Global Deal on Climate-Warming HFCs Hinges on Secret White House Policy

Hydrofluorocarbons – or HFCs – are gases most people have never heard of, even though almost everybody in America has bought their fair share of them.

They come inside cars and air conditioners and refrigerators as the newest gases of choice in cooling systems and are many thousands of times more potent than CO2 as climate warming agents.

Use of these gases is expected to mushroom with rising prosperity in developing nations, and if left unchecked could be equivalent to as much as 45% of CO2 emissions in 2050. It is an invisible emergency within a climate emergency whose outsized contours were confirmed in a scientific paper published last month by the National Academy of Sciences.

The public is barely aware of the issue, though, and as the White House works to hammer out its policy, it seems to want to keep it that way.

As a result, HFCs have become one of the most important sleeper issues in the international climate arena, caught in a Byzantine crossfire of conflicting interests and turf wars both within the administration and outside it. At stake right now is an opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate international leadership and score a big victory for the climate during meetings in Geneva next week. Most stakeholders fear a golden opportunity to build momentum ahead of Copenhagen climate talks will be squandered, even though many see an inspiring victory within easy reach.

"We can take HFCs out before Copenhagen and offer it as Exhibit A to the world to show what can be done to protect the climate," said Durwood Zaelke, founder and president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.

"This is exactly the kind of signal the climate markets need, and the big question now is what will the U.S. do."

NGOs want to see the Montreal Protocol – dubbed "the treaty that never fails" – amended to allow it to control HFCs, since securing a new climate treaty that can do the job as quickly and efficiently is an uncertain prospect at best. The Montreal treaty has a working international mechanism on the ground in every country, and in the 20 years since ratification, it has successfully phased down the use of more than 95 similar substances. With little left to do, the treaty mechanism could easily be tapped for climate duty.

Nobody is quite sure what U.S. policy will be, because from the White House, mum’s the word, inaugural promises of transparent and science-base policymaking notwithstanding.

EPA issued a statement weeks ago when the scientific paper on HFCs was published, saying the agency "anticipates robust and meaningful discussions of HFCs at July’s Open-Ended Working Group meeting of Montreal Protocol Parties" in Geneva. Questions sent this week by e-mail and by voice mail to the State Department, EPA and the White House, asking for detail on U.S. policy going in to the meetings, have not been answered.

Bush Was More Open About HFCs

NGOs like Zaelke's that have been working on the issue for years have encountered the same closed door, frozen out from meetings and kept in the dark about the substance of discussions. They are so frustrated that they have taken to publicly calling out the Obama administration for lack of access as compared to the Bush administration, a low blow with truth to it, in the hope of piercing the cone of silence.

"If the Bush team had been doing this, we would have been hammered," said George David Banks, who served in the Bush administration and now works for IGSD, Zaelke's group. "Under President Bush, we used to hold large public stakeholder meetings at the White House to advance policy on HFCs."

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