CFCs are also terrible greenhouse gases. The net result of the Protocol is positive for the climate, by a significant margin according to Estrada: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131110-montr...

Renewable energy is an inexpensive alternative.

Giving up coal for electricity production would be roughly the same health benefit as everyone in the country giving up smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and eating fast food combined and save 10 billion dollars a year.

That sounds like kind of a big deal; citation needed? How does that work, is it just the health benefits of air pollution + the damage to miners?

Air pollution from coal power generation and internal combustion engine automobile driving (diesel being the worst by far) causes strokes, heart attacks, asthma, lung cancer, etc. It shortens peoples lives, makes them worse from a health standpoint and causes many deaths every year.

Imagine just the healthcare cost savings and the productivity gains alone from using cleaner power generation.

Phasing out coal power is a no brainer because there are plenty of alternatives to use, and renewable energies like solar will make our grid more resilient by making power generation more diffuse.

Electrifying cars is a longer-term issue. But if you can electrify cars, you can power them from cleaner sources. Even if you don't power them with cleaner sources, you'd still get less localized particulate pollution.

Whether or not you care about global warming or the planet itself, you'd get big benefits personally for your health and your family's health if we had cleaner power generation.

The $10 Billion per year is just in extra costs passed onto grid customers compared with using natural gas and renewables instead.

http://www.carbontracker.org/in-the-media/phasing-out-coal-p...

This may be true but the health costs are shifted to the consumer, government and health providers. If health damages were factored into the costs of producing energy or as overhead that the fossil fuel industry had to eat, they would have much more incentive to be cleaner and to invest in renewables.

That $10 billion per year is purely in the costs the energy industry is going to pass onto their customers. Once you start counting the health or climate benefits the number goes up.

http://www.carbontracker.org/in-the-media/phasing-out-coal-p...

The issue is that they're mostly escaping market forces due to how they are regulated:

"“Merchant” coal owners operating in competitive wholesale markets have lost nearly half their value in the last two years amid fierce competition from cheap gas and renewables. However, two thirds of coal plants are “regulated” and receive government-approved prices which cover their costs. This means that consumers rather than shareholders pick up the bill for supporting uneconomic coal plants."

Once you start counting actual externalities you get numbers like $5 Trillion a year subsides for fossil fuels globally, as estimated by the IMF, 7% of global GDP:

http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew07...

If you want to work on a refrigeration system that uses R-134a, there are all sorts of laws about properly collecting and disposing of it, not just venting it into the atmosphere, etc.

But if it's not used as a refrigerant, the exact same substance is labeled as HFC-134a. This is what is in most of those "compressed air" duster cans.

I don't know about this particular case, but a lot of times when one looks more deeply at two things that are the "exact same substance", one finds that they may be primarily the same substance, but there are a number of surrounding details that are different driving the separate products. It could be different marker smells or dyes, or that there is a bit of lubricant additive in R-134a, etc...

This does allow the duster cans to be banned easily without affecting fridges if it is discovered the gas is toxic.

This hysteria reminds me of the Nickel mines in Northern Ontario. For decades, they dumped high-sulfur compounds up the smokestacks. The surrounding area had millions of trees die or get stunted, and the rocks etched black from decades of sulfuric acid.

After much kicking and screaming, they were forced to put precipitators on the stacks to remove the sulfuric acid.

Which they then sold for more money than it cost to add the precipitators.

Oops.

These people pollute and lie about even when they would make more money by not polluting.

Of all the Saturday morning cartoons I watched, Captain Planet is the one I least expected to be a realistic portrayal of the world.

> One important difference between the CFC ban and carbon emissions caps is the availability of inexpensive alternatives: HFCs.

A very important thing to note about the difference is that CFCs and HFCs are produced by the same corporations.

Du Pont fought tooth and nail against a CFC ban until it was shown that HFCs would work in the same applications, at which point they turned about face and supported it.