Nearly six years ago, during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the president signed a piece of bipartisan legislation introduced to phase out the rampant use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are potent 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, created in line with an international agreement to tamp down widespread use of the “super pollutant,” as something that would benefit U.S. manufacturers working to produce alternative and less environmentally harmful refrigerants. The Environmental Protection Agency would 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 the goal of phasing out production and use of the pollutants by 85 percent by 2036.
Now, Trump has reversed his position. At a White House press conference last month, he announced the administration would be loosening two of the EPA’s refrigerant rules, delaying the deadline required for grocery stores and air-conditioning companies to begin reducing their use of hydrofluorocarbons, and exempting transport companies from repairing HFC leaks in refrigeration equipment.
Flanked by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and a handful of the country’s biggest grocery chain executives, the president assailed both the rule and the very law he signed, promising Americans the move would have no environmental consequence and bring down supermarket bills. Trump estimated that U.S. businesses and families will save more than $2.4 billion under the new rule changes, while expressing his desire to get rid of the underlying law altogether.
“Thanks to today’s reforms, the American people have lower grocery prices, cheaper transportation of goods, lower costs of air conditioning at no detriment to our country,” Trump said.
There’s just one problem — that’s just not true. Economists and former EPA officials say the rollbacks are more likely to raise prices than reduce them. Some industry groups warn the administration’s sudden turnabout would result in ramped up demand for equipment that use the most climate-damaging HFCs, which the sector had been steadily scaling back. Even Trump’s EPA has acknowledged in an internal assessment that the rule change could achieve the opposite of its stated goal — rather than lowering costs, the supply and demand dynamics it may create could elevate them.
“It just doesn’t add up. There’s just no plausible way in which relaxing these rules is going to generate any meaningful reduction in the costs of food people purchase,” said Chris Barrett, an economist at Cornell University.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Dollar data, which is widely considered the best breakdown of costs that go into an American consumer’s grocery bill, food retail, transport, storage, and energy costs together amount to roughly 20 percent. But refrigerants, according to Barrett, are not a meaningful slice of that share. “We’re talking about a maximum reduction of a percentage point in your grocery bill,” said Barrett, who added it’s much more likely to amount to a fraction of a percentage point. “For a consumer who’s spending $200 a week on groceries, maybe it will save you a dollar or two, at the maximum.”
HFCs are incredibly powerful greenhouse gases that are primarily used as cooling agents in everything from supermarket freezers to slushie machines. Commercial systems using HFCs are prone to leaking, too — the EPA has estimated that U.S. supermarkets alone leak an average of 25 percent of their refrigerants every year. Though the super pollutants don’t stick around in the atmosphere for too long, their global warming potential is hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The 2020 law signed by Trump initiated a gradual phaseout of production and use of HFCs in alignment with an international deal known as the Kigali Amendment. The result of years of negotiation by parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone pollution, the Kigali Amendment aimed to prevent up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of added warming by the end of the century, which scientists warn will have enormous consequences for agriculture and the global food system. Though Trump did not send the deal to the Senate for approval during his first term, the U.S. formally ratified the amendment in 2022 under Biden. Inside Climate News reported that a recent EPA assessment estimated that loosening the national phaseout deadlines is likely to increase emissions by 68 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050.
Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration, suspects that Trump’s cost-savings messaging around the rollbacks are nothing more than a “gimmick” to appease disgruntled voters struggling with soaring inflation ahead of midterms. Part of what Trump and Zeldin are doing with these changes, he said, is “wanting to create some grocery-price theater.”
The administration argues that alternative materials to high-global-warming-potential HFCs are not sufficiently available, making the deadlines set by the rules for the phaseout too aggressive and expensive for food companies — costs, they say, that will be passed down to consumers. But critics have countered that U.S. businesses have spent the last several years investing billions into new refrigerants, equipment, production lines, and staffing. Chemours and Honeywell have already developed alternative refrigerants sold domestically and worldwide. Groups like the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy have also denounced the idea that the market needs more time.
“We heard that argument, I would say, three years ago,” said Goffman. “It’s almost, by definition, arbitrary for the Trump EPA to say, ‘We’ll come along and make these changes,’ as if the EPA hadn’t already received a lot of information and worked through these issues.”
While several major supermarket chains and grocery trade groups have spoken out in support of the rule changes, the administration’s claim that savings will flow through to grocery consumers remains unsubstantiated. As they stand, the EPA’s rule amendments carry no mandates for grocers to lower their prices, and it is unclear whether companies would voluntarily use any presumed savings from the rollbacks to lower their prices, rather than relieving pressure on their own bottom lines.
Food prices are shaped by many dynamics, but the dominant forces are demand and supply. Over the last few decades, food demand has only continued to grow, fueled by rising global populations, higher incomes, and urbanization. Supply has struggled to keep pace, and food prices have been climbing steadily as a result, punctuated by sharp spikes from recent shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran.
But Barrett says the overwhelming persistent stressors behind steadily rising food inflation for most of the last six years has been extreme weather and climate-related shocks coupled with lagging productivity growth in food production. Americans are actively seeing this play out with skyrocketing beef prices nationwide, largely driven by persistent and prolonged droughts and heat waves that have decimated cattle herds and created severe supply shortages. “The evidence is very clear,” said Barrett. “Climate change is predictably driving the growth of supply down, and therefore driving prices up in due time.”
By that logic, the administration’s rollback of the refrigerant rules, intended to mitigate planet-warming emissions, won’t, then, abate rising food inflation but stoke it.
“So, if relaxing these rules aggravates climate change, and gives us more severe and more frequent episodes of extreme weather that hurts productivity in agriculture, we’re actually going to increase grocery prices down the road,” he said. “It just seems very hard to see how this administration is doing much to help relieve consumer food price inflation concerns.”
“Who’s really benefiting from these empty promises?” he said. “We all need to start asking that question.”
