Why super pollutant credits are finally stepping into the spotlight

John Tinsley, VP and Co-Founder of Therm

We want climate impact now. Super pollutants deliver.

There’s growing interest in super pollutant credits across the carbon market—and for good reason. Some attribute the surge to cost-effectiveness or high ratings. Others point to updated protocols or strong mitigation potential. But beneath all that, I think there’s a more human explanation: we crave immediacy.

Carbon markets are built around timelines that often stretch beyond the present. But there’s a growing appetite for climate action that delivers real, visible results today, not just for future generations. (See: Google’s newly announced super pollutant partnership with Recoolit and Cool Effect.)

This appetite is part of what makes us human. Research in behavioral economics consistently shows that people are more motivated by immediate rewards than distant ones. Known as temporal discounting, this phenomenon is a powerful motivator of action. Yet, the climate space is often dominated by 100-, 400- or even 1,000-year outlooks, asking people to invest in climate benefits that they will never personally see.

Super pollutants offer a rare opportunity for climate action on a human timescale. The impact from these projects is measured in years, not generations. They align with the basic, human motivation to act now, then live to see that action matter.

Short-lived but potent: The science behind super pollutants

But let’s back up a second. If you haven’t heard the term “super pollutants” yet, it’s a descriptive category for gases with similar characteristics. Super pollutants—such as hydrofluorocarbons and methane—have an outsized influence on near-term warming. They’re defined by their high Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) and relatively short atmospheric lifespans. That combination makes them powerful levers for near-term climate mitigation.

• Methane has a GWP of 81 over a 20-year time horizon and a half-life of 11.8 years (IPCC AR6).
• HFC-134a, a common refrigerant, has a 20-year GWP of 4,140 and an atmospheric lifetime of 14 years (IPCC AR6).
• R-22, more commonly known as Freon, has a 20-year GWP of 5,690 and an atmospheric lifetime of 11.9 years (IPCC AR6).

Removing or destroying super pollutants like these offers an immediate cooling benefit, often within a decade or less. And these aren’t simply marginal gains. According to the Climate & Clean Air Coalition, reducing short-lived climate pollutants could avoid up to 0.6°C of warming by mid-century. 0.6°C of warming avoided by the time I retire, or my son gets married, or my daughter has her first child. 

Long-term vision, short-term wins

There is absolutely no question that we need long-term strategies like afforestation, soil carbon, and engineered removals. These interventions are vital to achieving net zero over the coming century and form the very foundation of true, lasting climate action. Improved Forest Management, for example, operates on a 40- to 100-year project cycle and provides essential biodiversity and co-benefits along the way.

But in parallel, we also need solutions that deliver results within the timelines that drive real-world decision making, like corporate reporting cycles, infrastructure planning, or the tenure of senior political leaders. Super pollutants are the rare solution that bridge those timelines. Their short atmospheric lifetime means tangible, measurable results in just a few years. They provide quick, verifiable emissions reductions that help stabilize the climate system now, while we build and protect slower, durable solutions for the long haul.

Hope is a climate solution, too

Right now, we’re seeing a generational shift in climate leadership. Many of today’s decision-makers grew up watching the environmental collapse in real time. We didn’t learn about the climate crisis from textbooks—we saw it unfold on TV, then social media, then in our backyards. We came of age alongside worsening headlines of holes in the ozone layer, megafires, mass extinctions, rising seas.

The emotional toll of this coming-of-age has been coined “climate anxiety” and linked to increased rates of depression and feelings of helplessness. The result is a generation with a deep desire to act, but often disillusioned by the slow pace of change. We are motivated, informed, and looking for solutions that meet the urgency of the moment.

Super pollutants are that rare combination of urgency and agency. They’re some of the most powerful climate forcers, but also some of the fastest to remove. Cutting them today yields measurable results in the next few years. And we’ve seen this before. The 1987 Montreal Protocol healed the ozone layer and became one of the most effective climate actions in history.

This kind of fast feedback—seeing results in decades, not centuries—offers something sorely missing in climate work: hope.

The underrated overachiever

There’s also a practical reason super pollutant credits are gaining traction. They’re high-integrity, low-maintenance projects, built around well-established industrial processes like commercial refrigeration, and refrigerant reclamation.

These activities are additional (they wouldn’t happen without market incentives), verifiable (the gas is measured and destroyed), and durable (destruction is permanent). No risk of reversal. No double-counting. No theoretical baselines. These attributes make them attractive to ratings agencies, buyers, and regulators alike.

They’re also cost-effective. The price per tonne is much lower than engineered removals, and the climate benefit per dollar is hard to beat.

And while they’ve flown under the radar for years—overshadowed by more headline-grabbing removals—they’re increasingly being recognized as the unicorn credits of the market. In a recent webinar hosted by Rubicon Carbon and Calyx Global, industry leaders referred to super pollutant projects as the "ugly duckling" of the carbon world: long overlooked, but now revealed to be precisely what the market needs.

Looking forward

To be clear, super pollutant credits aren’t a silver bullet. They don’t remove historical emissions, and their scope is limited by available refrigerants, landfills, and other sources. But they buy us time—and time is one of the scarcest resources we have left.

No single solution will solve climate change. But super pollutant credits offer something the market, and the world, desperately needs right now: confidence. Confidence that we can reduce warming in the near term. Confidence that the Voluntary Carbon Market can deliver measurable, immediate outcomes. And confidence that climate progress isn’t only possible for future generations. That it’s happening now.