"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies."
-- Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, 1861.
Since I live in Illinois, aka “The Land of Lincoln,” it’s hard for me not to think of Mr. Lincoln every November. After all, he delivered the iconic Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, and that came just one week before the first official U.S. celebration of Thanksgiving. Of course, it was Lincoln, himself, who had made Thanksgiving a national holiday just a month prior.
Not surprisingly, Lincoln also was in my thoughts earlier this month when I served as a Cook County Election Judge for the U.S. Presidential Election, helping to oversee just one tiny precinct in our nation’s vast network of polling places in all 50 states. Yes, democracy, in all its quirky iterations was on display, and more than 154 million of us citizens participated in one way or another.
In the end, one candidate with 76.8 million votes won and the other with 74.2 million votes lost. A divided nation, indeed.
Why does this all matter to the HVACR industry? How does it affect HVAC engineers, designers, builders and suppliers?
Well, I trust most of you already know, but it’s worth reviewing the most obvious factors in play. Tax cuts and deregulation likely will arrive in some form in 2025, which is largely why Wall Street surged in the first week after the election. But beyond that, darker clouds are gathering over the federal role in environmental protection enforcement and climate-related sustainability efforts. And tariffs and aggressive immigration deportation policies could suddenly “disrupt” the construction industry in profound ways next year, as discussed in our lead News article.
Still, the train has already left the station on so many of these issues.
So even a drastic change in U.S. leadership is not going to undo all of our industry’s diligent work in recent years to make products that are cleaner and better for our planet. For instance, A2L Refrigerants are still coming, and R-410A refrigerants are still going away. As industry giant TRANE explains on its website: “No new system may be installed using HFC refrigerants above the GWP limit after the compliance date (Jan. 1, 2025), even if the components were manufactured prior to that date.”
For some of us, the world may seem completely upended as we enter this holiday season. But for others, it is an opportunity to recommit ourselves to our core values.
"While our political landscape might shift, ASHRAE's mission to serve humanity and promote a sustainable world remains unchanged," says ASHRAE President Dennis Knight, in his appearance on our December episode of HPAC On The Air. “Our mission remains rock solid.”
Founded in 1894, ASHRAE is now a truly global society with 50,000 members representing 132 nations. “We will continue to provide technical expertise and guidance based on scientific evidence and our engineering principles,” added Knight. “And I think that’s what we’ll do for the next 130 years, too.”
Taking the long view seems particularly wise in the heat of this chaotic political moment.
Indeed, I am heartened by something I witnessed on Election Day this year at the polls. One of my colleagues was a 17-year-old student judge, an African-American senior at the local high school. He checked in an elderly Polish-American man in his 90s, a Korean War veteran who shared that he, too, had been a student poll watcher… in 1948! Seventy-six years apart!
After the visibly emotional older man had voted, I asked both to pose for a photo. In their two remarkable faces, I saw all the rocky U.S. history that stretched between them. And their smiles made me smile.
So, who am I to doubt what all of us good-hearted citizens can accomplish in this industry, and in this nation, in the uncertain year to come?
