https://archive.ph/30zMl
"What if the Senate passed an international climate treaty—a pact so powerful
that it could avert nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming—and nobody
noticed?
That’s more or less what happened a week ago. Last Wednesday, the Senate
ratified the Kigali Amendment, a treaty that will phase out the world’s use of
hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, a climate pollutant used as an industrial
refrigerant and in sprayable consumer products. Because HFCs are hundreds of
thousands of times more potent at capturing heat in the atmosphere than carbon
dioxide, the Kigali Amendment, which has already been adopted by 137 countries,
is the most significant environmental treaty that the United States has joined
in at least a decade.
But just as striking as the fact that the United States joined the treaty was
how it did it. The vote to ratify Kigali was bipartisan, with 21 Republicans
and 48 Democrats voting in support. Yet the move didn’t break through to the
extent that other recent climate news has. “It’s very important, and nobody’s
picked it up,” Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences and international-affairs
professor at Princeton, told me. In fact, even he didn’t know the treaty had
actually been ratified until I told him.
It deserves more attention. The Kigali Amendment was finalized by negotiators
in Kigali, Rwanda, six years ago, updating the Montreal Protocol, a
three-decade-old treaty. That pact was first adopted to eliminate
chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a class of chemicals that were found to be
destroying the ozone layer. It has proved to be one of the biggest
environmental victories of the past decades: CFCs have since been successfully
phased out—and the gap in the ozone layer that those chemicals opened has begun
to close.
The Montreal Protocol was updated four times before the Kigali Amendment, but
this tweak is different. Instead of helping protect the ozone, this tweak was
designed to specifically reduce greenhouse gases."
Via
Future Crunch Oct 7, 2022:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-us-crime-conservation-argentina-evs-china/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
