HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
A recent study says it is a source of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) which environmentalists stigmatize as PFAS - 'forever chemicals' - and insist cause all kinds of disease they can see in statistics but science has not discovered yet.
They promoted HFO-1234yf as a cure for global warming potential, because it has 1/300th the global warming potential of the R-134a activists insisted needed replaced. Yet the new work says it breaks down in the atmosphere to TFA. And it has been put into nearly all cars by government fiat since 2017.
Activists turned their fundraising toward TFA and it'sa a genius business model. They are doing to car refrigerant what they did to natural gas, hydroelectric power, ethanol, and GMOs; get a substitute mandated and then sue over the product you demanded be in use. Blame Corporations. Say government scientists are colluding. It generates them $3 billion per year, even if it has never helped anyone.
Getting rid of hydrofluorocarbons and demanding hydrofluoroolefins be implemented, at far higher cost to consumers and unknown benefit, is a time-honored business model. If you hate science and regard fellow people as resources to be exploited.
Citation: TFA Generation and Deposition over Europe May Currently See a Greater Influence from HFO-1234yf than HFC-134a Rayne Holland, Ben Adam, M Anwar H Khan, Dickon Young, Simon O’Doherty, Kieran M. Stanley, Matthew Rigby, and Dudley E. Shallcross, Environmental Science & Technology Letters Article ASAP, DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.6c00356
