As the world warms, the growing use of air conditioners (“ACs”) and other cooling equipment becomes essential for human comfort and public health. In addition, cooling-equipment energy and refrigerant consumption also presents tremendous climate mitigation opportunities. This article highlights China’s “Same Line, Same Standard and Same Quality” policy (“Same-Line Policy” or “Policy”), intended to support economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and address the export challenges that have negatively affected Chinese industries and products on the global market. The Policy encourages manufacturers of consumer and industrial products to sell products within China that were produced for markets outside China according to standards exceeding those for products produced for the Chinese market. The Policy, and the associated information and business platforms that the government established to ensure policy success, aim to improve the domestic economic situation through consumption of products previously destined for export markets but which are not being sold because of the economic downturn during the pandemic. Policies like these, representing a course of action that China’s leadership endorses, can drive changes in Chinese law, including changes that address loopholes in the law that allow environmentally harmful activities to continue. The Same-Line Policy provides an opportunity for global climate mitigation, public health, and other benefits that should not be missed.
Environmental dumping is a practice historically associated with the export of hazardous product waste from a developed country for irresponsible and often illegal disposal in a developing country. Now, with the industrialization and globalization of China and other developing countries, environmental dumping can involve both developing and developed countries as origin and destination. This dumping can be especially harmful to attempts to control under the Montreal Protocol ozone-depleting and climate-forcing chemical substances and/or products requiring unnecessarily high energy consumption. While developing country Parties to the Montreal Protocol are allowed to delay their phasedown of climate-forcing and ozone-depleting hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) during a multi-year grace period, there are advantages to earlier implementation when superior alternatives are already available at reasonable costs, as is the case for many uses of HFCs today. Thus, developing countries can benefit under the Protocol from setting controls for environmental dumping. This article aims to give policymakers, especially those in developing countries, a legal and policy “toolkit” that can be used to stop unwanted environmental dumping. It includes an examination of the history of environmental dumping, illustration of such dumping in practice, a detailed explanation and examination of the legal and policy tools, and a summary of the consequences of environmental dumping.
The following is a review of the continuing evolution of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, including the Kigali Amendment’s critical role in evolving the Montreal Protocol into a full-fledged climate treaty. Before the Kigali Amendment, the Montreal Protocol controlled about 100 ozone-depleting substances including chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons, which are powerful greenhouse gases (GHGs), and thus the Montreal Protocol has always contributed significantly to the mitigation of climate change. The Kigali Amendment expanded the scope of the Montreal Protocol to encompass explicitly the phasedown of super GHGs, or those with very high global warming potential in the form of hydrofluorocarbons (or HFCs), although they have only a negligible impact on the ozone layer. We also discuss energy efficiency improvements to cooling equipment, which, because of the opportunity to simultaneously upgrade the energy efficiency of equipment, augments the climate change mitigation potential of the substance phasedowns and reduces related air pollutants by reducing indirect emissions from electricity generation. Phasing down HFCs has the potential to avoid up to 0.5ºC of warming by 2100. Improvements to the energy efficiency of cooling equipment could perhaps double this.
