States have joined a growing legal fight against EPA’s May rule pushing back deadlines for the food industry to start buying climate-friendly refrigeration systems.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta led 17 other states, New York City and the District of Columbia in suing EPA on Tuesday over its move to give grocery stores and a handful of other industries five more years to transition to food storage and cooling systems that don’t use climate-warming chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons.
“Across the country, communities are enduring record-breaking temperatures, devastating floods, and raging wildfires,” said Bonta, a Democrat, in a press release. “They are clear warnings that our planet is approaching a dangerous climate tipping point. Yet, the Trump Administration is weakening critical environmental safeguards that combat the climate crisis.”
As a matter of policy, EPA does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.
HFCs, which are used in cooling, refrigeration and foams, can be thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change. The technology transition rule that EPA modified in May was authorized by a 2020 law that passed with bipartisan support during President Donald Trump’s first term and aimed to ratchet down production and use of HFCs by 85 percent by 2036.
U.S. manufacturers developed more climate-friendly alternatives and have transitioned their product lines. They threw their political heft behind both the law and the Biden-era regulations. Now they argue that the Trump EPA’s slower transition timeline will make it harder for them to recoup investments made to comply with the original rule and will throw their supply chains into disarray.
Several manufacturers’ groups and the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, have already filed challenges to the delay rule. The states’ challenge may ultimately be consolidated with those.
NRDC, which filed suit Monday, has said EPA relied on faulty regulatory analysis to demonstrate that the delay rule would be cost-effective.
