The head of the Environmental Protection Agency will lead the U.S. delegation to a major climate conference in Vienna later this week, the White House said Monday.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy will head to Austria for a meeting of the parties to the Montreal Protocol, an agreement in which signatories have agreed to reduce emissions of ozone-depleting substances.
The aim of the meeting in Austria is to come up with an amendment to the agreement to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, said National Security Council spokesman Ned Price. In recent years, HFCs have been used to replace ozone-depleting substances for refrigeration and air conditioning, but recent science shows HFCs are a greenhouse gas roughly 10,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Many scientists blamd greenhouse gases for driving manmade climate change.
In a November meeting in Dubai, the nations in the Montreal Protocol agreed to limit HFCs, but left how much until the Vienna meeting.
The goal is to keep global temperatures from rising by a half-degree Celsius by 2100, McCarthy said in November.
The U.S. and other countries agreed to the Montreal Protocol in 1989. That agreement has led to a 97 percent reduction in the production of substances that harm the ozone layer. Scientists believe the ozone layer will fully heal by 2050 thanks to the agreement.
