The Trump administration will need to know the difference between a good and bad climate deal if business is to emerge unscathed under the next president, say industry and top environmentalist officials.
It is widely known that Trump is looking to reject big climate deals, notably the Paris Agreement reached in December, but it could be dangerous for some U.S. manufacturers if all deals are targeted just because they have something to do with climate change, the officials warn.
For example, large appliance manufacturers, which make everything from window-mounted air conditioners to giant walk-in refrigerators, fear Trump could take a “knee-jerk” approach to anything perceived as a climate agreement, like last year’s Paris deal.
The Paris deal doesn’t have “teeth” and is primarily an unbinding agreement, said Stephen Yurek, the president of the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, representing appliance manufacturers. But a more recent international deal to cut refrigerant chemicals does have binding requirements, with the ability of squeezing American-made products out of the global market if they are not met, he told the Washington Examiner.
Yurek was part of the negotiations to update the 30-year-old Montreal Protocol to impose a global ban on the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are a common chemical refrigerant used in most air-conditioning units.
The Environmental Protection Agency says the deal, which was reached in Kigali, Rwanda, in October, is necessary to stave off the effects of global warming because the refrigerants are more potent than other greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. Removing the chemicals from the global marketplace over the next two decades would bring down the temperature of the Earth by half a degree.
Many scientists blame greenhouse gas emissions for causing the Earth’s temperature to rise, resulting in more catastrophic weather, droughts and floods.
Yurek and others want Trump advisers to understand that just because the Kigali deal is tied to climate change, it doesn’t mean the industry opposes it, despite his group having problems with other aspects of President Obama’s climate agenda.
“We are hoping they won’t do the knee-jerk reaction … of tying this to climate, and other things,” Yurek said, explaining that the Trump team might think it has to oppose it because it assumes businesses do.
Francis Dietz, spokesman for Yurek’s group, put it this way: “They may be afraid that we don’t support it. They could think they are doing us a favor.”
There is some indication that Trump himself is wading more cautiously into the idea of exiting from Paris than he pronounced on the campaign trail, according to remarks he made on Tuesday to reporters at the New York Times, but it wasn’t clear why. He did suggest that efforts to combat climate change would raise costs for companies.
Yurek and others plan to begin lobbying the Trump transition team to get across the idea of the HFC agreement being important, “not just for the environmental aspects,” but also as a matter of trade and competition.
“If we don’t become part of that, none of our products will be able to be manufactured here in North America to be sold in the countries that are signatories to the protocol that are complying with those provisions,” Yurek said.
“It would lock us out of those markets.”
He said all the major developed and emerging economies, including China and India, have agreed to abide by the HFC agreement.
They do anticipate that Trump likely will scrap recently finalized EPA regulations for complying with the deal domestically and replacing them with “market-based measures,” as opposed to a more straightforward ban that the Obama administration implemented using its Significant New Alternatives Policy, or SNAP.
The SNAP update adds new chemicals to a list of acceptable substitutes for HFCs. The new rule also sets a deadline to stop using HFCs in circumstances where safer alternatives are available, according to the EPA.
David Doniger, chief climate strategist at the influential environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, has been working with Yurek on ways to convince the incoming administration that exiting from the Kigali accord would be the wrong move for industry and the nation.
“I think it would be very important to know where the business side of this comes in,” Doniger told the Examiner.
“They would have to find an approach that doesn’t just blow the whole thing up,” he added.
That’s why it is going to be important for Yurek and others to get their message through to Trump’s transition team.
Beyond the climate deal, Yurek also wants the Trump administration to restore balance to the Department of Energy’s energy-efficiency program, which his group has gone to court over because of the rule’s increased stringency and cost.
“We know there is going to be a significant change from what we have seen in the last eight years on the pace of regulations, especially the efficiency regulations at the Department of Energy,” he said.
“When you look at some of the Climate Action Plan that President Obama has been pursuing the last eight years, our concerns as industry is, yes, we want a change, we want to bring back more balance” to regulations.
The industry wants the Trump administration not to just look at “what’s technically feasible, but you’re also looking at the economic impact, not only for industry but also for the consumers,” Yurek said.
However, he doesn’t want Trump just deferring to states when it comes to developing efficiency standards for appliances. That would create a patchwork of rules that the industry wants to avoid.
“We need … one rule for designing products that can be used across the country,” he said. “We want to make sure that we explain to the transition that there is a role for the federal government in this, but let’s look at the law, let’s update it, make it more balanced and move forward.”
