Here's how the UN climate conference delegates kept their cool. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
The air-conditioning system installed to keep more than 10,000 delegates cool used highly damaging refrigerant gases - as lethal to the atmosphere as 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and nearly the equivalent of the emissions of all aircraft used to fly delegates to Indonesia. ...
Staff from Australia's Natural Refrigerants Transition Board and the London- and Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency noticed the stockpiled cylinders of hydrochlorofluorocarbons - a refrigerant likely to be phased out over the next few years because it devours ozone in the upper atmosphere. In addition, the refrigerant is a potent greenhouse gas, with each kilogram at least as damaging as 1.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
After a fortnight of discussions with its Indonesian hosts and the contractors who installed the air-conditioning, the investigation agency proposed sending experts to safely recover the HCFC emissions by storing the refrigerant gas in sealed containers.
Australian officials were contacted and offered to help. The information was also sent to the staff of the former US vice-president Al Gore, and Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
By Friday the Indonesian Department of Environment decided to commit its own staff to a careful clean-up.
The people from Australia's Natural Refrigerants Transition Board and the London- and Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency probably recognized the cylinders because they saw them before. I wonder how many of the other 10,000 worlds greatest environmental experts did? Some things tend not to be recognized. Remember this object with a copper driving band still on it that looks a lot like, oh, a 155 mm artillery shell?
NYT caption: Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border. Courtesy of Sweetness and Light.
Makes you wonder though if you could hold a convention of 10,000 doctors and have only a handful of them recognize the drinking faucets were hooked up to a sewer, then have it take two weeks of discussion with the hosts to patch it up?