Industry Wants Kigali HFC Treaty; So Do 13 GOP Senators, But Shitstain Admin Doesn't Care
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The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol of 1987 is, technically, a climate-change deal — possibly the most important climate-change deal that most people have never heard of. Agreed to in October 2016 by delegates from 197 nations at a conference in Kigali, Rwanda, the accord sets hard targets for the global phaseout of chemical coolants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. HFCs lack the ozone-destroying potency of their chlorofluorocarbon predecessors, which were banned by the original 1987 treaty. But, as greenhouse gases go, they are devastating, packing 1,000 times the heat-trapping punch of carbon dioxide. Scientists estimate that the Kigali Amendment could prevent a warming of up to 0.44 degrees Celsius by century’s end, meaningful progress in the quest to hold temperature increases to under two degrees above preindustrial levels. When the accord was announced in 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry proclaimed it “the biggest thing we can do in one giant swoop” to combat climate change.
The agreement took effect this January. So far, 72 countries have ratified it. The United States is not among them, and Mr. Trump shows no sign of submitting the deal for Senate approval. This is hardly a shock, considering this president’s skepticism of climate change, regulation, multilateral treaties and anything that has former President Barack Obama’s fingerprints on it.
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Last May, 32 top executives from affected companies sent the president a letter urging ratification. Theirs was a purely economic case, laden with data aimed at Mr. Trump’s competitive instincts: projections that the deal would create 33,000 manufacturing jobs, increase exports by $5 billion and improve the balance of trade for their industries.
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The fate of the agreement remains uncertain. A State Department spokesman said only, “The administration is considering transmittal of the Kigali Amendment to the Senate for its advice and consent, but no final decision has been reached.” Mr. Trump risks missing a big opportunity here. His administration may not have moved to kill the Kigali amendment, but it seems depressingly content to let it languish, at the expense of both American competitiveness and the health of the planet.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/trump-kigali-agreement.html