Save the Earth! Get Rid of Your Refrigerator!

By Alan Caruba

On June 22, Greenpeace USA put out the word that “A new study published today in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences shows that refrigerant chemicals, so called F-gases, are a more dangerous global warming threat than previously predicted.”

Apparently, in order to save the Earth, we must all unplug and get rid of our refrigerators and air conditioners.

The study was authored by scientists from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the United States government agencies, NOAA and EPA, along with a scientist from “the chemical company Dupont.” You don’t suppose that Dupont has come up with a new refrigerant that it would like to sell, do you?

As to anything NOAA and the EPA has to say about the environment, at this point anyone older than a kindergartner knows that virtually everything these agencies say about global warming is pure fiction. They long ago abandoned any pretence about offering science-based information on anything.

“The paper projects that HFC (hydrofluorocarbon) emissions will rise rapidly in coming years and decades, threatening to effectively cancel out some of the hard fought greenhouse gas reductions made through energy efficiency and clean energy deployment,” said Greenpeace.

Why is it that, at the very moment Congress is being asked to pass a huge energy tax called “Cap-and-Trade”, supposedly intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Greenpeace has chosen to begin warning everyone about the chemicals in refrigerators and air conditioners as the next great threat?

“We must aggressively phase out HFCs to effectively combat climate change,” says Greenpeace USA.

Why is it that Greenpeace is lying about greenhouse gas emissions, largely carbon dioxide and methane, both produced naturally by the Earth, as the cause of something that ended ten years ago? The Earth has been cooling since 1998. You’d think that NOAA and the EPA would know about that, wouldn’t you?

Does anyone recall the last time we heard about HFCs? It was the big Ozone Hole scare which you might have noticed no longer scares anyone. It turned out that there had always been ozone “holes” over the North and South Poles. The one in Antarctica is over an active volcano, Mount Erebus, where one might expect the atmosphere to be affected. The Earth’s several hundred active volcanoes no doubt have a similar affect.

The real cost of the Ozone Hole scare was the banning of Freon, the most effective refrigerant and fire retardant ever invented. Freon, invented in 1928, was colorless, odorless, nonflammable, and non-corrosive. It doesn’t get much better than that. It was also a lot less costly than the refrigerant that replaced it.

Let’s see, who sold Freon? Oh yes, I remember. It was Dupont. Could its research scientists have found a new chemical compound for refrigeration purposes? Would that enrich Dupont? Would Greenpeace get a big, fat donation if that happened?

Here’s my suggestion. Don’t believe anything Greenpeace has to say on this subject. Ignore the alleged scientific study by what are possibly the two most scientifically-corrupted government agencies extant in the U.S. today. Forget about global warming because it isn’t happening.

Give your refrigerator a big hug. In hospitals, refrigerators protect life-saving drugs. After the generation of electricity and the invention of the internal combustion engine, refrigeration is one of the greatest life enhancing advances of the modern era.

In my youth, we had something called an “ice box.” It cooled its contents because a man came every few days with a big block of ice and put it in the “ice box.” There was no such thing as air conditioning. Those were not “the good old days.”