From Engadget,
Today, more than 170 nations have settled on a plan to cut the use of hydrofluorocarbons (or HFCs), a refrigerant that causes warming in the Earth's atmosphere. Called the Kigali Amendment for the location of negotiations in Rwanda, it's the result of seven years of work to expand the Montreal Protocol reached in 1987. That deal phased out the use of ozone-depleting chemicals, and by adding to it, this agreement carries its legally binding weight as a treaty, without needing to wait for ratification like last year's Paris Agreement.
The New York Times notes that the Kigali Amendment was partially helped by President Obama’s making the effort to amend the Montreal Protocol(which was ratified by Congress during the Reagan Administration) a top White House priority to further the President’s goal of tackling climate change in a meaningful way. It also helps that he doesn’t need to take this through Congress.
The Natural Resources Defense Council says that the Kigali Amendment will avoid “nearly 90 percent of the tempature increases that HFCs would have caused” which scientists have estimated to have been a global temperature increase of 0.5 degrees centigrade. The NRDC also estimates that this would “avoid the equivalent of more than 80 billion tons of CO2 over the next 35 years.”
Developed countries would make their first HFC cuts by 2019, which the EU & the US have already started. China, Brazil & more than 100 other developing countries have committed to freeze HFC production by 2024. India, the Gulf States & Pakistan would freeze their HFC production by 2038.
I have my doubts that cable networks will give this piece of really good news for the planet the kind of coverage it deserves, but this really is a Big Fucking Deal as Joe Biden would say. It would seem that this could be the future of important climate agreements: narrow, techocratic, and avoid the mess of having to ratify through the Senate given the supermajority requirements that any new international treaty would have to pass to have the binding force of law.