One of the claims made in the book Facts not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment (Regenry Publishing, Inc. 1996) by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw is that replacing CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) will make refrigeration more expensive, and this will lead to an increase in deaths. Among the claims are that:
"more children will die of infectious diseases because it will be more difficult to keep vaccines cold" (page 48)
"By raising the price of refrigeration, the ban will cause more people to get sick from food poisoning and some will die." (page 48)
"Substitutes are less efficient." (page 170) "This means burning more fossil fuels and more pollution. Hardly an ideal solution for the environment!"
"And more people will go hungry because food cannot be safely preserved." (page 171)
A little research shows that Sanera and Shaw are only partly correct. According to the Air-Conditioning & Refrigeration Institute (personnel communication) in general if CFC is removed and replaced in a piece of equipment, it will be less efficient. However, in equipment designed to use CFC replacements, the efficiency will be the same or greater. In a series of reviews of refrigerators, Consumers Reports found that CFC free refrigerators cost about the same as those with CFCs, and are as efficient or even more so. One report (May 1995, pages 310-311) was titled "The new refrigerators: How much energy do they save?" And Business Week reported on July 24, 1995 that:
In fact, a ban may save money in the long run. Air-conditioning giant Trane Co. has improved the energy efficiency of its CFC-free commercial-building chillers by 40% over older models--conserving enough energy to pay for new devices. ``A building owner will save money,'' explains James Wolf, vice-president at American Standard Inc., Trane's parent. ``I see the ban as an economic benefit, not a liability.''
So Sanera and Shaw are right only in a limited number of cases, where substitutes are used in equipment designed for CFCs. And developing countries have been given additional time to phases out CFCs, so their economic impact should be lessened. Where did Sanera and Shaw's claims originated? There reference was an article in Scientific American (February 1996, pages 14-16) about keeping vaccines cold in developing countries. The article notes that "new equipment that employs substitute refrigerant chemicals has performed poorly and requires further development. 'There's a 30 percent drop in efficiency,' says John S. Lloyd, a WHO technical officer." To generalize from this one example is of course not justified. At the very least the authors should have done more research to see if others were having the same problems. And, there was no mention in Facts not Fear of new developments noted in the Scientific American article: attempts to developed vaccines that do not require refrigeration (although development was being protested by some environmentalists) and work on solar powered refrigerators.
Written by Jim Norton
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