Conservation Comment: The essential shovel-ready project that no one's talking about

Rosemary Penwarden says the decisions the government makes in the next few months will determine what kind of a world her grandchildren will inherit. Photo / Supplied

As if we need anything else to worry about. Rising seas, raging pandemics, fake news, Trump's tweets… now I learn that the heat pump that warms my grandkids on winter mornings is a climate-destroyer extraordinaire. It's all to do with the gas inside it.

In 1987, pre heat pumps, governments banned ozone-destroying CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) under the Montreal Protocol. Slowly the ozone hole began to shrink. Thirty years later one study estimated that 2 million fewer skin cancers per year will be diagnosed by 2030 thanks to this encouraging display of governmental cooperation.

Great. But. Turns out there's more to the story. Montreal was good for ozone but bad for the climate. Why? CFCs were replaced with HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons).

R410a, the most common HFC in heat pumps and air conditioners, has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) 1980 times that of CO2. Most car air-conditioners use HFC R134a which has a GWP 1430 times that of CO2. And then there's the refrigeration units in every corner store, supermarket, pub, dairy farmers' milk vat and bigger places like meat works, Fonterra milk factories… you get the idea. And they leak. Just like CFCs they eventually end up in the atmosphere.

My friend, whose home-built electric car has clocked up 55,000km, preventing 14 tonnes of CO2 from heating the atmosphere, figures his CO2 savings are cancelled out by the slow escape of gas from his neighbours' four ordinary-sized home heat pumps.

Blimey, when does a grandma get to rest easy these days? Wasn't grandmotherhood supposed to be about supping G&Ts under the hair dryer reading the latest celeb goss?

There has to be good news, right? Here it's that we've signed up to the Kigali Amendment.
Montreal was tasked with getting rid of ozone-destroying CFCs, and Kigali has the job of getting rid of their replacement, climate-destroying HFCs. Under Kigali we have until 2037 to phase down HFCs by more than 80 per cent. The UN reckons this could avert 0.5C of global warming.

But my friend the fridgey (refrigeration engineer) said that in contrast to Europe, there's no effing sign of any serious phasing down of HFCs in clean green Aotearoa. He reckons 2037 is too far off.

With the arrival of Covid-19 the climate crisis has taken a back seat, but it hasn't gone away.

Since world governments pledged $10-20 trillion on economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, Christiana Figueres, head of the UN team at the 2015 Paris Agreement, changed her mind about us having the next decade to secure an emissions free economy. No, she said, we only have the next three to 18 months to put in place the changes needed to meet the Paris targets. "We are at an irreversible T junction," she said on RNZ. If we try to return to the old normal we can kiss goodbye to staying below 1.5 to 2C of global warming.

My fridgey friend is ready with tools and expertise to safely deal with HFCs and replace them ASAP. It's the essential post Covid shovel-ready project that no one's talking about.

My granddaughter will turn 20 in 2037. The decisions our government makes in the next few months will determine what kind of a world she will inherit. HFCs had better be long gone.

• Rosemary Penwarden grew up on a small farm in Brunswick, just north of Whanganui. She now lives on 4.5ha near Dunedin.