“Climate Warming Gases Rising Faster Than Expected” was the headline of an Associated Press story published in mid-February.

It summarized a report from the Carnegie Institution for Science given at a Chicago conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was a report on carbon emission increases, claiming they have been growing by 3.5 percent per year since 2000 up from 0.9 percent in the 1990s.

Oh no, I thought, here come HFC refrigerants into the environmentalists’ cross hairs since they are considered global warming gases.

But, the blame game in this case was leveled elsewhere and at a much more worthy target. “The largest factor (for global warming) is the widespread adoption of coal as an energy source,” said Carnegie’s Christopher Field. “And without aggressive attention, societies will continue to focus on the energy sources that are cheapest and that means coal.”

Well now, here is the HVACR industry in which HFCs are kept in contained systems so they don’t leak into the atmosphere. And we are constantly coming up with more energy-efficient equipment and technologies designed to burn less fossil fuels like coal.

Frankly, we as an industry welcome solar, hydroelectric, or wind as a generator of power, because we can certainly plug our heating, cooling, and refrigeration equipment into any such generator.

Let’s hope this most recent finding has environmentalists focusing more attention on the generators of power, than us users.