Don’t Air Conditioners Emit Greenhouse Gases Vastly Worse Than CO2?

HFCs are being phased out in favor of greener alternatives. Nice! But not until 2024, and not everywhere. Bummer!

Heat Wave Benson Bubbler fight. (Chris Nesseth) (Chris Nesseth)

You downplay air conditioners’ energy use, but they do other damage, too: They raise urban temperatures by 10°F, emit greenhouse gases vastly worse than CO2, and encourage development in scorching climates—requiring yet more AC. —Ben

If I didn’t know better, Ben, I’d say you’d been preferentially stockpiling arguments to confirm a preexisting bias.

We all do this, of course. When I suggested last week that global tourism, with five times air conditioning’s carbon footprint, might be the more expendable of the two, it certainly didn’t hurt that I personally never travel. (This conflict of interest notwithstanding, I’m still pretty sure 64 Multnomah County residents never died in one weekend because they couldn’t make it to Cancun.)

AC is medium lousy for the environment—worse than nuclear power, say, but not as bad as Arby’s. We’ll put aside that 10-degree claim; the consensus is more like 2°F. As for development in hot places, I’ll just say that Phoenix may use a lot of air conditioning, but it doesn’t use much heat, which is the bigger energy draw.

That just leaves those “vastly worse” greenhouse gases (GHGs), which I freely admit are air conditioning’s most inconvenient truth.

Some of you may remember CFCs, the handy refrigerants and aerosol propellants that put that giant hole in the ozone layer in the 1970s. Oops! So they were replaced with HFCs, which don’t harm the ozone at all. Yay! Except HFCs turned out to be thousands of times more potent as GHGs than CO2 itself. Boo! So now HFCs are, in turn, being phased out in favor of greener alternatives. Nice! But not until 2024, and not everywhere. Bummer!

In the meantime, you can do your part by simply not repairing AC units or refrigerators yourself. I can attest that it takes just seconds to stupidly emit a pound and a half of r134a refrigerant into the atmosphere, which is the greenhouse equivalent of a car trip to Denver and back. This was probably the most immoral thing I’ve ever done.*

Still, as pernicious as HFCs are, they represent less than a fifth of AC’s total climate impact; the rest comes from generating the electricity it consumes. And combined it’s still less than a quarter of the damage done by those dirty, irresponsible leisure travelers and their pointlessly peripatetic perigrinations. Paris, schmaris.

*Yeah, right—who am I kidding?

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.