Trump administration moves to relax rules on climate super pollutants

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration announced on Sept 30 that it planned to relax a Biden-era rule requiring grocery stores, air-conditioning companies, semiconductor plants and others to sharply and rapidly reduce some powerful greenhouse gases used in cooling equipment.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plan would unravel what many industry leaders and environmentalists view as a rare success for the climate: a bipartisan agreement that those human-made chemicals, known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, should be rapidly phased down.

HFCs, which are commonly referred to as super pollutants, are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet.

But EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the Biden administration’s plan for cutting the production and consumption of the chemicals, which aimed for an 85 per cent reduction by 2036, did not give companies enough time to meet their deadlines.

He said the rapid switch to other refrigerant blends had caused shortages that left families without air-conditioning in hot summer months, a claim the air-conditioning industry has said is exaggerated.

“With this proposal, EPA is working to make American refrigerants affordable, safe and reliable again,” Mr Zeldin said in a statement.

The proposal came just hours before

an expected government shutdown

amid a deadlock between US President Donald Trump and Democrats over spending.

If an agreement is not reached and federal employees are furloughed, work on all pending regulations will be on hold. A shutdown could also potentially delay Mr Zeldin’s plans for repealing dozens of climate protections enacted under the Biden administration.

Phasing out HFCs worldwide could avert up to 0.5 deg C of global warming by the end of the century, which would go a long way towards averting the worst consequences of climate change.

In fact, it was Mr Trump, during his first term, who signed into law a measure directing the EPA to ratchet down the climate pollutant. The provision was tucked into a sweeping Covid-19 relief Bill that passed Congress at the tail end of his presidency.

The Biden administration, which wrote the HFC regulations to enact that law, hoped to eliminate the equivalent of 4.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050, or about three years’ worth of climate pollution from the electricity sector.

Unlike efforts to curb fossil fuels, plans to reduce HFCs have won broad support from both Democrats and Republicans, as well as industry groups and environmental organisations. With other countries moving away from HFCs, many supporters described the Biden rule as protecting the US$206 billion-a-year (S$265 billion) cooling industry by helping to put all manufacturers on a level playing field and by helping to support alternatives.

“We liked the rule that came out at the end of the Biden administration,” said Mr Francis Dietz, vice-president of public affairs at the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute.

Mr Dietz pushed back on the Trump administration’s claims about dangerous shortages of alternatives to HFCs. He said that there had been a temporary shortage in 2025, but that it had been resolved. He also said the proposed compliance delays could disrupt planning and investment by US manufacturers because companies have already retooled production and built supply chains around the current schedule.

“We wanted certainty and we had it, and now we don’t, potentially,” he said.

Many grocery store operators, however, had been pushing for changes and said they were pleased with the Trump administration’s plan.

Ms Leslie G. Sarasin, president and chief executive of the Food Industry Association, a trade group, said in a statement that the Biden rule had imposed “significant and unrealistic compliance timelines”. She said the Trump plan would make changes “in a way that achieves the intended environmental benefits without placing unnecessary and costly burdens on the food industry”.

Under the proposal, the residential air-conditioning sector, the retail food refrigeration sector, cold storage warehouses and semiconductor manufacturing would potentially have five more years to switch to alternative coolants.

Environmentalists said the changes would have marginal effects on businesses and huge effects on the climate.

“This is not going to make potato chips or computer chips any cheaper,” said Mr David Doniger, senior strategic director of the climate and clean energy programme at the Natural Resources Defence Council, an environmental group.

“These are extremely powerful greenhouse gases” that will now linger longer in the atmosphere, he said.

The public will have 45 days to comment on the proposal once it appears in the Federal Register, and the EPA said there would also be a virtual public hearing on the plans before changes are finalised. NYTIMES