration system are making a comeback. In Europe it's apparently fairly popular for things like supermarket refrigeration, partially maybe due to ever tightening EU F-gas regulations making a big investment into flourocarbon refrigeration systems a risky proposition.
I've often wondered what other ways we could do "refrigeration" without requiring such horrible gasses, CO2 would be a nice one (and we already distribute CO2 world-wide for soda), but perhaps something could be done with piezo also.
In Europe, and I think in much of the rest of the world except the US, isopropane or butane is used in common household refrigerators. Recently EU regulations were changed to allow these to be used in small split AC's as well, provided some flammability precautions are taken in the design and installation of the units.
In principle you could also go without phase change refrigerants with the reverse Brayton cycle, essentially running gas turbine cycle in reverse. But AFAIU these are not competitive with phase change refrigerants in the usual temperature ranges used for AC's and refrigerators.
Yes a propane/isobutane blend works well, it's basically a drop-in replacement for R-12 in air conditioners. Straight propane replaces R-22 in freezers.
The only drawbacks are that it's flammable, and that for the blend, if there is a a slow leak, the blend ratios change due to different partial pressures of the two gasses. So to recharge, you basically have to vacuum the system and refill with the proper blend.
Ammonia also works for industrial applications (the local ice rink uses it) but due to its toxicity it's not ideal for household applications.
I did a quick search on how much refrigerant is in a household refrigerator. Internet says 30 to 180 grams.
I wouldn't be very concerned with 100 grams of propane. Your kitchen has probably 20kg of air. You ain't going to get even close to the flammability limit releasing a 100gm of propane into it.
R22 is also flammable. But probably not as much as propane. But you aren't going to get anything dangerous with the small amounts used in HVAC. It would need to be a propane/pure oxygen mixture to even approach danger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tert-Butylthiol - Because propane is delivered as a liquid and vaporizes to gas when it is delivered to the appliance, the vapor liquid equilibrium would substantially reduce the amount of odorant blend in the vapor.
There's the Peltier Effect, which only has the itty bitty downside of requiring about 4 times as much power as a traditional compression-based cooling system.
> The only drawback is CO2 refrigeration equipment has to operate at relatively high pressure, but this isn't a major problem
So far it has been a problem for scale. There are very few consumer appliances that use CO2 as a refrigerant. I can think of 1 right now - and it's 3x the price of it's alternative that uses traditional refrigerant.
I thought that the variable and linear compressors could use a smaller system because they’re designed to run almost constantly instead of in bursts.
They’re also more efficient, but more expensive. So I wonder how much of the price differential is the refrigeration loop, and how much is using more expensive processes to offset the lower tonnage for the system.
Most new technology heating and cooling systems are expensive because they serve the rich eco-nerd and commercial markets, both of which are willing to pay a premium for the real benefits of the technology.
Hopefully the recent pro heat-pump moves across Europe and the US Administration's invocation of the DPA to support domestic heat pump manufacture will push this stuff out to the mass market instead of just in the houses of the wealthy.
EVs are just now breaking out of that pattern, only after competitive pressure from companies like Hyundai, Kia, VW, and GM who have made nearly affordable EVs.
The trouble is that high pressure means more embodied energy, and when we start talking about embodied energy, "CO2 equivalent of 250 gallons of gas" isn't that much. Just releasing the gasses into the atmosphere once or twice might pencil out.
Regardless they are very widely deployed in existing equipment which can't be upgraded, so a program to collect and burn these gasses is a very good thing.
This seems like a better place to point out (rather than editing the original to say something different) that this actually undermines the argument: stainless steel is only about 6kg CO2 per kg, and a gallon of gas burned is around 8.
That number for steel is a lot lower than I expected, but here it is:
I had a refrigerator using propane, sadly, it didn't last very long (just a few years) before it died. It was a low end unit and repair was more than a new one, which happened to use conventional halocarbons.
>Getting rid of the chloro-flouro stuff makes lots of sense, but not producing any of it in the first place would be even better.
Science doesn't work like that though. You can't study something until it does exist. However, we just don't study something long enough (we just can't think of everything to test against) to see what the true long tail effects will be.
Yes, there's lots of things that would be amazing if we could un-invent them. But wishing won't make it so. We just need to be much more ammenable to the fact that somethings don't work and just STOP using them rather than shrugging shoulders and kicking the proverbial cans down the road
Planet Money did a story [1] in 2020 about a US team running a very similar scheme with the same business model to get rid of R12 refrigerant in the Midwest.
It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of that episode made me so frustrated about a segment of the population. They had to lie about what they were doing because there were people who objected to the fact this was being done to protect the environment and would refuse to sell to them essentially to stick it to the environmentalists.
The degree to which not screwing up the environment has become partisan for some people is really quite depressing.
My neighbor, whose political affiliation you can guess, actively gives us shit for recycling. It is a free service where we are, and I don't bother recycling the low-value plastic crap, primarily thick dry cardboard, glass and metal, and this dude still pokes fun at it every time he sees the bin. Just the dumbest damn people.
Here's a strategy that I've found works decently with these people: frame it in terms of (1) being resourceful (2) being responsible and preserving resources for the next generation (especially their children, if they have them) (3) not being "lazy and wasteful" (you might not like that framing, but it kind of works better for that kind of personality) and (4) national sovereignty (the more wasteful we are with resources, the more we have to depend on other governments for them).
There's also a few good ones for moving away from ICEs: (1) I'd rather make things out of oil/plastic than just burn it up (2) national sovereignty and (3) resilience in case of war or disaster.
Relatedly, I don't think I've every heard an environmentalist use these points. Any idea what that is?
The best argument for EVs is putting them on the passenger seat of a Tesla Model 3 Performance, and putting the hammer down.
Stop arguing with abstract concepts, benefits for society, and dishonest framing (people are really allergic to anything they perceive as being lied to). Show the immediate, direct, tangible benefits they get.
I don't argue in FB about the environmental benefits of EVs, but rather hype immediate benefits: faster on the 0-40 times than most cars (even beating some sports cars), less maintenance, and never having to hit the gas station. Just plug in at night.
they do all the time, it doesn't work. people might be dumb but they are not dumb enough to know when they're being pandered to. they have a cultural signifier and they like it that way.
Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings.
Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work. This is the real “Inconvenient Truth.”
If you really wanna “do your part to fight climate change,” you’re better off trying to live like someone out of 1890 before plastics was a thing, and people repaired/patched 100x before even considering replacements. You’ll have less time for arguing with idiots like me online but you’ll be much happier and actually be making a positive contribution.
> Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings.
> Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work.
No, it's because he's an idiot whose brain is turned to mush from obsessing about culture war politics.
The plastic recycling history is vaguely interesting for some plastics and completely irrelevant for glass and metals which are profitably recycled due to the economics of recycling them vs. creating them from scratch.
In any case, the local waste plant recycles what they can and then burns the rest for energy so I'll let them make the call on what's profitable to process.
All fired silicon materials are more stable when they have been fired at least twice. If you make ceramics, you save all your failures to make grog, which is basically ceramic sand or dust. Mixed in with fresh clay it reduced the expansion ratio and the internal stresses.
Bottles with recycled material are more sturdy than those without. I don’t know how the process of bringing a bottle plant online works, but if it doesn’t include either buying grog from a supplier or feeding all the glass from the test runs into a hopper I would be very surprised.
I have never heard a physicist explain this phenomenon, but if you crush something it tends to break along the weakest points, so crushed silicon has selected out many of the weakest grains and left the strongest ones. Then either they continue to grow or they just increase the ratio of strong to weak.
There is a quickly growing movement for multi-use consumables. Its become a huge thing among the youngest complete with Instagram "influencers" peddling reusability to consumer brand companies releasing products that are meant to be "re-filled" instead of just tossing out containers and buying another. In the cities stores are popping up that specialize in selling "refills" to consumables that you come by with your own container and pay by weight.
Things such as refillable water bottles are simple examples of this as well.
Of course MAGA country is a laggard so this will probably take another 5-10 years to become adopted after it becomes the norm in the left cities->suburbs>rural.
> Of course MAGA country is a laggard so this will probably take another 5-10 years to become adopted after it becomes the norm in the left cities->suburbs>rural.
Perfect example of an unnecessary vile comment.
Most rural people already reuse and repurpose many things, they don’t have trash pick every week if at all and like to have a clean area for their children and grandchildren. It’s in their blood to find innovative ways to use something again in a different way. Your hate is coming from somewhere gross and you should consider some introspection on why you have so much of it in your heart.
It was necessary to me, thats why I made it. Whether or not you consider it necessary has no bearing on me. Just downvote and move on.
>Most rural people already reuse and repurpose many things, they don’t have trash pick every week if at all and like to have a clean area for their children and grandchildren.
I think you are not descriptive enough when it comes to the term rural. I specifically said MAGA country. That does not encompass all of rural.
And to be clear, my point with "left cities->suburbs>rural" was to indicate that the concept of "stores that sell refills" as a concept is still a niche idea (in the US). It will begin in the cities and then once it becomes the norm there, it will expand to the suburbs and eventually become the norm in rural as well.
You saw this same concept in the adoption curve of many things such as electricity, internet access and well, even single use plastics (The rural areas were the last to ditch the milk man)
I’m saying you’re a hate-filled person and suggesting you investigate that hate with some introspection instead of spewing and spreading it.
Again, this comment is filled with vitriol and hostility. This is not a healthy way to live, I strongly encourage you to seek outside council on how to process these destructive feelings.
In the third world and perhaps depending on your income levels, all containers are refillable. we used to take Coca Coca bottles as water bottles to schools, the same for years. I think they would be usually thrown out.
Yeah you are right, this is not a new idea. In fact even in the US it used to be the norm. (ie. The Milk man making a milk delivery and you leave your old bottles out for him to collect and reuse).
The plastics era is slowly ending and being replaced by ideas that used to work fine.
The symbols we've come to associate with plastics being recyclable actually just indicate the material composition. And it isn't by accident that we assume that symbol means it's recyclable either.
Plastics like PET and HDPE are recyclable but sorting recyclable materials from non-recyclable ones is costly which meant a lot of recycling does end up as waste.
We need to start penalizing manufacturers and retailers for single-use plastics. Laws like those passed in Maine banned most single-use plastic bags and mandates that anyone offering them must also provide recycling a drop off bin.
Consumers mostly do not have a choice about how their products are packaged so the onus must be shifted onto retailers and manufacturers who make those decisions.
There is when the city is getting paid for the recycled material.
In fact some cities offset the price of trash service with the money from recycling. Which is part of the impetus to fine people for not separating. You’re costing the city money.
From what i've read, aluminum is about the only thing that is remotely valuable, and can deposits tend take care of that. Paper and glass especially are EV negative, and composting a la NYC is yuppie feel good nonsense.
Composting is bullshit until we’ve mandated that produce stickers be fully biodegradable. Nothing put me off city compost like finding microplastics everywhere in the pile.
They might be less stubborn if you were less condescending and spent more time actually trying to come up with good arguments to convince them. pretty clear that being arrogant never changes anyone's mind. inclined to believe that you don't actually care about convincing, just judging
Funny, I've been able to convince some of my conservative friends and family to recycle and change their minds on some conservation issues. maybe, like I suggested, the problem is that you're doing it wrong
I have convinced one or two to think differently, on one or two subjects, after them knowing me for long enough to not assume I'm some leather-chewing CNN puppet. I finally got my dad to say that "no one should die from lack of healthcare because they're poor" and that "the act of being a billionaire implies unethical behavior". But he doesn't think the government should do anything about any of it, all the Democrats are evil and corrupt, and Trump is the best president of the past 120 years.
Another relative, after one of the recent shootings, said there was nothing we can do about gun violence. I immediately named off a few modest proposals that don't involve mass registration or confiscation, and he immediately said "yeah those don't sound bad".
Both my parents were conservatives for a long time, but were not angry, bitter, finger-pointing people about it until they had a traumatic event happen, AND a black Democrat became president, AND they got access to high speed internet and Fox News in the same year - 2008.
Now they watch four+ hours of Fox propaganda per day, my mother more because she goes onto bona-fide hate and misinformation sites and prints out articles on how Ukraine is the hub for US bioweapons labs and World Order money laundering because Ukraine is literally the most corrupt government in the world. With bylines of made up names, whose biographies are empty when you click the hyperlink. But that is more trustworthy than the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, or gasp NPR.
I've had experience in these conversations. I know that the approach is to get them talking about what matters to them first, and find common ground. Believe me, I'm not "doing it wrong".
Doing it, even doing it correctly, is exhausting, full stop.
As I recall it wasn't "to stick it to the environmentalists", it was simply preservationist thinking. They didn't want something they saw as scarce & useful destroyed, the same way you might prefer to sell your old laptop to someone who will appreciate it and re-use it vs someone who wants to melt it.
There was a lot of overlap between people with each of those opinions. My recollection is the same as yours, though - the motivation was more preservation and the idea that "the good stuff" was now a limited resource that could never be replaced.
Part of the reason for this is that environmentalists optimize for the most visible (annoying) measures, not the most effective one. That goes so far as to ask people to sort recycling from trash 'to raise awareness' even when it all gets mixed together anyways.
Straws and plastic bags in developed countries with working waste disposal systems are another example. Each time someone pulls a half-dissolved paper straw out of their drink, you've just made a person that is less willing to support environmental measures.
Probably because any "skepticism" about climate change (no matter how reasonable) is basically taboo (cancelable offense) which triggers knee-jerk opposition in reactionary/contrarian types.
Happens with other topics, like transgender treatment for kids.
It's also amplified by the humiliation many kids experience when struggling in school systems. Causes a general distaste for reason and science because, in a very real way, it hurt them as a child. Not actually science and reason itself, but people pushing it and claiming to represent it.
You are wrong on the facts about all of these, which is impressive in its own way, but just to focus in on one:
Burning plastic isn’t better for the environment than recycling. It is better than landfill, assuming you're using the heat to displace fossil fuels though.
You can check out the waste hierarchy on wikipedia if you care about being well informed about stuff:
No, I am not wrong. That's what's sad about this. People actually believe in all these things, not realizing they don't help the environment. And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
Go read a study on the energy and water costs of recycling plastic. But I'll give you a quick summary:
Plastic has two energy components. The energy embodied in it because it's flammable, and the energy to manufacture it.
It takes more energy to recycle plastic, than it does to manufacture it. So why do people want to recycle it? Because they want to recover the energy embodied in it!
But if you burn it, you get that energy back, AND you got to use the plastic for some productive purpose. And since recycling it takes more energy than manufacturing it new, burning plastic is always better than recycling it.
Here's a meta review of Life Cycle Analysis that says otherwise.
Different countries, different methodologies, different assumptions but recycling being better than burning which is in turn better than landfill across a range of environmental impacts is fairly consistent.
> Overall, this review found that for all the studies which aiming to compare waste treatment
technologies, mechanical recycling comes out as the environmentally preferable option in
most cases
Hopefully this:
> And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
also applies to you finding out that you've been lied to by people who have a vested interest in generating exactly that backlash against environmentalist.
That study is making the exact same error I already mentioned: They are counting the embodied energy of the flammable plastic as GWP, while not discounting the energy saved by burning the plastic instead of some other fuel.
They literally cite that as the benefit it provides over landfill. All of the studies, that this is a meta review of, do that. It's just a fact that it releases CO2.
> Similar discretion is needed while comparing the results obtained for the WTE [waste to energy] option
by the four studies. It is known that the incineration process emits greenhouse gases,
but it also generates thermal energy and electricity which can be used as an alternative
to fossil fuel consumption. However, the results indicate that overall, the WTE option
contributes adversely towards the global warming problem, with all high positive impact
values between 50% and 100%. However, all four studies indicated a negative impact value
for AP, indicating that the incineration process is advantageous in reducing the impact of
acidification, making it the second most environmentally friendly method of disposal, and
suitable for disposal of the residues discarded by the MRF process.
The key point being, if you can get your heat or electricity from a non-fossil source, then it's preferable to do so. Because releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is bad for climate change.
But luckily for WTE, the are other aspects that make landfill even worse. Still not as good as recycling, just like all those environmentalists have been saying, correctly, for years. How boringly non-contrarian of them.
That paragraph you quoted is logically inconsistent. I mean think about it - if you are substituting other oil for this plastic, how in the world can your plastic have "100%" GWP?
That would imply they somehow manage to emit double the CO2 that the plastic actually contains. Or they burn it and don't capture any energy at all, so there is no substitution taking place.
And the negative GWP for recycling? That's impossible. Recycling something does not remove CO2 from the air - rather it costs CO2 to do the recycling. I suspect they are subtracting the embodied energy of the plastic to get that figure, which is dishonest.
Sorry, but this "study" is worthless. But it's an excellent example of the sorry state of environmentalism.
29 published Life Cycle Analysis papers from different authors in different reputable journals in different countries all got confused about this, then the meta review that talks in detail about the different assumptions they all made also missed this?
That seems unlikely.
I've never even seen this specific meta review before, I just knew that's what they all said and grabbed the first link I found to a recent one. Feel free to check others, they will all broadly agree because this is fairly boring stuff.
Welcome to the club. Yah, that is the current state of environmental research. It's just junk.
This is why I started this thread with "Because environmentalists have a truly terrible track record.". And this is also why so many people are so distrustful of what "experts" say about this topic.
Environmental research is so dependent on assumptions it's basically impossible to do it honestly. Usually an author will have a goal in mind, then write a paper to reach that goal, and he'll have no trouble doing so - just change an assumption here or there, and you'll be successful.
If you want a way to cut through the nonsense just follow the money: Resources cost money, the method that is cheapest, to a rough approximation, is the one that uses the fewest resources.
Plastic straws take FAR FAR FAR less energy than metal ones - don't forget the hot water to wash the metal one. Paper straws are usually coated with stuff, the paper takes more energy that plastic, and the coating doesn't break down - so you don't even get the compost.
So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Plastic bags are good for litter, but you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better. Not to mention people reuse around half of them for garbage bags, so if you ban them, people still need to buy them.
> So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Only if you're using resistive heating. Heat pumps run on natural-gas-produced electricity can be at least as efficient as direct natural gas combustion for heating, and they automatically transition to cleaner sources of energy as the grid does.
> you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better
I understand that this is the case for cotton bags, IIRC due to high water use in cotton production, but for other types of reusable bags the threshold is lower.
> people reuse around half of them for garbage bags
This estimate seems like it's significantly too high. I do most of my grocery shopping at places that don't provide free plastic bags, and yet I still end up with far more single-use plastic bags than I could ever use for garbage. I would guess that no more than 10% of single-use bags actually get reused for trash.
Heat pumps work fine for home heat, but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer. Heat pump do not work well for those applications - I considered buying them and checked into it.
Your oven also uses resistive heat. Induction can work well, but is underpowered if you are cooking more than 3 or 4 things at once (especially if you also use the oven). You need around double the electric service most homes run to the range (there is no standardized plug for it).
Induction is only a replacement for causal cooks, people who make full course large meals will not be happy with it.
It sounds like(yet again) another US only problem. My induction hob here in UK is wired to run at 7.2kW and the last thing I would describe it as is "underpowered" - even with all rings turned on at max power, things will burn instantly. It's a vast vast improvement over a gas range, wouldn't be without it.
>>but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer.
I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
>> Heat pump do not work well for those applications
What's wrong with heat pump dryers? They are awesome, as long as you aren't putting them in an unheated space like a garage. They use much less energy than condenser dryers and considerably less than vented ones, while being pretty quick.
Ranges in the US can be wired for 50A * 240v * 80% = 9.6kW, and no, that's not enough. Cheaper homes have 30A for the range which is I guess what you have.
> like(yet again) another US only problem
I don't think Europeans realize how they sound when they say stuff like that. Especially when your stove would be considered low end in the US.
A good stove is around 5 kW, and each burner is 2.5kW = 15kW to run everything at once - basically double the service you have. Unless you want to wire the range and stove separately (which might be an option).
> I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
Obviously it's a thing, otherwise why would I say it? Is this a European thing not to have them?
Gas dryers cost a bit more to buy (15% more maybe), but much much less to operate (half to be exact). If you have gas service in your home and you buy your own appliances you'll almost always pick that.
> What's wrong with heat pump dryers?
They are very expensive, and save about half the electricity - but gas dryers also save about half the energy, so there's no point in going for the heat pump.
Even if you have no gas service, they cost around double a non heat pump, and it would take 10 years to recoup the money. It's not worth it - all you are doing is generating emissions in the dryer factory instead of your house.
Environmentally the gas dryer is better, at least as long as we still burn gas to generate electricity.
And don't forget the heat pump dryer takes much longer to dry clothing - at least for my house the dryer is always the bottleneck for laundry, I would never buy one that takes longer!
Yes, natural gas dryers are semi-common in homes that have natural gas service where I live (Minnesota) due to the fact that it costs about half as much to operate a gas-fired dryer vs an electric one.
Nearly everyone has gas furnaces here in MN since it’s significantly cheaper to heat with natural gas in the US, and it gets very cold here.
As a frustrated environmentalist myself. I would just like to say, burning or not burning natural gas for heating is dependent on a lot of factors. But the GP is generally right in most of the US because the energy is already coming from coal or natural gas. Both of which are back of the envelope about 50% efficient at converting heat from the burnt coal/gas to electricity. Add in the transmission and distribution loss (aka step up/down transformers, increasing distances to the electric plant as they are moved farther outside of cities/etc) and its another ~5-10% loss, and then the final conversion assuming a heat pump has a 50% gain. So its roughly a wash, and the actual gain/loss is dependent on electric mix (nuke+hydro), how cold it is outside (heat pumps for heating get really inefficient as the temps drop until they are basically restive heating, which many switch to after a certain point to avoid just burning up the compressor).
There are similar problems around wind/solar, which tend to just be green washing natural gas peaker plants, many of which aren't even combined cycle. So the easy back of the envelope here is, that if your not getting ~50% of your power from a nuke its likely that burning the gas in your house is more CO2 friendly (the places with lots of hydro also have nukes, so 1rst order approximation).
And the plastic bag thing, is again feel good because those bags both have a very short time to degrade (despite all the environmentalist misleading people into thinking they last decades, which is true when they are buried in a landfill, but that isn't the case they then talk about which is finding them in the open environment where UV destroys them in a few months to a couple years).
The plastic drink bottles though? Those are much more robust, but just about no one banned them in favor of recreating the commercial bottle washing systems we had before and that exist in mexico/etc. But again, one had to be very careful about total system costs, which is how we get back to nukes. We have to shift the energy curve away from CO2 sources, and the only way to really do that is to find a significantly more energy dense mechanism. And we have one, which is somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million times as dense per Kg and instead of arguing about the CO2 being emitted to move or manufacture things, we could basically zero it out with 40 year old technology and likely gain another order of magnitude of efficiency if we built energy systems with modern technology that actually burnt the entire fuel load rather than calling it "waste".
Most environmentalist are just as uninformed as the climate deniers, which is why we are stuck.
PS: once you start to understand much of the above you can also see how premium electric cars can frequently be worse for the climate than econobox gas. The numerical systemwide advantage isn't so overwhelming to wipe out the disadvantages in places that get a lot of power from coal.
Arguing for natural gas heating is dumb. The only way to hit net-zero is electrification AND renewable electricity generation. Both will take decades. The only question is whether to do them sequentially or in parallel, and it is pretty obvious which will get us to net zero faster.
Emitting a bit more carbon now is worth it if we can significantly reduce emissions long term
The reality is that most environmentalists don't care about the environment, they just care about making people miserable. I joined some environmentalist forums because I cared only to realize how misanthropic most of them were, and they did not care at all about reality.
This is one of my favorite things about permaculture. It’s turning gardeners into conservationists, not conservationists into gardeners. If you don’t already like plants it’s too involved (intellectually and sometimes physically) of a hobby/cause to get into it just so you can lambast people.
The glaring exception to this is that we absolutely are all coming after your lawn, and that’s such a hot button issue for people.
are lawns really such a problem? I see an ecosystem next to my front door as a risk. Lawns are easily managed, they provide line of sight across my property to the street, it's hard for wild animals to nest next to where i, and my future children, need to walk every day. I really dont see it as a problem.
on the flipside, the greater back half of my yard not near the house i encourage to be an ecosystem. If everyone on the block did so, then the entire middle of the block would be a continuous piece of nature. Front lawns create scattered pockets of nature at best and seem to cause a lot of friction.
I think of the Geese all around the industrial park near me, and how going into and out of your office on the sidewalk can become a problem if theres a mother goose around who thinks youre threatening her family
Some substantial fraction of all pesticide and fertilizer release into waterways comes from cities not farms. Also a huge part of the non agricultural water supply goes to lawns. So while I empathize with the people who say that asking residents to stop watering their lawns to conserve water, but we don't do that for farmers, that's still quite an impactful action from the perspective of the city's water supply.
The farmer is filling up a tank or hopper with hundreds or thousands of pounds of chemicals that cost them a ton of money so they can't really afford to have it just sitting around. They know when they fertilize right before a rainstorm just how much money they lost. The feedback is pretty immediate. Some people would say this is sufficient to prevent problems, but we know that's not true. It discourages problems, but it doesn't prevent them.
Meanwhile your neighbor has a $10 container they bought last year and they'll need a new one next year even if they didn't use it, so who cares if I fertilize and forget to turn off the sprinklers? Hardly any discouragement at all. It's very open loop.
I wasnt thinking about the water supply, the dangers there makes sense. The fertilizer issue seems tangential. We can ban / limit the sue of fertilizer without telling people they cant have lawns.
What's the alternative? without a lawn people will likely opt to concrete their property - which I guess would be better for water but kind of depressing
IMO, most lawns are fake and not actually comprised of native species, which is where the waste and pollution comes in. A person in Arizona or California can xeriscape using native cactii etc. or they can put in a St. Augustine lawn - it seems to me that the former would be easier to manage with less waste than the latter.
Do you have any good resources for lawn-free land management? I'm moving to Appalachia and will have an acre of creekside lawn I'd love to replace with something more sustainable/productive. And I'm a big gardener already.
I’ve noticed this too. There’s a certain religious fervor to it, where the only acceptable options to address a threat to the environment must involve some pain or cost. Solutions that increase abundance, or don’t require suffering, are at best suspect at worst unspeakable.
Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).
I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature.
In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
You seem to not understand the point of an interview. It's not a quiz where you get a mark at the end and the best marks get the job. It's a series of intentionally constructed questions to help talk through someone's thinking and process in order to understand if they would be a good fit. The actual answer at the end is largely irrelevant.
My point with saying "almost all wrong" is that this is one of the questions where you have like, 50 different ideas that seem like they could work and wouldn't work if tried when you try it and maybe 1 or 2 actual strategies, not a question where you have 30 different things that all work with different pros and cons and you need to compare between them.
But you said yourself that you don't know what will work and what won't.
You say that the answer at the end is largely irrelevant, but then claim that there is only a couple of good solutions in the problem space, implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
Either your position is not coherent, or there is a communication deficit here.
> implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
No, you're implying that.
Definitionally, I don't know the answer to the question. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be interviewing you, I'd be off making millions buying R12. And if you knew the answer, you should be off making millions buying R12 instead of interviewing here. That's clear to everyone at the start of the interview.
You seem to be attaching a moral valence to the word wrong, that people are somehow failures if they come up with the wrong answer to a question. The opposite is true, most of the things we try in life are wrong, we try something, it doesn't work, we learn from it and we try again.
edit: The reason why I think it's a good interview question for marketing people is because it's a business that seems like, if the customer acquisition piece is figured out, the rest of the business is relatively trivial. But empirically, it's not a common business so the customer acq piece must be pretty hard to figure out. At the same time, it seems like there's at least a few businesses so it also doesn't seem like it's impossible to figure out.
If I hire you, I'm going to constantly be asking you to do things that, as far as you're aware, you're the first person in the world to have ever done. If I'm asking you to do it, it means I don't know if it can be done or not, I don't know the "right" answer to the problem. Most of the time, the answer back is that the thing I want done looks impossible and probably isn't worth pursuing which is a great answer in the context of a job but not very illuminating in the context of an interview.
This question looks that hard but there's also a proof point that it can be done which means you can't give a "this isn't possible" as an out and are forced to explore deeper into how someone could actually do it. At the same time, it's a question with relatively little context which means I can explain all the relevant facts in the span of an interview.
That's why I think it's a potentially great interview question. It's not designed as a trick brainteaser for you to figure out the answer. It's designed for you to exercise the same parts of your brain as you would when I come to you with any other crazy request that probably can't be done.
My guess is they're missing large demographics, hispanics that scrap metal. I'd imagine if they took effort to do campaigns in Spanish, Polish and Chinese, they'd have a lot better luck.
Chinese companies have historically violated bans on making banned gasses, but other countries have detected this. After that, the Chinese government has actually cracked down on them and eliminated those emissions. They worked with international groups to find the violators and then raided and even demolished illegal factories: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/10/study-suggests-...
China's policy of responding only when they are caught is broad and applies to a wide variety of violations. The problem is, they also make it very hard to police China. This is deliberate.
The 1-2% that get caught and punished are acceptable breakage from the broader picture.
The fact that levels have fallen dramatically since this operation shows that much more than 1-2% are being caught. Not trying to defend the Chinese government as a whole, but on GHGs specifically they are doing more than many other countries to curb emissions.
Absolutely there is someone somewhere in China who has built an R-12 plant with a high end capture system for escaping volatiles and a weird ventilation system that gets past the satellite imaging.
Author here, very excited to share this with HN. Been seeing a lot of engineers thinking about getting into climate so I thought people might find it interesting. Happy to answer any questions!
For whatever it's worth, I see this same thing here in Los Angeles. Scrappers cut open fridges, minifridges, AC units, etc and vent the refrigerant wherever they found the device (usually right on the curb). If you could make it profitable for them to capture it, they would. They're not making a ton of money off the copper.
Yeah that's definitely an issue! It's probably a bit less tractable than what we're dealing with because
1. Scrappers likely don't have the skills, equipment or inclination that AC technicians do.
2. Those self-contained units typically have a lot less refrigerant than the split AC systems (or large chillers) we see, which require venting in order to remove once installed. A refrigerator might have only 30 grams of charge, vs a split system with 2-3 kg.
We destroy it in an active cement kiln! The Montreal Protocol has a Technology and Economic Assessment Panel outlining approved destruction options[1] and this is one of their approved technologies. It's great for a few reasons:
1. Already operates at negative pressure with a high enough temperature and long enough residence time
2. Alkaline environment neutralizes the HF and HCl that are produced when the refrigerant burns.
3. Already consuming massive amounts of energy so the marginal energy use is negligible.
4. Allows use to use an existing facility instead of building our own -- great for developing countries where building infra is harder (but cement plants are everywhere).
Your bio suggests you know more about the chemical details than I do, but we do have
1. A trial burn done by an independent lab to make sure that under normal operating conditions, when destroying refrigerant the levels of those + other chemicals are below certain thresholds
2. automatic monitoring and shutoff mechanisms if the kiln deviates from normal conditions
I’m glad you have the safeguards. A lot of people don’t know to even be aware. Almost all the emissions of the chemicals I mentioned are from accidental creation now (mostly industrial fires and chemical waste incineration)
IMHO the CFCs were one of the biggest advances in technology in the 20th century. Non-toxic, non-flammable, and stable under ordinary conditions, and providing very good efficiency compared to the alternatives. The problem is with large-scale atmospheric releases, not with the substance itself.
Thus I am absolutely in agreement with recollecting, reselling, and reusing, but in strong opposition to destroying what would otherwise be useful. The latter only encourages the replacement of equipment in a continued cycle of forced obolescence, which might be far worse from a CO2 perspective.
I've always found it a little amusing that R152a, which is a pretty good replacement for R12, you can buy in "gas dusters" and legally vent all you want to the atmosphere, but it's technically illegal according to the EPA to recharge an R12 system with it.
This is from the viewpoint of someone who restores and repairs old appliances. Environmental considerations aside, I'd never vent deliberately, just because of how expensive and rare these substances are now --- and not surprisingly, there is an underground market for banned refrigerants too.
Thus, "you're throwing away money if you vent refrigerant" is probably going to have a much bigger effect than mentioning "climate change".
The illegal to retrofit R152a thing is mostly about old systems not being designed to ensure that in the event of a leak people are not exposed to high levels (concentrations of 3.7% v/v or above) for more than 15 seconds.
Old designed for R12 were not engineered to meet those guarentees. R152a can be huffed to get high, and doing so can be lethal. Thus we know that prolonged exposures to high enough concentrations of R152a can cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia.
So it is fundamentally a safety concern. Just an unfortunate one, considering how good it otherwise is as an R12 replacement.
Well R152a is a highly flammable gas that produces hydrogen fluoride and carbon monoxide as it burns.
R12 on the other hand is used a fire suppressant on submarines.
I don’t think banning the use of a high flammable gas in systems originally designed to operate with a fire suppressant is a bad idea.
I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that designers of R12 systems didn’t worry about accidental leaks into enclosed environments with ignition sources, on account of an R12 leak being completely safe in that situation. R152a on the other hand, that’s just an explosion waiting to happen.
Misinformation seems to abound about refrigerants as much as anything else, but 152a is definitely NOT "highly flammable" or we would see gas dusters having the same warnings that propane and isobutane (R290, R600a) come with. It is classified as "slightly flammable", and is actually rather difficult to ignite in practice.
Funny enough the compressor on the older heat pump that came w/ my house blew this week after a power surge. Got to watch a smokey mist of R-22 leak for a several hours.
I knew the unit was into EoL based on age, but when something seems to work fine it's really hard feel like preemptive replacement is the right choice or priority.
At least in the US R-22 is so expensive and people still repair and recharge units not infrequently. Wonder how reasonable or possible capturing leaking refrigerant would be. I was watching it leak and vaguely wondered if it would be possible to catch in a large umbrella.
Normally the tech would recapture it, and it is worth something. It must have been a pretty dramatic failure for the coolant to leak from a power surge.
That said, ‘reduce, reuse’ comes before ‘recycle’ for a reason. If the unit still worked and was reasonably close efficiency wise, it’s just a waste to replace it when it still functions.
It probably caused the power surge. What he describes is a fairly common failure mode. The compressors are hermetically sealed, and the weak point is where the AC is plugged into the compressor casing. As they age they corrode once the plug loses its own environmental seal driving up the capacitance of the junction, or the compressor starts to draw increasing amounts of current to start and run, resulting in the plugs melting. Basically its any number of effects, but the result is that the plug shorts/melts/etc and the compressor loses its seal at the same time.
Generally this kind of failure was a couple hundred dollar fix. Pull the compressor, braze on a new one, flush the system, vacuum it down, and refill.
Only now, the refrigerant can cost a grand, the markup on a $200 Emerson scroll is 4x, the fact that you need a license to work on the system means the tech charges $200 an hour, and it all adds up toe selling someone a new system, that is likely going to last 1/2 as long because R410 runs at 2-3x the pressure, the major manufactures have penny pinched every gram of metal out of the condenser/compressor tubing so its as thin as possible, and a half dozen other factors means that the 30 years a good R22 system would run for is unheard of now.
Sounds about right to me, only r-22 refrigerant alone would have been more than two grand $ on its own, let alone labor, parts, or other services. (And prices they quoted per lb were in line with other HVAC places in town.)
Definitely the cost of replacement coolant was a big driver of how things played out (in concert with system age).
Edit: Got mixed up with R-12, which was used in cars and apparently runs at a lower pressure.
I looked into an R134a conversion for my 1990 car about 10 years ago and found that any remaining R-12 would need to be vacuumed out of the system and collected for re-use. I elected to just live without A/C for a few more years and let the junkyard collect the refrigerant when I ended up scrapping the car.
This work is high impact for low effort (relative to carbon removal and sequestration), ready to deploy today, and largely overlooked. This type of effort is crucial to address — as fast as possible. I'm really happy to see this.
I really really love how this post touches on the bullshit that is the carbon credit market. Question: what incentive do BigCos have to buy your "high quality" carbon offsets vs the inferior ones you mentioned? Do you price cheaper per ton of CO2 credited? At the end of the day they're just trying to comply at the cheapest price possible, right?
There is definitely a lot of bullshit out there but when companies decide to pay for climate mitigation, even as a marketing ploy, I think that is net good.
Many companies are certainly looking to buy the cheapest credits they can find but there are promising indications that things are changing, led by companies like Stripe and Shopify.
This is a useful business that only exists because of carbon credits.
I winced a bit at their attacks on low quality carbon credits because the very idea has been under sustained attack by climate change deniers for decades.
Oh, rich people just paying money for carbon credits and still flying around the world, that's not real it's all fake, like climate change.
Obviously some are better than others, but the concept itself is useful and worth fighting to improve, not write off.
We are 10x cheaper than the high-quality carbon removal that for example Stripe Climate is purchasing. But we are 10x more expensive than the "low quality" credits that I describe in the post. So overall there is a 100x differential between what is allegedly the same ton of carbon, based on perceived quality and other factors.
Something doesn't quite add up in my mind - I must be missing something, please help HN...
So a regular home refrigerator has about 60 grams of R600a in it. It has a global warming potential of 3. That means if you illegally vent it to the atmosphere, you are doing the same environmental harm as venting 180 grams of CO2.
However, if you hire a trained technician to extract the gas for you, and he drives 10 km to get to your house, then his van (a brand new average van getting 158 g/CO2 per km) will emit 1580 grams of CO2.
Considering this, it seems crazy to bother regulating this stuff.
R600a has been specifically designed to have a low global warming potential. Unfortunately this is not true for most refrigerants used today, most of them have global warming potentials in the thousands. R600a is still flammable so it should be replaced by a trained technician.
Venting R600A (isobutane) isn't really the problem. This stuff gets vented from things like backpacking stoves fairly regularly. R410A is what's used in most modern HVAC equipment and it has a GWP of around 4000 (it's complicated because it's a mix of two refrigerants). 3000g of R410A might be in a small to moderate-sized system.
Yeah, R600a is a so-called "natural refrigerant" with a GWP that rounds to zero. Not even close to in scope for us -- the lowest GWP gas we touch is R32, with GWP 750.
Refrigerants are this huge elephant in the room in climate change. Everybody knows there a main issue but almost nobody is addressing them. They're not easy nor sexy. Makes this work all the more critical. Go Louis go!
It's not a case of opinion. One is better or worse for each relevant attribute, like thermal efficiency, cost, dangers, enviornmental concern, lifespan, etc
I often hear that r12 cools better but that's not true at all according to thus Perdue study. There may be other factors though.
I think that came about as a result of people filling old R12 systems with R134A and then complaining that it didn’t work as well as before, back in the 90s.
I just had my air conditioner replaced last week, and I walked out to check on the tech doing the work just as he finished removing the refrigerant from the old system. By venting it to atmosphere. forehead slap. I was under the impression the EPA will go after technicians personally if they get caught doing that. R410a may not be the same ozone-depleting refrigerant as R-22, but it's still a lot worse than CO2 for greenhouse effect.
I heard they're switching next year away from R410a to something new. But... not propane?
There is a good chance they might have been purging nitrogen they put into the system. If you are replacing the evaporator and condenser but not the line set, it is normal to purge the existing line set with nitrogen to clear anything out.
That is partially what makes it so difficult to catch people doing it, since it is not obvious whether they are venting refrigerant or nitrogen.
Ah, okay, maybe he did capture it after all then. I did notice that it wasn't making any vapor clouds like it seems to when you're unscrewing the lines and a bit escapes. I thought maybe it was just the end of the process and that's why, but nitrogen would totally explain that.
He definitely had a bottle of nitrogen on hand because he used that when pressure testing the new system. And it was just a replacement of the evaporator coil and the condenser, so the line set was reused. Your explanation makes perfect sense, thanks!
Yeah HVAC techs use nitrogen a lot. They use it for pressure testing, cleaning line sets, flowing while brazing to avoid oxidation, and sometimes even to clean out condensate lines. Hopefully your AC is working well, it is in the mid 90s here today in the New England.
"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income."
This is addressed on the Buy Offsets page. Quoted because I thought the same thing as you:
We never pay our partners more than the market price of new refrigerant, removing any possibility of a perverse incentive. And because we use well-studied industrial processes, as approved by TEAP at UNEP, there’s no science risk: no carbon is going to bubble back out in 5 years, like you might worry about with soil, forestry, or other nature-based processes.
In France (and maybe in the entire UE), it is mandatory for refrigerant to be collected, and you must bring your old fridge/freezer to a HWRC when you want to dispose
of it.
However, in a fridge/freezer the refrigerant circulate in metallic tubes, usually made of copper which have great conductivity. And what do you think happen when you leave copper tubes unattended at night? Copper thieves come and scrap the fridge with no regards for the refrigerant being released to the atmosphere…
Refrigerant and climate change is a problem we created by replacing very efficient CFC based refrigerants with a very short lifetime in the atmosphere with "more stable compounds".
It was a huge political failure, which was completely focused on the "ozone hole" rather than making wise decisions. Just banning CFC's as propellants, and all the other uses which basically dumped huge quantities into the atmosphere and putting licensing requirements around their use, and enforcing the recapture (aka AC techs are tracked for how much they buy vs return), and not filling leaky systems would have solved the immediate problem. But the legislative bodies were also convinced to legislate a change in equipment/refrigerant to these newer compounds which had a huge positive effect on many manufactures and AC installers bottom line. And now we have to do it again because the people warning about the dangers of these new (frequently patented) refrigerant compounds were ignored.
Like the story about American democracy, this is going to be one of those cases of trying all the wrong approaches before doing the right thing.
I am SO lucky to have a friendly neighbor who's an HVAC technician. A relay went out on my A/C last week, and he came over and fixed it the next morning.
Pro tip: there are certain advantages to living in a place where not everyone is an engineer in high tech.
Refrigerants are really interesting - we phased out a bunch of them a few decades ago because they were destroying ozone, but what we replaced them with had high Global Warming Potential (GWP.) The new thing that all of the HVAC companies are working on are finding new refrigerants that have low GWP and work well in their equipment. One of the tricky things is a lot of the low GWP refrigerants are mildly flammable, so there's some thought about trying to revise the building codes to permit their use.
I'm glad to see someone taking the initiative to mitigate this problem. I also wonder how much "canned air" dusters contribute overall. If I recall correctly, they're commonly just HFC-134a in a can. But because it's not used as a refrigerant, it's outside the EPA's purview and can just be sprayed into the atmosphere willy-nilly. Using one can is more or less equivalent to venting the refrigerant from a car's AC, yet for some reason it's a common practice.
I just looked up the MSDS[0] for my can of Dust-Off (which I believe is the most popular brand?). It lists the sole ingredient as "Ethane, 1,1-difluoro-", which turns out to be a refrigerant, but not 134a.
It's HFC-152a[1]. Looks like it's a much "friendlier" refrigerant than 134 (and of course vastly better than R-12)
Interesting. Did a little more digging and it looks like both are used for air dusters, with 134a being marketed for "energized circuits" because it's non-flammable (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DNR066). 152a has ~1/10 of the GWP as 134a.
In any case, it's still amazing to me how restricted these are when used as a refrigerant, but then they're sold to consumers to spray on whatever they want. It really undercuts the environmental impact of these chemicals.
> the destruction process permanently neutralizes the chemical
This raises a few questions in my mind. TFA makes it sound like the refrigerant boogeyman is a problem of fixed quantity. It sounds like after we've destroyed all the refrigerant, it can cause no more harm, but clearly these refrigerants must be manufactured on a continual basis?
Can refrigerants not be recycled? What materials go into the creation of refrigerants? Is anything of value lost in destroying refrigerants, besides the energy that went into making them?
The refrigerants we use have changed. R22 was replaced by R410a and that will eventually be replaced by units that can run on R290, or less ideally R32 or another.
The organisation at work here are targeting developing countries who've been much slower to migrate to less harmful refrigerants, but old units are being cycled out for new ones, so new demand for janky old refrigerant (from failing units, so likely contaminated) is lower than you might think.
This makes sense, thanks for clarifying. So the refrigerants in use are effectively obsolete, and after they're reclaimed and destroyed, should pose no further risk, as there are better options available.
The writeup mentions fraud, but doesn't say how they plan to keep folks from just buying refrigerant and turning it in. Unless I missed it. Classic "cobra effect" stuff.
If anything they are understating the problem refrigerants cause. Not only are most refrigerants more potent from a greenhouse potential, many are based on CFCs that are ozone depleters. We’ve already created a hole in the ozone layer from CFCs being used as aerosol propellants before that practice was banned, but we still have CFC refrigerants in use globally all over the place. In fact propellants are generally refrigerants.
As of recent I believe propane and/or CO2 is the only refrigerant left allowed for any indoor use. That seems to be an acceptable gas, or am I mistaken?
I believe the current rule is actually that any refrigerant has to have a GWP (Global Warming Potential) equal to or less than CO2. R290 (propane) has a GWP of 0.02, the new refrigerant for automotive use R1234yf has a GWP of less than 1. CO2 has a GWP of 1.
So it's not required that it's CO2 or R290, but rather than you can use any refrigerant that has a GWP of 1 or less.
R290 seems an ideal refrigerant, especially since the technology to use it as a refrigerant is so old/mature. The challenge is that it's /highly/ flammable. This is true of most refrigerants with a GWP less than 1. R1234yf partly exists because of a desire to reduce flammability.
It's a rule that the EU set for vehicles. EU-based manufacturers were the first to use r1234yf because of this rule, and American auto manufacturers followed suit to make it an industry standard, but there's no rule in the US other than the existing Clean Air Act, AFAIK.
The rule only affects newly manufactured vehicles as well, so there's no requirement to phase out R410A.
At this point most US vehicles use R134. Most R12 cars have been converted as once these things tend to leak, your ripe for a compressor rebuild, flush, oil swap, etc.
Why they set such hard GWP < 1 regulation? Isn't like < 50 enough? It's not emitted every time like CO2 emission of ICE but emitted at accident or poor deconstruction.
I don't know what was in their mind, but my guess is that it's due to automotive HVAC systems using flexible hoses rather than hard piping like stationary HVAC. The consequence of this is that those hoses aren't /truly/ impermeable, and it's commonplace for a vehicle HVAC system to need to be recharged after about 10 years of service life even with no "leaks". So, pretty much all gas going into the system will eventually end up in the atmosphere over time.
It varies by country but I'm not aware of any country that has fully phased out HFCs -- the EU I believe is already imposing import quotas but it is still legal to use.
R-134a is being phased out as well. R-32 or R-454b are the new coldness.[1]
I believe R-12 and R-22 were phased out because of their ozone depletion potential. In the states R-134a replaced those.
R-134a was great! No more ozone layer damage!
But its global warming potential is still too high[2] to comply with various climate change pacts and laws (I think California has a law that will limit refrigerant GWP to 750 in 2023 [3] ).
It's a bit weird for consumers though because if you're buying an air conditioner/heat pump right now then it's probably still R-134a.
Who wants to buy hardware that will last for 15+ years but could cost a significant portion of the original unit price to refill in the event of a leak or installer error?
Because of the chance of a leak. It's so much better to destroy it than risk it leaking again. The newest refrigerant is many times less harmful to the environment if it leaks.
Full disclosure. I work at a scrap yard and we routinely discharge systems into the air, and I am sure many many other scrap yards do absolutely the same.
Precisely because credits are not really a commodity, so some buyers have preferences about what credits to buy and how much they are willing to pay. There are some subset of buyers and sellers who pretend that all credits are the same, but usually that's an excuse to pay for the cheapest possible credits (which in many cases achieve nothing).
Just wanted to say I agree that your credits are of much better quality than the average of what you usually find on the market. Carbon credits right now are like the new (but also old?) shitcoins.
I have a startup in this space but we mostly do MRV, always looking for solutions like yours to link to our clients and contribute to this new economy. Send me an email (check profile) to get in touch!
Selling at a higher price means more revenue, more revenue means the business can expand faster, faster expansion means climate impact of refrigerants gets solved faster.
Obviously, one cannot simply choose to sell above market price. But the context of the discussion was about the reason for selling far below market price.
You missed that its not below market price, its below market price for the quality. But most companies don’t buy based on quality of credits but based on how cheap they are so they can get away with polluting. This is counterproductive and pricing those credits higher will lead to them not being as useful as they can be.
And honestly: I find it very arrogant to think that you can show up and propose this “crazy idea” that “hey what if you guys made more money you could do more good”, as if that hasn’t been considered…
To move market demand to them. They’re offering a premium product at a deep discount. They could raise prices after their model is more proven, enabling them to scale up to pull more refrigerant destruction in.
It’s your usual market pricing adoption curve. And frankly, their solution is more effective than paying to not cut trees down.
Thanks for sharing! Based on my reading, reducing refrigerants is one of the highest-impact ways to reduce planet risk.
"Our plan is simple and has zero technical risk"
What do you see as the biggest risk? And what is your assessment for why no one has pursued this approach before?
Is there any data on this 6% of global emissions claim? Do they mean 6% of CO2e emissions? (in which case the "2000x" claim is redundant and makes this statement overblown, as it's already factored into the CO2e calculation)
It's 2000x worse on a per-pound basis, using the Global Warming Potential (GWP), and 6% of total emissions on a CO2e basis. They are separate facts which are mentioned to serve different purposes: 6% is to emphasize the scale of the overall problem, and 2000x is to understand the leverage of this approach (small amount of material to handle for the impact).
That's the kind of projects we need to get where we need to be in terms of emissions. It won't be easy, but clever solutions where there is real $$ incentives are the ones that can actually be implemented!
Why actively destroy the refrigerant (at least for refrigerants still in use/production)? Most can be reclaimed and re-purified rather than destroying - with a less energy intensive process than making new.
In theory, reclaiming gases that are still unrestricted for production/import is at least as good as destruction from a climate perspective. However, virgin refrigerant is really cheap until import bans take hold -- so there is never a point where it is both economically worthwhile and impactful for climate. In theory you could use credits to boost the economics around reclaim but you end up with a very messy additionality story. My sense is that most reclaimers are very low-margin or even loss leaders for the companies that produce/sell the gas!
Anyway the short answer is that it's harder for us to figure out in this first push, but we do intend to look into it more closely as we expand.
There are direct replacements and refrigerants that require different equipment. And different refrigerants for different purposes. So all that amounts to a pile of really bad refrigerants (cfcs), newer refrigerants (high GWP), and the newest refrigerants (low GWP) with a half dozen or so varieties for each.
Is it possible to deactivate these gasses in situ ? I could see that being more successful than transportation, but I know nothing about the chemistry...
Speaking of refrigerants, you can replace R22 directly, R134 sometimes directly but desirably with new oil and capillary, and probably other refrigerants with... R290 - an innovative compound that is very environmentally friendly and cheap. Also known as Propane.
I've done it with my home office room A/C, a small 12,000 BTU unit. I couldn't believe it when I found out you can do that.
They say R290 is cleaner, purer, blah blah, but the gas from a simple propane tank you can get anywhere works fine. Remains to be seen for how long, so far 2 summers and going strong.
Tradewater is great, they are one of the original inspirations for this approach. The key differences are geography (they are mostly US-focused) and that they pursue stockpiles of gas where we go after the emissions from end-of-life equipment. So their counterfactual is slow leakage over time, and our counterfactual is immediate venting.
Given the large impact from venting to the atmosphere, it's almost certainly better from a carbon impact standpoint to ship it:
Every time he does this with a single air conditioner, it has the same effect as burning 250 gallons of gasoline, which is more than enough to drive from SF to NY and back
It surely doesn't consume 250 gallons of gasoline equivalent to ship the collected gas.
Feels like the perfect thing for a Bill Gates, Elon Musk or other rich guy to bankroll. I know it's not the job of billionaires to do but it should be a government thing. But the Southeast Asian countries probably wouldn't do it and neither would the US do it for another country. The amount they're trying to raise seems like it would be tiny for a billionaire type.
Refrigerants have to be compressible to increase their temperature above ambient. Or equivalently, to be expandable to cool them. Salt water wouldn't work at all.
It's not a very good one for general space cooling for the reasons others have stated here, at least near typical ambient conditions. Water / steam are often used for space heating, though there the energy conveyed is typically from combustion rather than via a heat pump as in an air conditioner.
Water does work well for cooling high-temperature equipment such as automobile engines and power plants.
Both typically operate at or above the standard atmospheric boiling point of water.
Water is a very good heat transfer fluid, it has a huge specific heat capacity compared to many other fluids, it's cheap, abundant, non-toxic, non-flammable.
The problem is that if you want to reduce the temperature below ambient you need some kind of expansion cycle, either with a single-phase gas, or something that has the gas-liquid phase transition somewhere in the temperature of interest. Water doesn't really work for common AC or refrigeration uses.
Water could be used at lower temperatures in a low-pressure system, which would reduce the boiling point.
I'm curious whether or not such a cooling design exists, and what application(s) it might have.
For HVAC, I suspect the temperature would have to be between 0 and 8 C (32--45F), which would be about 5--10 mbar of vacuum.
Note too that it's difficult to cool below 0C (32F) with water, though salt water can reach lower temperatures. Other refrigerants function far better down to ~ -8 -- -12C, or lower. Water-based refrigerants would likely require a secondary cascade.
The problem is that if you lower the pressure enough to move the boiling point to something suitable for AC or refrigeration, the density of the steam will be very low. So you'd need huge pipes to transfer that heat around.
why not recycle?
I can buy these refrigerants today.
You say you are working to replace them with greenhouse safe refrigerants. Why are these not economically priced and competitive on the market?
Chemical & petrochemical (3.6%): energy-related emissions from the manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants, oil and gas extraction, etc.
2. That 6% is based on the most recent IPCC report which estimates 1.4 GT from HFCs, and another ~1.4 from CFCs+HCFCs, so 2.8 total. OWID seems to get its data from climatetrace, I haven't dug into their data, but if I'm reading that correctly it looks like that is only energy usage from manufacturing, rather than direct emissions of the gases. Looks like maybe this breakdown just ignores refrigerants, which is unfortunately common.
It’ll be really interesting to what happens as the next gen of refrigerants rolls out. There was a great link on hn recently about them but I’m unable to locate it.
Sitting in standstill traffic in >30°C climates is more than an inconvenience; it is an acute health risk. Please consider the fact that a significant proportion of humans live in tropical or desert climates which would be otherwise uninhabitable without air conditioning technology.
Is it actual AC or swamp coolers/evaporative cooler? Usually as I mentioned elsewhere the licensing requirements (at least in the US) for actual AC systems usually involve a portion on computing heat load/etc in order to size a system.
Although, I'm betting the engineering side of the tram probably avoids needing anything other than the equivalent of the US PE/etc. Its probably a bit tricky because the needs of being able to load/unload people quickly also probably tend to dump a lot of hot air into the car. Either way though, busses, cars, trains all tend to do ok in hot climates because they have massively oversized AC systems and can move a lot of air relative to the enclosed space.
Returning to my original point, I'm betting your trams don't actually have AC, from your description I might guess they have some kind of evaporative cooler.
What part of the world do you live in that tells you that you can make those types of decisions for people that live in other places in the world?
Come to Texas and drive your car with no AC and just the windows rolled down. Please, I'll let you stay at my house for the duration of the experiment just to watch you bitch about the heat. I'll even record it for your socials so you can just show everyone how amazing your idea was.
One thing to realize is that "wind chill" also has a reverse effect that occurs when it's hot outside.
As a human, with a normal body temperature of 98.6 degrees F. If the outside air temperature is 100 degrees F, then having your windows rolled down will actually increase the speed at which your body heats up to match ambient temperatures.
This makes driving motorcycles in desert areas where air temp is > 100 degrees especially dangerous as it can quickly lead to dehydration and heat stroke.
Much of that is dependent on the wet bulb temp, which is where some people are crying about high humidity at lower temps. But in most deserts the humidity also tends to be quite low, so the wet bulb temp can be fairly low at air temps quite a bit higher than 100F because sweat evaporates quickly.
But yah, motorcycles at speed are another thing entirely because sweat/etc can just as easily blow off as evaporate. And so, you can't drink/sweat enough to be cooled. Combined with the need to wear protective gear which also tends to stop evaporation is a deadly combination. I ride mountain bikes in 100F+ weather and its another set of dangers, and one of the best feelings is dumping cold water through the vents in a helmet and feeling the burning hot water flush down your face and be replaced by the cool. But again, i'm basically carrying a significant quantity of <40F water intended to be sprayed on my already sweaty self, along with a 32F water i'm drinking not for hydration but as coolant.
I have lived years w/o air conditioning in tropical West Africa and desert areas of North Africa. I have also spent plenty of time sitting in standstill traffic during my years in Florida and Louisiana. I have never used air conditioning. If you have a valid medical need for a/c, you could be accommodated. However, if you just want to shutoff the outside world by rolling up the windows, then perhaps you should be the one paying for that luxury.
I don't remember the exact threshold (It is definitely the case, over 98 degrees Fahrenheit -Body temperature, but that seems high), where moving air no longer cools you. I think that humidity can bring that threshold waaaayyyy down.
I used to live in Maryland. The summers there are brutal. On hot days, rolling down the window is like having a hair dryer pointed at your face.
I was talking with a friend of mine in Delhi, a couple of weeks back, when they were having the heat wave.
It's no joke. People are dropping dead at their workstations.
The threshold is in fact higher than body temperature for dry air. The point below which air can't cool anything is the wet bulb temperature, and a wet bulb above body temperature is eventually fatal.
But in a decade or so, it will be the prevailing opinion. Some czar of the environment will go around deciding who gets AC, and telling others "You don't need AC". (Generally, this is decided by campaign donations and party support.)
Of course there is some negligible environmental impact that will come out in a college paper some point. But otherwise, the only thing people will notice is the rise in deaths of the elderly.
But this is a small price to pay. The environment is our god, and it demands sacrifice.
(Yes, my AC units broke and the time to even get a technician to look at them, was so long I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification, bought a bunch of gear off Amazon and refrigerant from a “good old boy” at an exorbitant price (global shortage, plus most is sold in palette quantities), and fixed my own unit in half the time it would have taken to get an appointment with a professional company. The first unit is working. If I succeed at the second unit I’ll even be money ahead. Of course if my yak had already been shaved maybe it could have tolerated the heat.)