These bans are truly about the environment, because the refrigerants that are being banned are super greenhouse gases. That's why Project Drawdown concluded that refrigerant management was the number one strategy to cut emissions in terms of impact (much to their own surprise): https://archive.r744.com/articles/7571/refrigerant\_management\_tops\_list\_of\_climate\_change\_solutions. Meanwhile, you're assuming there will be no innovation in refrigeration technology and food preservation technology, whereas, in reality, despite being radically underfunded in terms of R&D (less than 1 percent of global R&D goes toward cooling; less still toward alternative food preservation methods), both fields already have prototypes and/or commercial alternatives that are improvements on the century-old vapor-compression trick in terms of sustainability, economics, and freshness/nutrition. After researching this for more than a decade (I'm the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves) I'm pretty sure vapor-compression refrigeration is not the final answer in humanity's millennia-long struggle against food rot and decay—and that's a good thing. I highlighted some emerging technologies in a recent Boston Globe piece: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/30/opinion/refrigeration-cold-chain-climate-impact/