New and Better Ain’t Always

Well, pluck my tail feathers, fry me up and call me dinner. The more I find out about the future the more worried I am. Here we are in Stump County, Virginia, about 100 years behind you real folks and I’m worried about you.  Last week I wrote that while our scientists are warning us about global cooling the ones in your world are warning about global warming.

I was concerned that if our scientists were wrong, and they were, if you folks in the real world could really trust your scientists.

This weekend I slipped over to the real world and read some newspapers on one of those com-puter machines. I found two stories. Times like this I’m glad I live in imaginary Stump County and don’t have to pretend this stuff makes sense.

What happened was this. Way back (for you folks and way ahead for us in 1987) folks outlawed Freon 12 claiming it destroyed the ozone layer and without ozone they said you folks were gonna fry in the sun like chickens. They claimed they had a better product called R-134A. Even though outlawing Freon 12 made the price of fixing stuff that heated and cooled go through the roof and even though millions of air conditioners and refrigerators and heating and cooling units were suddenly obsolete and had to be replaced they claimed it was worth it.

I could have warned you all about all of that high tech stuff. Ain’t nothing wrong with keeping milk and butter in the spring house, and a big block of ice in your Frigid-aire ice box will keep anything cool. You folks seem to think everything needs cooling.

Anyway, today ( your time 2014) there was an article claimin’ how successful banning Freon 12 was. Another article says President Yo Mama is hot on the trail of R-134A because it is the number one culprit in climate change. They want to ban it and replace it with something else new and “better” which also means untested and questionable.

Don’t just take my word for it. Read the actual 2014 news articled below.

Then in another 20 years or so they can replace that with another “new and improved and better” when they find out that one is hurting the earth.

 “An environment story without warnings of impending doom: The ozone layer that blocks cancer-causing rays from the sun is finally starting to recover thanks to global action, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. While it will probably take until the middle of this century to recover to where it was in 1980, experts from the world bodies say a 1987 ban on chemicals, including the chlorofluorocarbons once used in fridges and aerosol cans, appears to have paid off, preventing hundreds of thousands of cases of skin cancer in the process, Reuters reports.

Researchers hailed the findings as an example of what can happen when the political will is there to protect the environment. Humans “have started to do the right thing in order to convert the atmosphere back toward what it was before the Industrial Revolution started,” a NASA expert tells the BBC. WMO chief Michel Jarraud describes the ozone recovery as a “major environmental success story” that “should encourage us to display the same level of urgency and unity to tackle the even greater challenge of tackling climate change 

– The Obama administration has a new goal in its effort to fight climate change: get Americans—and the world—to quickly stop using a chemical coolant found in just about every US home, car, and office. R-134a is a hydrofluorocarbon, or HFC; the chemical was used to replace ozone-damaging Freon in air conditioners and refrigerators in the 1990s. Trouble is, certain HFCs can be up to 10,000 times more dangerous per ounce than carbon dioxide when it comes to climate change, according to scientists. Today, the administration will announce that top retailers and chemical firms have voluntarily agreed to cut down on the use of such coolants, the Washington Post reports.

The manufacturers behind about 95% of American HFC production have voluntarily agreed to work with the administration to quickly offer a replacement coolant—one option, HFO-1234yf, can be subbed in for R-134a with little modification to the cooling system. The eventual eradication of R-134a will be environmentally comparable to taking 15 million cars off the highways for 10 years, an official says.