The Man Who Signed the Law He’s Now Quietly Dismantling

I’ll be straight with you. I’m bored of writing about Trump. I suspect you might be bored of reading about him. There’s a fatigue that sets in when the same character dominates the script for this long… a kind of political tinnitus. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: what happens in that office doesn’t stay in that office. It lands in our supermarkets, our atmosphere, and eventually our children’s inheritance. So bear with me. This one actually matters

Donald Trump signed a law in December 2020. A good one, actually. Bipartisan. Sensible. The kind of legislation that makes you think… oh, occasionally the system works. He signed it, presumably smiled for the cameras, and moved on to whatever came next.

Fast forward to 2026, and his administration is now quietly loosening the very rules that law created. No fanfare. No acknowledgement of the irony. Just a press release, some grocery executives in the Oval Office, and a regulatory rollback dressed up as a gift to the consumer.

I genuinely could not make this up. And I write fiction.

And so here we are. Again. With Donald Trump.

This week, the administration extended the deadlines for supermarkets and businesses to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons… the synthetic cooling chemicals found lurking inside your refrigerator and air conditioning unit, and classified, not by green lobbyists but by actual scientists, as harmful, planet-warming pollutants. There was an Oval Office announcement. There were grocery executives in attendance, presumably beaming. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was there too, lending the whole pantomime a suitably bureaucratic air of legitimacy.

Now. Here is the bit that makes you set down your tea.

The AIM Act… the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act… is bipartisan legislation. It was written with strong cross-party support. It directs the EPA to implement an 85 percent phase-down of the production and consumption of HFCs by 2035. It was, in the words of its own supporters, among the most significant environmental laws passed by Congress in recent years.

And it was signed into law on December 27th, 2020. By one Donald J. Trump. During his first term. With, one imagines, a flourish of the presidential Sharpie.

Five years later, the second Trump administration is reversing course.

Let that breathe for a moment. The man is dismantling his own legacy. Not somebody else’s regulation, not a piece of Obama-era environmentalism he’d been meaning to torch since 2017… his own work. Signed with his own hand. This isn’t a U-turn so much as a full handbrake spin in a supermarket car park, leaving tyre marks on the very tarmac you laid yourself.

Right, But What Actually Are HFCs?

I appreciate that for many people, hydrofluorocarbons sit somewhere in the mental filing cabinet between “things I vaguely know are bad” and “things I will never fully understand.” So let me give you the version that actually makes sense.

HFCs are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide as a warming agent. They don’t hang around in the atmosphere for centuries the way CO₂ does… but while they’re up there, they are staggeringly efficient at trapping heat. Think of it this way: carbon dioxide is the slow, creeping tide that gradually floods the basement. HFCs are someone throwing a bucket of petrol on the bonfire. Brief, violent, and deeply inadvisable.

The AIM Act directed the EPA to phase down HFC production and consumption to 15% of baseline levels in a stepwise manner by 2036, through an allowance allocation and trading programme. Not overnight. Not with any dramatic upheaval to industry. Gradually. Sensibly. With years of runway to adapt.

The chemical and manufacturing sectors had been given ample time. The Food Industry Association estimated the cost to switch away from HFCs at around $1 million per grocery store… but the industry had years to prepare, and many companies had already made the changes. Several states, California being the loudest as always, had pushed even harder. The wheels were turning. The transition was happening.

And then came the announcement, flanked by supermarket executives, that actually… we’re going to ease up on that a bit.

The $2.4 Billion Sleight of Hand

The White House, with the kind of confidence you can only achieve when you believe the electorate has the attention span of a golden retriever near a tennis court, has dressed this rollback up as a gift to the consumer. The administration claims that loosening these restrictions will save businesses and consumers upwards of $2.4 billion.

Lovely number. Very round. Very reassuring.

There’s just one small problem. A trade group representing refrigerator makers argued that this rollback will actually raise costs for consumers, manufacturers and grocery stores. Their reasoning? “By extending the compliance deadline, the EPA is maintaining and even increasing demand in the market for existing refrigerants while supply continues to fall under the AIM Act,” as one industry chief pointed out. Scarcity plus sustained demand does not, as a rule, produce cheaper anything.

Even Chemours, the Delaware-based chemical giant and a leading producer of alternative refrigerants, said it had “consistently supported an orderly phasedown schedule of HFCs as outlined in the AIM Act,” and that delays risked undermining American investment in the industry. When the chemical company that makes the stuff you’re trying to phase out says “actually, please stick to the original plan”… you may want to pause and reflect.

But reflection, as a practice, has never been particularly high on the agenda.

The Horizon Problem

Here is the thing that genuinely baffles me about modern political decision-making… and I say this as someone who has watched enough of it to feel permanently mildly seasick. The timescales are wrong. Structurally, fundamentally wrong.

The political horizon extends, at most, to the next election cycle. Environmental consequence operates on decades. These two things are not just misaligned… they are operating in entirely different dimensions. One is the length of a parliamentary term. The other is the length of a human civilisation.

And so you get precisely this: cheap groceries today… a slightly more chaotic atmosphere tomorrow. The bill, when it arrives, will not land on the doormat of anyone currently standing at a podium. It will land on the people who are, right now, learning to read.

The AIM Act remains fully intact and enforceable… altering it would require congressional action, not administrative rollback. So there are limits to what can actually be undone here, which is mildly comforting in the way that discovering your house is only slightly on fire is mildly comforting.

But the signal matters. The optics matter. When a sitting president stands in the Oval Office to announce that industry gets more time before it has to stop pumping super-pollutants into the atmosphere… and frames it as a favour to the public… something has gone rather badly wrong with the narrative.

The law was good. The bipartisan consensus was genuine. The science was settled. The transition was underway.

And then someone decided that the groceries needed to be cheaper before November.

Some receipts, it seems, have a very short shelf life.

Until Next Time