The Obama administration announced its latest attempt to combat global warming on Thursday by placing new restrictions on the chemicals that everyone uses to keep things cool.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced new measures to handle and dispose of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are considered a potent greenhouse gas used in refrigeration and air conditioning. The agency also said it will begin steps to ban the most potent HFCs beginning next year.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said the new efforts would help achieve the goals laid out by President Obama’s climate change agenda.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2574118/
McCarthy said the administration has the support of the industry to “transition” to new “climate-friendly refrigerants, and deploy advanced refrigeration technologies.”
“EPA’s regulatory actions and innovations emerging from the private sector have put our country on track to significantly cut … use [of these harmful chemicals] and deliver on the goals of the president’s Climate Action Plan,” McCarthy said.
The first action the EPA took Thursday proposes new regulations on how refrigerants are to be “sold, handled, recovered and recycled.” The proposed rule would “strengthen the existing requirements for handling refrigerants,” the agency says. The rule is slated to be finalized next year.
Second, the EPA said it will be proposing additional regulations next year to begin phasing out and banning certain HFCs.
The 2016 rules “would change the status for certain high global warming potential HFCs to unacceptable where safer alternatives are available and also approve several new climate-friendly alternatives for a variety of industry applications,” the agency said.
Thursday’s announcement is part of Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which includes a number of contentious regulations to reduce emissions in the runup to a major climate change conference in Paris in December.
The president’s plan also includes rules for reducing carbon dioxide from power plants that places states on the hook to reduce emissions air one-third by 2030. Most climate scientists blame the greennouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, for causing manmade climate change.
Republicans argue that the rules will raise prices for consumers, with little to show in stopping climate change.
