When the CFC rules were written, nobody in the chain from chemist to regulator to manufacturer to technician to customer had the job of saying the response was out of proportion for small domestic fridges. Doug Major argues that chair is still empty: Right to Repair, consumer reporting, manufacturers, regulators and existing trade groups don't advocate for the people who fix appliances or the people who own them. The cost lands on the customer, and when repairs stop making sense, fridges get scrapped early.
In the shotgun and the fly I told you a story about refrigerant. I stand by every word of it. But I buried the lead. In that entire chain, from the chemist to the customer who paid the bill, there was never one person whose job was to stand up and say, “Wait. This is a shotgun to kill a fly.” That chair was empty. It’s still empty.
What did the refrigerant story miss?
Domestic fridges were a few percent of the problem, and we got regulated like we were the whole thing. I told you about the foam in the walls, the real reservoir, the part nobody ever asked us to touch. I told you we led with our wallets, did everything right, and watched the system reward the people who did nothing. And I closed by telling you nobody ever sent us the receipt.
Here’s the thing. I write, then I research, to validate my thoughts or invalidate them, as often happens. More than a few times after recording, I’ve come to the conclusion that I missed the real story. Buried the lead, whatever phrase you like. This is a master class in not wrong, just missed the point.
R12 had to go. Period. Full stop. That story was never really about R12. R12 was just the example I happened to live through. The actual story, the one I should have opened with, is this:
In that entire chain, from the chemist to the regulator, to the manufacturer, to the technician, to the customer who paid the bill, there was never one single person whose job was to stand up and say, “Wait. This is a shotgun to kill a fly.”
That chair was empty. It’s still empty. That’s the lead.
Did it have to go that way?
No. And this is the part that turns a sad story into an infuriating one.
We were told you needed two complete sets of equipment, one for the old refrigerant and one for the new, as if the two would detonate if they ever met in the same hose. Overkill, and we proved it. We were told every last ounce had to be recovered, stored and returned, on little sealed systems holding a few hundred grams, while the real load sat in the foam, where our gauges couldn’t reach.
There could have been a carve-out. A small-charge line for the little domestic systems, a pound or so, set where the cost of all that recovery actually made sense against the benefit. There wasn’t. The rule was the rule, top to bottom. Fly and elephant, treated exactly alike.
And here’s the part that should bother you most. The smarter answer wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t waiting to be invented. Over in Europe, they already understood where the CFCs actually were, in the foam, and they built the recycling to capture it at the end of the appliance’s life. The knowledge was sitting right there on the table.
Somebody just had to be in the room to pick it up and say: “This regulation does not meet the need. What it does is inflate the cost of repairs and force product to end of life sooner, where it releases a storehouse of CFCs. Domestic refrigeration needs a different answer.”
Nobody was. No advocate.
Is this a one-time thing?
If it were, I’d let it go. A bad call, decades ago, on a gas most of you have never heard of.
But I’ve been doing this long enough now to notice something. Every story I tell you is the same shape. The tariff story. The Sears story. The wage story. The refrigerant story. Different decade, different villain, but the same empty chair. Every single time, the decisions got made by people who would never hold the wrench or sign the cheque. And there was no one at that table speaking for the two ends of the line that actually pay for it:
The person who fixes the thing. And the person who owns it.
Doesn’t somebody fill that chair today?
You’d think so. Noisy advocates everywhere. Let me walk the room and check.
Right to Repair? It’s the closest thing we’ve got, and I’m glad it exists. But it lumps a sealed-system refrigeration repair in with swapping a cracked phone screen. Similar words. Completely different animal. It’s fighting for access to parts and manuals, and that matters, but it is not watching for the next shotgun. It isn’t built to.
Consumer reporting? Too shallow, and aimed the wrong way. It’ll tell you Brand A beat Brand B on this year’s reliability survey. It will not tell you that a single policy just quietly made every fridge in the country more expensive to fix and faster to landfill. That’s the trend. Nobody is watching the trend and calling it out.
The manufacturers? They’ve told us plainly: service is a cost centre, not an asset.
The regulators? They reach for the shotgun, because the shotgun looks like action.
And the technician, the one person in the whole chain who can actually see the fly and the elephant standing side by side, has no voice at all.
The organizations that do exist with an appliance service membership base are either too aligned with manufacturers to say anything useful, or pointed inward at education and credentialing, not outward at advocacy. Without a seat at the table, getting one costs money, lobbying money. That’s a prohibitive ask for an industry built on small family-run shops operating on slim margins.
A few numbers make the mismatch concrete. Total appliance service revenue in North America runs somewhere between $4.5 and $7 billion a year. The top four repair companies combined hold just 6.9% of the market. There are approximately 4,650 businesses in the space, averaging $900,000 to $1 million in annual revenue each. That isn’t an industry with a unified voice. That’s a collection of sole proprietors and two-tech shops who happen to fix the same things.
North American households are sitting on roughly $600 billion worth of appliances. The industry built to keep those appliances running grosses $5 billion a year. The industry built to replace them grosses $130 billion. Nobody designed the system to be this lopsided. Nobody needed to. The incentives did it on their own.
Who pays when nobody is in the room?
Before you decide this is just a tradesman feeling sorry for himself: it isn’t. Watch where the bill lands.
Costs go up for the servicer. The servicer has nowhere to put them but the customer. The repair gets too expensive to make sense, so the fridge gets condemned instead of fixed. Crushed. Shredded. And every ounce of foam that would have leaked out slowly, over another fifteen years of useful life, goes up all at once, in one afternoon, at the scrapyard.
The exact thing the rule was supposed to prevent, happening faster, because of the rule.
Bad for the technician. Bad for you. Bad for the air. Everybody loses, except the people who never had to sit in the chair to begin with.
So what am I asking for?
I’ll be fair, same as last time. The Montreal Protocol worked. The ozone layer is healing. I am not telling you that regulation is the enemy.
I’m telling you that regulation with nobody in the room to aim it is the enemy.
I can’t fill that chair. I’m one guy, fifty years of tools, and a camera. But I can do the one thing nobody else seems willing to do. I can point at the empty chair and say it out loud, on the record: somebody should be sitting here.
That’s what Clamshell Economics is. Not a complaint. A chair, held open, for the conversation that should have happened forty years ago. And still hasn’t.
I’m still all in. I just stopped waiting for someone else to say it.