Refrigerant and climate change is a problem we created by replacing very efficient CFC based refrigerants with a very short lifetime in the atmosphere with "more stable compounds".

It was a huge political failure, which was completely focused on the "ozone hole" rather than making wise decisions. Just banning CFC's as propellants, and all the other uses which basically dumped huge quantities into the atmosphere and putting licensing requirements around their use, and enforcing the recapture (aka AC techs are tracked for how much they buy vs return), and not filling leaky systems would have solved the immediate problem. But the legislative bodies were also convinced to legislate a change in equipment/refrigerant to these newer compounds which had a huge positive effect on many manufactures and AC installers bottom line. And now we have to do it again because the people warning about the dangers of these new (frequently patented) refrigerant compounds were ignored.

Like the story about American democracy, this is going to be one of those cases of trying all the wrong approaches before doing the right thing.