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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

AC is not harmful to the planet, carbon-based sources of energy are.

The ideological framing of the degrowth movement is all around us.

Common refrigerants are also potent greenhouse gases.

The currently used R32 is equivalent to 675x the CO2, so a typical AC unit will have several tonne equivalents of it inside.

That's still an upgrade over its predecessor - R410a, for which the same figure was 2088x.

Heat pumps have the same problem, which is why the recently deployed 33MW district heating heat pump in Helsinki uses CO2 as a refrigerant:

https://www.man-es.com/company/press-releases/press-details/...

It‘s only a problem if the system is not properly installed.

In countries with proper regulation and professional certification this is not an issue.

This is incorrect. Every ounce of that stuff winds up outside eventually. Regulation can only put it off. It's a gas and it has to go somewhere. It's like trying to keep lithium out of landfills.

Please provide a source for this wild claim. Nothing winds up outside, unless it leaks. The gas can and does get reused indefinitely.

Additionally and just to put it in perspective, a typical AC Split-Setup contains around 1kg of R32 which would be equivalent to 677 kg of CO2 _if_ it would leak completely over the 20 years of usage (which it doesn‘t). That‘s equivalent of the CO2 contained in 285 liters of gasoline or about driving 3000 kilometers by car (for cars using 7-8 liters). The expected leakage is 1-3 percent. So that‘s around 30 kilometers by car per year.

In reality, modern ACs are widely used for heating in winter (I am doing this myself) and help to reduce CO2 emissions compared to heating with oil or gas.

edit: I had to edit this twice. Actually the first estimate was correct.

I think the claim that all working fluid put into an AC ends up in the atmosphere is correct for now. Most AC decommissions I heard about involved venting the gas to the atmosphere. Given the high cost of labour everywhere, the zero labour option is the one we must expect.

There's no country AFAIK that sanctions AC equipment owners or anyone else for not disposing properly of all their working fluid at the end of the equipment's lifetime.

In the USA the EPA will fine you for intentionally venting refrigerants to the atmosphere instead of using a refrigerant recovery system for recovery/reuse/disposal.

Pretty good reddit thread about the realities of enforcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/HVAC/comments/ugg89h/people_who_hav...

AC equipment is replaced at the end of its lifetime and picked up by professionals. That's a fact.

And as I pointed out, even if it wouldn't be picked up and leak _completely_, then it would still be 50x less than the average car owner emits in the same timeframe.

Even a single season of heating a house with natural gas already emits more than a complete leak. And who is loosing sleep about that? Maybe those who install an AC for a 20x emission reduction. Not those baselessly claiming that AC are environmentally problematic.

That's illegal. Refrigerant from old A/C units must be collected and disposed of safely, typically through high temperature combustion.

This does release greenhouse gasses, but just normal CO2 not the extremely potent gases originally present.

If it's always reliably collected, why does every old vehicle need its AC unit recharged?

Say 32 oz of refrigerant per car, 675x CO2 equivalence, if your car AC vents all the refrigerant it's like releasing 0.675 tons of CO2.

EPA says an average passenger vehicle releases 5 tons of CO2 per year, so if your AC lasts 10 years it's about 1% of your car's greenhouse gas emissions.

Leaks in a larger building AC would be worse, but I bet all the vibration and getting banged around by potholes makes the car systems a lot more prone to leaks than a stationary unit.

AFAIK Vehicles use flexible rubber pipes because the rigid copper pipes of fixed split ACs would not withstand the vibrations of a car. The downside of these more flexible pipes is that they leak more.

Well I live in the USA and know PLENTY of people who either DiY to save a buck or hired some yahoo who just cuts the lines and did whatever because they were cheap to hire. Money will corrupt any regulatory illusion you have.

Problem is tradesmen want to charge too much.

The tradesmen charge what it costs to run a sustainable business. Unless all the tradesmen in your area are driving Lamborghinis and live in multimillion-dollar homes?

All those regulations make running a business a chore so something has to give.

How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

Far as damaging the environment, I'm a contrarian. If people tell me "blah blah we're forcing you to help the environment because we think that's a good thing you should be doing" I'll do the opposite. At least for me they need to be saying "we're going to pass a law that forces you to pollute because our opinion is that is what you should be doing" and it is at that point that I would try to save the environment

This is irrelevant nitpicking.

For decades to come, we won't have 100% clean energy systems everywhere. Even if you power your AC 100% by solar energy, that solar energy won't be used to displace dirty energy elsewhere. Even if you make absolutely sure you have additional solar energy (I don't know how you'd do that), you still have production emissions for the solar panels.

For the forseeable future, if you can do X with less energy than before, that's an improvement.

During calm hot sunny days in the summer (so.. the ones when you need AC the most), we already have surplus of solar energy and serious problems (in some places) what to do with that energy (you have to dump it somewhere).

> you have to dump it somewhere

You don't. Solar panels are more than happy to sit idle. "Excess energy" is an economics problem, not a physics one.

Why sit idle, when they can cool your house by powering the AC?

No reason. It's obviously better to use power than waste it, but it's not a "serious problem" if we don't. It doesn't damage panels. It doesn't stress the grid. It doesn't cause additional emissions.

Sure, in a world with an excess of carbon-free energy, air-conditioning is not harmful to the planet.

In the current reality, where global CO2 emissions continue to rise, yes it is harmful.

The ideological framing of ostriches is all around us.

The energy source for AC is a big issue but the refrigerant gas in most AC units cause issues for the ozone and for global climate change.

Is this still true in 2024? AFIK, modern ( everything after 2010) ACs, pumps and refrigerator use ozone neutral gas like HFC.

It is still true, most common refrigerants still have quite high GWP [1]. Not as bad as in the 70's, but the transition to neutral gasses is not ready yet. And then there is also all the old installed systems still running.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Common_refrigerant...

It says right in the table that propane only has 3.3 times the potential of CO₂. That's in fact quite low for the use.

HFCs are amongst the most damaging climate gases.

It's a very unfortunate outcome of phasing out CFCs that they have in many instances been replaced by powerful greenhouse gases. HFCs are slowly phased out as well, but there are still a lot of harmful gases out there.

The typically used R32 does not cause any ozone issues. It is a climate gas, but only if it escapes from the pipes which it doesn‘t if properly installed.

Except of course they're related: AC uses energy and much of our current energy generation releases carbon.

I don't agree with the degrowth framing at all. The article's intro actually suggests growth is expected and desirable:

> By one estimate, the number of room-cooling ACs could nearly triple between now and 2050.

> These additional units will save lives, make cities liveable and stave off losses in economic productivity.

Your framing is interesting too! Is there a name for discussing technology only in the abstract, ignoring it's connection to the real world? Ideological pedantry?

I mean, AC will literally save lives during the increasingly frequent heat waves of the future. AC is not the problem, making sure the energy that powers it is renewable is the problem.

When I move to my next place, I will be installing a solar panel and battery setup sufficient keep the fridge, freezer, and at least one room of the house cool during a heat wave. I don't really care how much it costs.

When we are actively warming the environment around us. Isn't that bad for our planet in some way?

Edit:// serious question. Maybe it doesn't matter, I don't know.

Not really. The Sun radiates about 1000W/m^2 of energy at Earth distances. AC won't hold a candle to that. That's why global warming conversations focus on greenhouses gases that trap the Sun's energy, not industrial processes that release heat.

  > AC is not harmful to the planet

Scientists who studied and rank climate solutions beg to differ.

https://drawdown.org/solutions/refrigerant-management

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6QCPN6KLB8

  > The ideological framing of the degrowth movement is all around us.

If growth (which itself is super vague; growth of what? benefiting whom?) was always a good thing without exception, this complaint would automatically be valid. However we're awash in ideological framing all around us supporting growth, even when growth is—yes Virginia—sometimes detrimental. An ideological counterbalance is desperately needed.

Wouldn't it be weird if growth of everything was always a good think in any scenario, forever? :-\ Maybe we should be just slightly more selective and data-driven than that...

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