Peace talks

“I was never a teen eco-zealot,” says Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace. But as we talk in the leafy garden of Greenpeace’s Islington hq, it soon becomes clear that he is just as passionate about the environment as the organisation’s frontline activists. Parr tells me that some of those volunteers are occupying a museum in Glasgow in protest at the national lottery’s funding of deforestation in south east Asia. News comes though later that nearly 100 activists had gone into the lottery-funded Kelvingrove art gallery and museum to remove packs of timber that had been sourced from the region’s last rainforest.

It’s a clear example of the numerous environmental campaigns that Greenpeace fights, but for Parr, one issue that has never gone away in his ten years in the job, is that of refrigeration. Use of harmful hfcs in refrigerants in buildings’ air conditioning equipment currently only contributes between 2%-4% of the total released into the atmosphere, but Parr says it is the future we should be worried about: “If you make some reasonable assumptions about fluorocarbon replacement of existing functions in developed countries and growth in RAC demand in developing countries then you come to the conclusion that by 2050, the global warming impact of f-gases is going to be the same as that of today’s passenger cars.”

Greenpeace is campaigning for non-fluorocarbon natural refrigerants to replace fluorocarbons in refrigeration and other applications, but the most difficult sector to persuade, says Parr, is RAC. It has already happened on a large scale in the European domestic fridge market, a change due to the development of Greenfreeze technology in Germany in 1992. Greenpeace had identified an alternative to the use of hfcs in domestic refrigeration, and capitalised on the industrial uncertainty in eastern Europe at the time. Manufacturers recognised their product was under threat by a demand for hydrocarbon refrigerants, and converted. Today, around 90% of European domestic fridges are based on hydrocarbons.

“The purpose of that intervention was not just about the level of hfcs involved but about the symbolism,” says Parr. “At the time it was consistently denied that any alternatives were possible, safe and energy efficient. Now we know that if you want a highly efficient fridge you need to use hydrocarbons, not hfcs. After years of use of hydrocarbons in domestic fridges there hasn’t been a single reported accident, so the arguments used at the time against hydrocarbons and Greenfreeze were completely vacuous and really just vested interest lobbying. We think we’re seeing the same thing in the use of F-gases in other sectors of refrigeration.”

The biggest step towards a total ban on hfcs is the forthcoming EU F-Gas Regulation (see BSJ 08/04), due to go to the council of ministers for debate this month. Parr says though, that some of the progressive legislation passed in some countries to reduce the use of F-gases is going to be undermined and threatened by the F-gas regulation. “In Austria and Denmark, the regulation will actually stop f-gas replacement in certain sectors. All the important parts of the regulation are being considered under the internal market regulation on a legal basis, which means the EU wants to standardise across Europe and make it a common market. If that happens, no one will be allowed to go beyond that standard for environmental purposes. So if the standard says there will be no regulation on f-gases in commercial air conditioning, then anyone who is proposing or has implemented standards on commercial air conditioning will be contravening the internal market and could be taken to court by the commission.”

Greenpeace is currently campaigning to get the regulation put on an environmental basis, making it the lowest standard and allowing other countries to go beyond it. “The council is currently split,” he says, “and the usual countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Austria are in favour of an environmental basis while countries who haven’t got such a good record on this issue such as France are against. It’s uncertain what the attitude of the new member states is going to be so it could go either way, but we still have hope.”

Lobbying policy makers is something Parr is heavily involved in, although he says the hfc issue is a difficult one to get them to focus on. “They appreciate that climate change is a long term issue and therefore you need to think long term about what needs to be done. To actually then convert that into an appreciation of acting now for the purposes of 10 or 20 years down the road is a battle. When you’re able to sit someone down and talk to them about it, they understand it, but getting that opportunity is quite hard.”

There are those who think Greenpeace is wasting its time on hfcs, claiming that it should be working on tougher issues such as reduction of car and aircraft use. “Why should we aim for the harder targets when this (f-gases) is a manufactured problem?” says Parr. “To get a grip on something like aircraft use we’d have to completely stop people flying, but you cant eliminate CO₂ emissions from aircraft use. HFCs are a manufactured problem, they exist totally within the technological domain and you can massively reduce global warming impact from refrigerant gases just by the advance of technology, it’s within our control, so let’s do something about it.”

Corporate collaboration

Greenpeace supported a recent event where three of the biggest contributors of hfcs to the atmosphere, Coca-Cola, Unilever and McDonalds all announced the replacement of their hfc refrigerants. “It was a little unusual for us and there was some nervousness inside Greenpeace about doing it, but it was the right thing to do. Even though those companies have got their critics, including us, for what they’ve done in different parts of the world, we’re not an anti business organisation. But we will criticise those businesses that do wrong and we will support businesses that do right, including in some instances the same companies. A good example is BP. We criticise them for the role they play in global warming but we support BP solar. We don’t have a problem with that even if it can seem a bit odd to the outside world.” He is not naïve in thinking that such corporate giants are making these changes purely for the good of the environment - “they wouldn’t be doing it if it was going to lose them money” – but he thinks they can see the writing on the wall for hfcs, and an opportunity to save energy.

As far as the construction industry is concerned, Parr says it needs to focus on producing energy efficient buildings that use renewable resources. “The building standards in this country are nowhere near high enough. You’re building in a problem for future generations by continuing to specify buildings that are going be using hfcs in 30 years time. Buildings will be there for half a century or more and if they are built now at low standards we’re going to have to retrofit at huge expense in 15 to 20 years’ time. I know things like solar panels aren’t commercially ideal now, but there are other sources. Vertical axis wind turbines could be put on a building, providing local generation of energy and electricity.”

Parr says there is a degree of damage already done that we are yet to feel the full effect of. And it’s not just buildings that are to blame.

“In 20 years’ time we’ll be panicking about global warming. There was a hurricane in the south Atlantic this year for the first time in recorded history and most experts think that was a sign of global warming. The Met office says the floods we’ve had in the UK are down to global warming. We are on a trajectory where this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

How much worse? The chilling list of examples Parr reels off make for extremely uncomfortable reading: a permanently flooded Bangladesh; the disappearance of the South Sea Islands; the loss of all of Europe’s ski resorts, and that’s not all.

“Coral reefs globally are under threat and it’s an open question as to whether we’re actually able to save them. It takes such a long time for changes in emissions to feed through to changes in concentration because of the way we’ve built in CO₂ emissions to our very existence through energy, through refrigeration, through transport. We’re committed to a huge and very uncomfortable amount of warming already and I don’t know where that’s going to end.We wont feel the full impact of the emissions that we’ve so far released for another fifty years at least, so even if we stopped now the world’s temperature would keep getting hotter for that period.

“The inertia in our energy systems, transport systems, the atmosphere and the ocean is so great that if we start having disasters, we’re going have a lot more of them before we can do anything about it. Any sane society would be hitting the panic button now.”