The president and his EPA chief on Thursday postponed requirements that grocery stores and frozen foods companies buy more climate-friendly refrigeration systems beginning this year — claiming the move would cut consumer food prices.
Speaking from the Oval Office flanked by grocery industry executives, President Donald Trump asserted that pausing the Biden-era rule that supermarkets buy new refrigeration systems that don’t contain climate superpollutants would produce savings that would be passed along to consumers.
The 2023 “technology transfer” rule, Trump said, would have “forced companies to adopt specific high-cost refrigerants, massively driving up the price of transporting and storing refrigerants and various goods.” He blamed the rule for driving grocery stores out of business and promised EPA’s delay would save consumers and businesses $2.4 billion.
The move comes as polls show Trump’s approval ratings on the economy nosediving and costs for American families are rising in the run-up to the midterm elections. April’s Consumer Price Index showed that food prices have increased by 3.2 percent over the last year, despite Trump’s campaign promises to reverse Biden-era inflation.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that EPA under his predecessor, former Administrator Michael Regan, had “faceplanted” when it finalized the rule.
“Just at supermarkets alone, we’re going to see a savings of $800 million, which Americans will be able to see when they go and buy their food,” he promised.
EPA’s revision gives the grocery industry until 2032 to transition away from climate-polluting cooling and refrigeration units when they buy new systems — a six-year extension from the Biden-era rule. It finalizes a proposal EPA issued on the eve of last year’s government shutdown that also incorporates regulatory tweaks sought by the semiconductor industry.
The president and Zeldin also announced a new proposal Thursday that would weaken a 2024 leak prevention rule aimed at boosting hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) recovery and recycling when equipment is repaired or retired.
The rules are part of a suite of Biden-era standards aimed at phasing down a class of coolants known as HFCs, which can be thousands of times as potent for climate change as carbon dioxide.
While Trump and Zeldin cast them as Biden-era mandates, the EPA rules were authorized by the so-called American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act, which Trump signed in 2020. The law phased down HFCs domestically on the same schedule required under the so-called Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an ozone treaty.
A subset of the grocery sector sought changes to the technology transfer rule, arguing it was costly.
Greg Foran, CEO of Kroger, said at the White House event that the reprieve would allow Kroger stores to avoid “having to outlay more capital at a faster rate” and incur “more operating costs to change that equipment.”
But the U.S. companies that developed and are manufacturing the next generation of cooling technology oppose the move, saying it would make it harder for them to recoup costs they’ve already incurred preparing for the transition.
They noted that the Biden-era standards didn’t compel companies to retire working equipment — only to buy more climate-friendly models when they made new purchases.
John Hurst, executive director of the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy, an industry group that supports the AIM Act, said the changes weren’t sought by all grocery store chains.
“The larger grocery store chains that have sustainability commitments, they’re well ahead in their transitions,” he said.
He added that the delay was unlikely to result in savings that would be passed down to consumers. HFC production is still being phased down under separate EPA rules, so supplies of the chemicals are dwindling and likely to become more expensive.
“So now you have a mismatch between supply and demand,” he said. “There’s no scenario that I’ve ever seen where supply is constrained and demand increases and prices go down.
“I don’t know how the cost of the gallon of milk or a dozen eggs goes down when you’re increasing cost of the refrigerant,” he said.
EPA said in a press statement that its new HFC proposal “would to exempt all road refrigerant transport appliances from HFC leak repair requirements established in the [2024 leak repair rule], removing burdens for owners and major U.S. operators of these appliances.”
But David Doniger, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said allowing more HFCs to escape into the atmosphere instead of being reused would make the chemicals more costly, not less.
“There’s a fixed total supply of new material, which is declining on the phase out,” he said. “If you waste the stuff,” either by leaking it or using for purposes for which non-HFC alternatives are already available, like supermarket refrigeration, he said, there will be supply squeezes elsewhere in the economy.
“This is a fake solution to affordability,” he said.
