Refrigerants are bad for the climate, but sustainable alternatives exist, and others are being developed as the industry prepares for increasing demand for cooling as the planet warms. Cans of R-134A refrigerant sit on the shelves of Cary’s Auto, Monday, Aug. 28, 2023, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Refrigerants absorb a lot more heat than water or other common fluids, which makes them great for cooling systems, but bad for climate change when they escape.
Once the chilled fluid has absorbed significant heat, say, from eggs you just hardboiled and placed inside, it gets squeezed in a compressor and gets even hotter. The refrigerant then flows through condenser coils where it releases its heat out and cools back into a liquid.
Some of the earlier refrigerant chemicals that allowed hot places like Phoenix, Arizona and Dubai to grow into population centers, were a family known as chlorofluorocarbons , but scientists discovered that these were causing widespread damage to the ozone layer in the mid to late 1900s. The way to compare damaging gases is “global warming potential” or GWP, which the Environmental Protection Agency defines as how much energy one ton of a gas can absorb over a certain period of time, compared to one ton of carbon dioxide. Over one century, the GWP ofIn 2016, the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol phased down the use of climate-harming hydrofluorocarbons 85% by 2036, so that phasedown is currently happening.