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Michael Cianchette is a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan. He is in-house counsel to a number of businesses in southern Maine and was a chief counsel to former Gov. Paul LePage.
Maine fought the law of unintended consequences. Once again, the law won.
“PFAS” has been the evil acronym of late in policy debates. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are seemingly everywhere, including in the soil and groundwater of many Maine farms. It is a real issue.
Health concerns around PFAS led the Maine Legislature to restrict the substance starting in 2025.
However, as the Bangor Daily News reported earlier this week, refrigerants in common use constitute “forever chemicals” necessary to the operation of heat pumps.
For those who may be unfamiliar, heat pumps are a modern heating and cooling system that simply moves heat from one location to another. Unlike furnaces, they do not create combustion to make heat; they simply move it.
In the political arena, they are one of the few policy issues which united former Gov. Paul LePage and Gov. Janet Mills. Both made the proliferation of heat pumps major objectives of their administrations.
Yet that proliferation appears to have the negative effect of increasing the deployment of “forever chemicals” as their refrigerant. So decreasing the reliance on wood or fossil fuels for home heating, in favor of heat pumps, has led to a broader distribution of PFAS-like chemicals.
This is a quintessential example of the law of unintended consequences. Solving one problem — fossil fuel use — has created another, with the wider distribution of “forever chemicals.”
The easy answer is that heat pumps should simply use a different refrigerant. The Environmental Protection Agency has mandated just that starting in 2025. Of course, there are trade-offs inherent in that requirement. That includes the need to build a better chemical to achieve the intended goal.
In the case of heat pumps, industry has responded. They have worked diligently to develop different refrigerants which are less bad than those that are presently necessary to operate heat pumps.
Do these new refrigerants have other unintended drawbacks? Time will tell. At one point, asbestos was the miracle mineral used in countless applications. Now it is best known for legal advertisements about mesothelioma.
But where Gov. Mills’ — and Gov. LePage’s — efforts to increase the installation of heat pumps throughout the state have been successful, changing chemicals now has a very real cost for homeowners. Since there were heavy subsidies in place for heat pumps, can people afford to move to the newer products?
Or will they let systems degrade and begin to leak more “forever chemicals,” recreating the problem presently faced by Maine farms?
Are we better off using fewer fossil fuels and expanding the deployment of heat pumps notwithstanding the PFAS-esque proliferation? Or did we ignore the trade off of one problem for another?
No easy answer.
This is a great case study in the challenge of policy making. Both parties argued strongly that heat pump adoption was good both economically and ecologically. In many ways, they were right. Except that heat pumps required forever chemicals to work effectively, which had their own negative repercussions.
The same holds true with efforts to eliminate plastic grocery bags. My household, like many others, takes advantage of the “curbside” option for grocery pickup. Shopping on our local store’s app reduces impulse purchases and saves time.
But Maine has outlawed single-use plastic bags. So when we head to the store to collect our groceries, they are now provided in “reusable” bags. They are classified as “reusable” because they are made of a thick plastic; the reality is that they are hard to reuse and hard to recycle.
The formerly available flimsy grocery bags were useful for a variety of secondary purposes, such as trash bags for bathrooms. So, while they created waste, it was not materially more than buying dedicated restroom bags. And it may have been less wasteful than the “new” bags.
The challenges in making policy are plain. Every decision has countless downstream effects. Some are foreseeable; some aren’t.
Yet whether the inadvertent encouragement to use forever chemicals for temperature control or the requirement to use less-environmentally friendly, thick plastic, nominally “reusable” bags, our elected officials need to spend some time thinking through their decisions.
Because more PFAS utilization or higher plastic waste were likely not the consequences intended from passing new laws.
