The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it planned to relax a Biden-era rule that requires grocery stores, air-conditioning companies, semiconductor plants and others to sharply reduce some powerful greenhouse gases used in cooling equipment.
The Environmental Protection Agency plan would unravel what many industry leaders and environmentalists view as a rare success for the climate: a bipartisan agreement that those man-made chemicals, known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, should be rapidly phased down.
HFCs are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet.
But Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said the Biden administration’s plan for cutting the production and consumption of the chemicals — by 85 percent by 2036 — did not give companies enough time to meet their deadlines. He said the rapid switch to other refrigerant blends had caused shortages that left families without air-conditioning in hot summer months, a claim the air-conditioning industry has said is exaggerated.
“With this proposal, E.P.A. is working to make American refrigerants affordable, safe, and reliable again,” Mr. Zeldin said in a statement.
The proposal came just hours before an expected government shutdown amid a deadlock between President Trump and Democrats over spending. If an agreement is not reached and federal employees are furloughed, work on all pending regulations will be on hold. A shutdown could also potentially delay Mr. Zeldin’s plans for repealing dozens of climate protections enacted under the Biden administration.
Phasing out HFCs worldwide could avert up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century, action that would go a long way toward avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. In fact, it was Mr. Trump, during his first term, who signed into law a measure directing the E.P.A. to ratchet down the climate pollutant. The provision was tucked into a sweeping Covid-19 relief bill that passed Congress at the tail end of his presidency.
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