Word: freon
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Those were the first heady days, when the learning curve was steep and the flexibility almost unlimited. They switched from ammonia to the refrigerant Freon as the separating agent without filing a single proposal, cost analysis or environmental-impact statement, without any of the constraints big corporations face daily. If something worked, they used it; if it didn't, they tried something else...
...planet of the millions of tons of ozone-depleting chemicals contained in that vision is not just a big job; it may be the biggest job the nations of the world have ever taken on. In the 60 years since Du Pont began marketing the miracle refrigerant it called Freon, chlorofluorocarbons have worked their way deep into the machinery of what much of the world thinks of as modern life -- air-conditioned homes and offices, climate-controlled shopping malls, refrigerated grocery stores, squeaky-clean computer chips. Extricating the planet from the chemical burden of that high-tech life-style...
Scott felt like a misfit at age 11, when his mother's remarriage took him from a lower-middle-class area to a wealthy suburb. Miserable, he began to drink and take drugs, buying $5 hits of the coolant Freon from a warehouse worker in the morning and then loading up on marijuana at his school during lunchtime. "It was like I was actually killing myself indirectly," says Scott, 18, who with treatment has been sober for three years...
...make matters worse, a host of other gases are now known to add to the greenhouse effect. In 1975, Ramanathan was amazed to discover that Freon, a widely used CFC, was an infrared absorber. "It had a very large impact," he says. "Since then, tracking down the role of other trace gases has become a cottage industry. There are dozens of them, and they are rivaling the effects of increasing CO2." In fact, by the year 2030 the earth will already face the equivalent of a doubling of CO2, thanks to these other rapidly increasing gases, including methane, nitrous oxide...
Determined to buy the best refrigeration equipment possible, Trump sent a team to Canada, where there are some 4,000 skating rinks. After consulting with Canadian experts, Trump bought brine Freon chillers (cost: $640,000), which are powerful enough to make ice in July. The units were too big to fit through the building's doors, so Trump removed the roof, lowered the machinery inside, then replaced the roof. Trump, a man of expensive tastes, could not resist a luxurious touch: instead of using pine for the rest stands, as the city had planned, he chose polished teak...