by Ayurella Horn-Müllergrist
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Nearly six years ago, during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the president signed a piece of bipartisan legislation aimed at ending the widespread use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are powerful. Greenhouse gases Commonly used in commercial cooling equipment in grocery stores and air conditioning systems.
At the time, he praised the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, which was created in line with an international agreement to reduce the widespread use of “super pollutants”, which would benefit US manufacturers working to develop alternative and less environmentally harmful refrigerants. The Environmental Protection Agency will then spend the next four years under former President Joe Biden working to implement a series of rules to help enforce the law, which set a goal of phasing out the production and use of 85 percent of the pollutant by 2036.
This time Trump has moved away from his position. At a White House press conference last month, he announced that the administration would relax two of the EPA’s refrigerant rules, delay the deadline for grocery stores and air-conditioning companies to begin reducing their use of hydrofluorocarbons, and exempt transportation companies from repairing HFC leaks in refrigeration equipment.
Flanked by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and a handful of the nation’s grocery chain executives, the president attacked both the rule and the law he signed, promising Americans that the move would have no environmental consequences and would lower supermarket bills. Trump estimated that US businesses and households would save more than $2.4 billion under the new rule changes, while expressing a desire to get rid of the underlying law entirely.
“Thanks to today’s reforms, the American people have lower grocery prices, cheaper transportation, lower air conditioning costs that don’t hurt our country,” Trump said. said.
There’s just one problem – it’s not right. Economists and former EPA officials say rollback The price is likely to increase rather than reducing them. Some industry groups to warn The sudden change in administration will increase demand for appliances that use the most climate-damaging HFCs, which are steadily falling behind. Even Trump’s EPA An internal assessment acknowledged that the rules had changed can achieve the opposite of its stated goals — instead of reducing costs, the dynamics of supply and demand it creates can improve them.
Chris Barrett, an economist at Cornell University, said, “It doesn’t add up. There’s no reasonable way to relax these rules that’s going to produce any meaningful reduction in the cost of people buying food.”
According to the US Department of Agriculture Food Dollar DataThat’s considered the best breakdown of costs, with food retail, transportation, storage, and energy costs together accounting for about 20 percent of the American consumer’s grocery bill. But refrigerants, according to Barrett, aren’t a meaningful part of that segment. “We’re talking about a maximum reduction of one percentage point on your grocery bill,” said Barrett, who added it’s more likely to amount to a fraction of a percentage point. “For a consumer who’s spending $200 a week on groceries, it’s probably going to save you a dollar or two at most.”
HFCs are incredibly powerful greenhouse gases primarily used as cooling agents in everything Supermarket freezer from The slushie machine. Commercial systems using HFCs also tend to leak — the EPA estimates that only US supermarkets leak on average. 25 percent of their refrigerant each year. Although superpollutants do not stay in the atmosphere very long, their global warming potential is hundreds to thousands of times stronger than that of carbon dioxide.
A 2020 law signed by Trump has phased out the production and use of HFCs in line with an international agreement known as the Kigali Amendment. The result of years of negotiations by parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Ozone Pollution, the Kigali Amendment aimed to limit excess warming to 0.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which scientists to warn will be Huge consequences and for agriculture The global food system. Trump though The deal was not sent to the Senate For ratification in its first term, the United States formally ratified the amendment 2022 Under Biden. Inside Climate News reported A recent EPA assessment estimated that relaxing the national threshold would likely increase emissions 68 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050.
Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration, suspects that Trump’s cost-saving messages around the rollback are nothing more than a “gimmick” to appease disaffected voters struggling. Rising inflation Before midterms. Part of what Trump and Zeldin are doing with these changes, he said, is “wanting to create some grocery-value theater.”
The administration argues that alternative materials to high-global-warming-potential HFCs are not widely available, making the timeline set by the rule for phaseout too aggressive and expensive for food companies — costs, they say, that will be passed on to consumers. but Critics hit back That’s what the US business has been through the past few years billion investment Among new refrigerants, equipment, production lines and staffing. Chemours and Honeywell already have Advanced alternative refrigerants Domestic and global sales. So are groups like the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy. Condemned the idea That market needs more time.
“We heard that argument, I would say, three years ago,” Goffman said. “It’s almost, by definition, arbitrary for the Trump EPA to say, ‘We’ll come along and make these changes,’ as if the EPA hasn’t already received a lot of information and worked through these issues.”
Although several major supermarket chains and grocer groups there is Pronounced in support Changing the rules, the administration’s claim that savings will flow through grocery consumers remains unproven. They advocate for revisions to EPA’s regulations Grocers do not carry orders to cut pricesAnd it’s unclear whether companies will voluntarily use any projected savings from rollbacks to lower their prices, rather than reduce pressure on their own bottom lines.
Food prices are shaped by many dynamics, but the dominant forces are demand and supply. Over the past few decades, the demand for food has steadily increased due to global population growth, higher incomes and urbanization. Supplies have struggled to keep pace, and food prices have continued to rise as a result, punctuated by sharp spikes from recent shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the US-Israel conflict with Iran.
But Barrett says the back pressure is overwhelming Ever-increasing food inflation For most of the past six years Extreme weather and climate-related shocks have occurred With productivity growth lagging behind food production. Americans are actively watching this game Beef prices have skyrocketed across the countrylargely driven by persistent and prolonged droughts and heat waves that have decimated livestock and has created acute supply shortages. “The evidence is very clear,” Barrett said. “Climate change is predictably reducing supply growth, and therefore driving up prices in due course.”
By that logic, the administration’s rollback of refrigerant rules intended to reduce global-warming emissions, then, will not reduce rising food inflation but rather contain it.
“So, if relaxing these rules exacerbates climate change and gives us more intense and frequent episodes of extreme weather that hurt agricultural productivity, we’re actually growth grocery prices down the road,” he said. “It seems very difficult to see how this administration is doing much to relieve consumers of food price inflation concerns.”
“Who is really benefiting from this empty promise?” “We all have to start asking that question,” he said.
This article originally appeared on grist A https://grist.org/economics/no-rolling-back-these-environmental-rules-wont-lower-your-grocery-bill/.
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This is the story Originally published by grist.
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