Well, howdy there internet people, let's be again. So today we're going to talk about

refrigerants and an agreement in the Senate and how and why it happened.

And we have some good news on the climate front,

which is a sentence I don't get to say very often.

The Senate voted 69 to 27

to push through an amendment to the Montreal protocols.

Now the agreement itself was hammered out like back in 2016 or something and were way behind.

But it's getting through. So what does it do? It scales back use of a certain

refrigerant, commonly called HFCs. It's a refrigerant that is widely used. It's kind of a big deal that this is being phased down, I don't want to say phased out, because this amendment theoretically should eliminate about half a

degree Celsius of warming over the next hundred years. It's kind of a big deal. It's not

phasing it out. It's phasing it down. They have to reduce use of it by 85% over the next 15 years. But here's the

interesting thing. It's not going to take that long. It won't take that long.

It won't take 15 years to get this done. And the reason it won't take that long. It won't take 15 years to get this done. And the reason it won't take 15 years is also the reason it made it through. It's the reason it passed.

The transition away from HFCs is expected to stimulate literally billions of dollars in economic

investment in this country.

money.

It's one of those instances where environmental and economic interests align.

That's why it got through.

Make no mistake about it, if there wasn't money on the line,

it wouldn't have made it through. But since that money was there, that money was

there to be made, people threw their weight behind it and got the senators to vote

in favor of it. It's what happened.

...