Home insulation in China blamed for rise in emissions of ozone-depleting gas | Hacker News Reader

Home insulation in China blamed for rise in emissions of ozone-depleting gas

bbc.co.uk

135 pointsgadders15 comments

Active discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17488719

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090224 This is reversing the ozone recovery progress made with Montreal protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

The days after Montreal Protocol gave me so much positive hope for the world...

Chinese "goods" are cheaper due in part to many factors like this. I'm not at all a fan of blanket tariffs, but simple free trade doesn't seem to have the stomach to deal with this imbalance in standards, or standards enforcement.

I think if instead of just certifying products for safety etc, the entire process by which they were made was also subject to certification, grading etc, that could be an answer. ie products attract a higher tariff if the producer has poor labor, environmental, safety, community practices, along with grading the quality, durability, repairability of the products themselves.

Ever wonder why humans, who have predominantly lived and worked outdoors until the last century, suddenly need suncream to go outdoors?

Ancient texts don't talk of terrible sunburn, everyone having skin cancer, or anything like that.

My guess is the main cause is ozone depletion: https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/433982main_percent-chang...

UV-b has increased substantially since 1979, and considering CFC gasses were first used in the 1930's, it's likley that UV-b has very significantly increased since then.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

People in the northern regions self developed weakness to sun. if you only get sun/heat for 3 months of the year, your body will adapt to these conditions.

No wonder people wear long sleeves and hats.

You could also argue that people were wearing much more clothes back then, covering most parts of their body, and avoided staying exposed to the sun for too long. Also: the life expectancy was lower, and skin cancer probably not as easily identified as today.

CFC-11 is an... odd choice of blowing agent. It's a liquid at room temperature and boils slightly above, compared with the majority of others I know of which are gases. But apparently it is used, here's an interesting read:

http://www.polymerjournals.com/pdfdownload/850527.pdf

It may be difficult to enforce the rules on thousands of foam companies, to get them to use something worse and more expensive.

But there must only be a handful of factories making the stuff. That should obviously be the target.

I saw this when the initial report was posted and I've been wondering why the Trump administration hasn't jumped on it. Whatever Trump thinks about the environment, it seems like this could be used as trade war ammunition.

The key ammunition should be the Great FireWall. If you want to make money in China you gotta increase western influence, which GFW effectively eradicated 99%.

dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17488719

Time to put those sanctions into good use. Mr T, take a hint nudge nudge

Palm held directly to face.

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