My husband is a news nerd. He’s well informed on just about every news issue. But I got him on the Kigali Amendment—he’d never heard of it! Kigali is an amendment to a groundbreaking global treaty. It was ratified by Congress in late September. The media missed it, and my husband missed it and it has major significance for global warming. So naturally, I had to cover it here!
Toxic HFCs are everywhere. Every refrigerator, supermarket case, auto AC, and building air conditioning system contains them. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 700 million air conditioning units will be online worldwide by 2030.
These refrigerants are powerful greenhouse gases, thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. Eliminating them would lower the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere by a full degree Fahrenheit, or one half a degree Centigrade.
HFCs are not to be confused with CFCs and HCFCs which were phased out in the 1990s in order to heal the hole in the ozone layer. HFCs are the replacement for those earlier refrigerants, and are not harmful to ozone layer. But they are devastating for global warming. And they need to be banned, and then safely disposed of.
So What Happened?
In 2016, 170 countries met in Kigali, Rwanda. There they signed a mandatory plan to reduce the use of HFCs, starting with developed nations, and progressively banning HFCs worldwide, until they are fully eliminated by 2028.
The full name of the treaty is the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. This Protocol is the treaty that eliminated the gases harmful to the ozone layer thirty years ago. It is one of the most successful global actions of all time.
In late September, the Senate ratified the Kigali Amendment with strong bi-partisan support—21 Republicans (including Mitch McConnell) and 48 Democrats voted in favor. Before the vote Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “Ratifying the Kigali Amendment, along with passing the Inflation Reduction Act, is the strongest one-two punch against climate change any Congress has ever taken.”
The fact that less toxic alternatives to HFCs are readily available—notably ammonia and propane—helped. Also the fact that countries that do not adopt the amendment will be restricted in international trading in 2033, provided an incentive for industry to support the amendment.
With the Kigali amendment ratified, the US has taken the lead on this issue. Now the global plan to eliminate HFCs can move forward.