The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to limit potent greenhouse gas refrigerants in the Biden administration’s first and likely least controversial regulation to curb climate change.
The proposal, which EPA Administrator Michael Regan signed on Friday and the agency made public Monday, is born from bipartisan legislation passed as part of last year’s spending package. That legislation laid out requirements for the United States to phase down the production and import of powerful greenhouse gas refrigerants known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, by 85% in the next 15 years.
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Once fully implemented, scientists have said such an HFC phasedown would avoid 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming. HFCs are hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide, but the coolants live in the atmosphere for a much shorter period of time.
“With this proposal, EPA is taking another significant step under President Biden’s ambitious agenda to address the climate crisis,” Regan said in a statement.
However, distinct from other pending Biden administration climate mandates, the HFC proposal isn’t likely to be met with much ire. The bipartisan legislation to curb HFCs enjoyed broad support from both political parties, environmental groups, and the appliance and chemical industries.
U.S. appliance and chemical companies have long been calling for a phasedown of HFCs. The industry helped negotiate a global agreement struck under the Obama administration in 2016 to limit the coolants, and the bipartisan legislation would put the U.S. on track to meet those global targets.
President Joe Biden is also weighing whether to submit that global deal, known as the Kigali Amendment, to the Senate for ratification — a step the Trump administration declined to take.
The EPA’s proposal begins to set up the regulatory regime for HFCs as dictated by the bipartisan legislation, setting the baseline levels for production and consumption from which companies will have to make reductions.
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The proposal also suggests a means of doling out allowances to companies for the years 2022 and 2023. Those allowances prescribe how many HFCs a company is allowed to produce and consume, and companies can buy and sell those allowances to meet the reduction levels the EPA establishes.
The EPA estimates that the HFC phasedown would eliminate greenhouse gas emissions equal to 4.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — or roughly three years of U.S. power sector emissions, based on 2019 levels.
