Not Cool: How the EPA’s Refrigerant Rollback Will Raise Your Grocery and AC Costs

President Trump recently announced a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rollback that delays the transition away from the climate super pollutants known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) at supermarkets, cold storage warehouses, and other industries.  

Grasping for a message on affordability, the Trump administration claimed the rollback would save supermarkets billions of dollars, which will supposedly get passed along to grocery shoppers.  

Like many Trump claims, this one’s based on cooked books, fake facts, and numbers like no one’s ever seen before.  

Even accepting the administration’s cockeyed math, the savings work out to a whopping $.03 a month on the grocery bill for a family of four. In reality, the rollback will raise HFC prices across the board, and that will cause families to pay more (not less) for groceries, more for repairs the next time their home air conditioner breaks down, and more in other hidden ways.  

NRDC isn’t going to chill out over this. We warned the EPA against this step backward, and we’re suing the agency to block it.  

And we are not alone. Five industry associations that support the HFC transition—representing HFC producers, equipment manufacturers, refrigerant and equipment distributors, installers, and service technicians—have also sued to stop the rollback. 

Funny math and cooked books 

HFCs are primarily used as refrigerants in fridges, freezers, and air conditioners. When they leak into the atmosphere, however, they are powerful greenhouse gases that are overheating the atmosphere and contributing to dangerous heat waves, storms, and other extreme weather.  

The EPA adopted the technology transfer regulations in 2023 under the bipartisan American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act, which President Trump signed into law in 2020. The rules required supermarkets and several other sectors to transition to alternative, safer refrigerants over the next few years. In Trump’s second term, however, the EPA has delayed the transition by five years (until 2032) and raised the limits on the potency (the global warming potential) of HFCs those sectors may use in the interim.  

Whether regulating or deregulating, the EPA is supposed to objectively quantify a rule’s costs and benefits. The Biden administration’s EPA accounted for both costs and benefits when it issued the 2023 rules that are now being weakened. In the Trump administration, however, the EPA routinely exaggerates the costs and ignores the benefits.  

So it’s no surprise that the cost-benefit analysis accompanying the rollback rule cooks the books. As we’ll explain, the EPA exaggerated the direct savings to supermarket operators. It hid the costs imposed on everyone else—including supermarkets—by making HFCs more expensive. It papered over the fact that consumer costs will go up, not down. It overlooked the harm from pulling the rug out from under businesses that had made big investments to sell safer refrigerants and the equipment to use them. And it ignored the environmental risks from increased illegal imports of HFCs from abroad.  

These are fatal legal flaws.  

1. Old equipment can stay in use 

Let’s start with President Trump’s ad-libbed remark at the White House event that he is saving supermarkets and grocery stores from having to rip out and replace perfectly good refrigeration systems.  

Nope. That’s not how the prior HFC rules worked. They applied only to new or remodeled stores, shifting users to equipment that uses next-generation refrigerants. Existing stores, small and large, can keep using their current equipment forever (well, until it wears out).  

But here’s the rub: Existing stores will end up paying more for the HFCs they need to keep their existing equipment working because, as we explain below, letting new stores install old-school equipment will drive up HFC prices across the board.  

2. Savings? Three cents a month for a family of four. 

Even under the administration’s fuzzy math, American families would save only pennies each month. And that’s if you ignore the ways that the rollback will raise their costs.  

At the White House event, the president and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed that their actions will save $2.4 billion, spread over the next 25 years. More than half of that ($1.5 billion), however, is the number that the EPA has put on a separate rollback that it has only just proposed, weakening a requirement to cut HFC leaks from refrigerated trucks. 

The EPA’s rulemaking documents reveal that the savings claimed for the supermarket rollback are much smaller: $976 million. Over the next 25 years, that’s an average of just $39 million per year. It’s even less in the near term because the bulk of the claimed savings is projected to occur only after 2037.  

Compare that to America’s grocery bill. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Americans spent $1.1 trillion on groceries in 2025. Even if we assume supermarkets will actually save $39 million per year, that’s 0.0035 percent (35 one-millionths!) of the nation’s annual grocery bill. For a family of four, the USDA estimates the average monthly grocery bill is $1,018. If you could count on supermarkets to pass the savings from the rule on to consumers, that family would save about $0.03 per month.  

3. Consumers will actually pay more for groceries—and for fixing home ACs 

Saving families three cents a month isn’t much to brag about. Even more so once you consider the ways the rollback will increase consumer costs. Although EPA leadership and the president did not consider these costs when scrapping the existing rules, the documents in the agency’s rulemaking record are revealing. In them, the EPA acknowledges that the rollback will cause higher refrigerant prices, losses for companies that have been preparing to follow the prior rules, and greater emissions of climate-damaging HFCs. 

Let’s consider these in turn. 

• Higher refrigerant prices 

  HFC production is being phased down under the bipartisan AIM Act and the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol ratified by the United States in 2022. The phasedown occurs in steps through 2036. U.S. HFC production and import of HFCs are currently limited by law to 60 percent of historic baseline levels. That will drop to 30 percent in 2029 and 15 percent in 2036. This phasedown schedule is written into U.S. law, so the EPA cannot change the limits on HFC supply.  

  This is why the AIM Act also authorized the EPA to issue technology transitions rules—to protect against price spikes by keeping HFC demand in parallel with supply. If HFC users that have ready alternatives are slow to adopt them, then the limited supply of HFCs will be squeezed by unnecessary demand and HFC prices will rise for end users that need more time to switch to alternatives. Those “stickier” uses range from servicing home air-conditioning systems to filling asthma inhalers. In addition, if each firm in a regulated sector has to transition at the same time, laggards won’t be able to undercut their competition.  

  Supermarkets already have alternatives. For example, nearly 3,500 new and remodeled stores across the country already use equipment that runs on carbon dioxide. In 2023, the EPA found that its rule would help keep overall HFC demand below the AIM Act’s mandatory 2029 supply limit. That would keep HFC prices down.  

  With the rollback, however, the agency now anticipates that HFC demand will exceed the supply available in 2029 by 28 percent and that HFC prices will rise by another 12–24 percent. Industry analysts put the overall refrigerant cost increase at nearly $8 billion per year.  

  Compare that to the puny $39 million-per-year savings projected in the EPA’s partial, one-sided accounting. 

  Food prices will go up, not down. That’s because existing supermarkets will have to pay more to maintain their current equipment, which leaks as much as 20 percent of its HFCs each year. This will cost supermarkets billions of dollars more, driving food price increases that will swamp the savings that the White House trumpeted.  

  Repairing residential air conditioning will also become more expensive. When that equipment leaks and needs repairs, it needs more HFCs. The HFC price rise will force homeowners to pay billions more for AC repairs, on top of the extra cost of groceries.  

  The HFC-using industries get it: “The economics are simple. If demand for older refrigerants stays high while federal law continues shrinking supply, prices will rise. Contractors, supermarkets, distributors, and ultimately consumers will pay more for servicing and equipment.” 

  These facts make it so surprising that a small minority of supermarket chains, led by Kroger and Piggly Wiggly, fought the original rules and used their political chips with the Trump administration to get this reversal. But even these guys will lose money on this rule, as they will pay more for HFCs in their existing stores than they will save in their new and remodeled ones. 

• Whiplash for companies that geared up for the transition 

  When the EPA reverses course, the law requires it to explain how it considered the interest of companies that invested in reliance on the previous rule. Chemical suppliers have invested heavily in making new refrigerants that have little or no climate impact. Likewise, equipment manufacturers have geared up to bring new refrigeration systems to market. Companies testified at the EPA public hearing that they made these investments in reliance on the transition schedule in the 2023 rule. Now the agency is pulling the rug out from under them.  

  Drastically underestimating how much money is at stake for these companies, the EPA dismissed the equipment manufacturers’ reliance interests as irrelevant because they are not directly regulated by this rule. Nothing prevents them, the EPA blithely said, from voluntarily continuing to sell their next-generation products. The agency even acknowledged that they’ll be undercut by both domestic and foreign manufacturers of old-school products that hadn’t invested in the transition. 

• Harm to the climate  

  The EPA estimates that this rule will lead to HFC emission increases equivalent to 68 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2026 and 2050. This is equal to the emissions of seven natural gas power plants.  

  These extra emissions will come, in large part, from illegal imports of HFCs into the country. As described above, the domestic supply of HFCs is limited by the AIM Act. Legal domestic production and legal importation of HFCs have to stay under the act’s phasedown limits.  

  But by dramatically raising HFC prices, the EPA rollback will encourage more illegal imports of HFCs. This is not a small problem. During the phaseout of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals in the 1990s, illegal imports of these chemicals became the second-most valuable form of contraband imported into the United States, after illegal drugs. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agency geared up with the EPA to seize large caches of illegal imports disguised as other products, but billions of dollars’ worth of smuggled chemicals undoubtedly got through. The European Union is struggling to cope with illegal HFC imports now. 

  Breaking with decades of precedent and legal requirements, the EPA refused to estimate the dollar value of the increased climate-harming emissions its rollback will cause. But for nearly 20 years, courts have held that agency cost-benefit analyses can’t ignore the harm done by greenhouse gas emissions. As the seminal court decision put it: “[W]hile the record shows that there is a range of values, the value of carbon emissions reduction is certainly not zero.”  

  So, for well over a decade, the EPA and other agencies have used science and economics to put money values on the benefits of avoiding each ton of greenhouse gases. Biden’s EPA calculated that cutting a single ton of HFC emissions produces tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in public health, environmental, and economic benefits. 

  But under President Trump, the Office of Management and Budget has ordered all agencies to stop calculating the benefits of cutting greenhouse gases. So now, the EPA values the damage from each ton of extra HFC emissions at $0.  

It’s rare to find an EPA rollback rule so universally disliked by both industry and environmentalists. That’s why we are proud to be on the same side as the five industry trade associations that have sued the agency to block this foolish step backward that will only raise prices for struggling American families and worsen the climate crisis at the same time.   

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