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Yahoo!We're all enjoying our LCD computer and television screens, which are in many ways environmentally superior to the big old CRT ones. And some of us have great hopes for "thin film photovoltaics," that they will provide solar energy more efficiently and more attractively, and certainly more cleanly than fossil fuels.
Nitrogen Trifluoride (NF3) is used in the manufacture of these, as well as common semiconductors found in computers and other electronics. Its global warming potential is 17,000 times that of CO2. Very small amounts are being released into the environment, but a recent NASA-funded study raised alarm at the quantity that is currently in our atmosphere (about 5,400 metric tons) and the 11 percent annual rate of its increase. It has an atmospheric lifetime of more than 500 years, so these concentrations are growing, not going away.
This was not known back when the Kyoto Protocol was created, with policies limiting greenhouse gases. In fact use of NF3 was encouraged by the Environmental Protection Agency to replace gases that seemed more dangerous to our atmosphere. Though no more irony is needed in this story, apparently yet another gas could be used in these processes instead, fluorine, which is not a greenhouse gas at all, and it does not persist in the environment. It just happens to be really toxic. Jeez.
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