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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Indeed that’s what I thought.. that freon was banned in much of the developed world in favor of harmless alternatives. But yet the article says this:
The projected most common modern one is propane, which sounds bad, but is about a thousand times less than our old ones. The amount of propane in an AC is also negligible compared to what even the smallest appliance that burns it would put out, by the simple fact that it is reused for the life of the AC.
As long as an AC is disposed of properly, which is far more likely to be done by someone who cares about their footprint, there's no issue.
I actually like that the landfills in my area specifically won't take refrigerators or air conditioners.
The refrigerant they are probably referring to is R134a or R410a which are much more potent greenhouse gases than CO2. But there are two things to consider:
If the system is maintained correctly, it shouldn't lose any refrigerant, and R410a started being phased out in 2022 for other gases with a lower Global Warming Potential. One of those refrigerants is R744, which has a GWP of 1. That's because R744 is just carbon dioxide.
The bigger issue for me is R134a. It has a lower GWP of 1430 vs ~2100 for R410a, but since R134a is used in cars, it's a lot more likely that it will be released. Some carmakers are transitioning to R1234yf in their air conditioners, which has a GWP of less than 1.
Tl;dr: Refrigerants can cause more global warming per unit volume of gas than CO2, but it's being worked on. Also, refrigerant typically stays inside the machine, while CO2 is emitted by lots of different processes, so it's not a huge environmental disaster when it's just running.