
Banned Ozone-Harming Gas Creeps Back, Suggesting a Mystery Source - montrose
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/climate/ozone-layer-cfc.html
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maxerickson
Recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090224)

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ChuckMcM
I find this story fascinating. The specific gas, CFC-11 is like old school,
produced in '86 banned by '96\. There are alternatives that are better today
and not banned. So who fires up an old chemical plant to make this stuff?

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mchannon
I seriously doubt it was a fired-up plant that manufactured the uptick.

More likely, I wonder if their model considers the natural decay of other
chlorofluorocarbons, like R-115, R-114, or, counterintuitively, R-12. It's
probably reasonable to expect that as those compounds break down, that R-11
could be an intermediate step.

Crushing up old closed-cell foam, old cars, old refrigerators, and old
industrial plants are all possibilities if the above is not what's actually
happening.

It's remarkable how we as a society have declared victory on our ozone
problem, when in reality, it's not been fixed. Did you know that the UV index
outside can actually go way above 12, like 45? Nobody measures this, but it
happens.

Spending all day at the beach with no sunscreen hasn't always been insane,
just since we started our experiment with refrigerants.

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ChuckMcM
In the study they considered the destruction of things like foam and old
refrigerant systems and concluded there was too much material for that to be
the source.

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newnewpdro
My assumption is developing nations relive variations of the past of the
developed nations, while adding some new mistakes of their own.

In the industrial context, there's a whole bunch of worrying things that had
to be learned not to do the hard way but were probably obvious and emergent
discoveries making them likely to recur without sufficient
intervention/education.

At least our mistakes were made with relatively small population multipliers.
Repeating them on the scale of China or India's population, there's massive
potential for environmental harm the likes of which we've never seen.

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beat
The first thought that crossed my mind is bitcoin mines. Large mining
operations using it as a better coolant.

Could be nonsense, though, if there are better coolants available today that
are legal.

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maxerickson
They would only do it incidentally while buying whatever cheap coolers,
there's no good reason to seek out refrigeration systems that use CFCs.

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beat
The question is, is there a technical reason? Are modern refrigeration systems
more efficient than CFC systems? If so, then it's a dumb idea. But if there's
an actual efficiency gain to be had with CFCs... well.

This is not my field of expertise, and a quick googling didn't turn up really
unbiased sources.

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maxerickson
They aren't different enough to justify any hassle seeking them out.

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beat
Depends. It's not just efficiency, it's cost savings. If someone is running a
large enough operation to save millions of dollars a year in cooling by using
CFCs (assuming they're actually cheaper), and one is in a, um, lightly
regulated industry (like Bitcoin mining) that uses massive power... well,
that's a lot of justification. Small savings become big savings at scale.

