EPA to stop collecting emissions data from polluters

The Environmental Protection Agency moved to stop requiring thousands of polluting facilities to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that they release into the air. The EPA proposal would end requirements for thousands of coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country. The government has been collecting this data since 2010 and it is a key tool to track carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that are driving climate change.

The announcement followed months of efforts by the Trump administration to systematically erase mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming. “Alongside President Trump, EPA continues to live up to the promise of unleashing energy dominance that powers the American dream,” Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said in a statement. “The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Programme is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape.” He added that ending the programme could save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in compliance costs over the next decade.

Critics said the proposal could hobble federal efforts to fight climate change, since the government cannot reduce emissions if it cannot track where they are coming from. “With this move, they’re taking away the practical and material capacity of the federal government to do the basic elements of climate policymaking,” said Joseph Goffman, who led the EPA’s office of air and radiation during the Biden administration.

For the past 15 years, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Programme has collected data from about 8,000 of the country’s largest industrial facilities. That information has helped guide numerous decisions on federal policy and has been shared with the United Nations, which has required developed countries to submit tallies of their emissions. In addition, private companies often rely on the programme’s data to demonstrate to investors that their efforts to cut emissions are working. And communities often use it to determine whether local facilities are releasing air pollution that threatens public health.

The EPA proposal would not eliminate emissions reporting requirements for certain oil and gas facilities such as pipelines that transport natural gas. That’s because those reports were required by Congress as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, the EPA is proposing to allow those specific oil and gas facilities to postpone emissions reporting until 2034. Congressional Republicans already delayed a related requirement for the facilities to pay a fee on their methane emissions until 2034.

Carrie Jenks, executive director of the environmental and energy law programme at the Harvard Law School, said the data had shown that many large oil and gas companies were reducing their emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is roughly 80 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the short term. “Not having the government verify this data is hard, but there could still be some voluntary efforts to collect it” by companies and states, Jenks said.

The proposal to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Programme injects uncertainty into a different programme that is favored by the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry: tax credits for companies that capture and bury their carbon emissions. To qualify for those generous tax credits, companies must submit their emissions data to the EPA. The proposal follows a rapid-fire series of steps by the Trump administration to weaken or dismantle environmental protections.

Under the 2015 Paris Accord, the agreement among nations to combat climate change, the United Nations has required that all developed countries provide data on their domestic emissions each year. But the United States missed an April deadline to submit this data, and Trump began the yearlong process of withdrawing from the Paris pact on his first day back in office.

In addition, the Trump administration has asked Nasa to decommission and possibly destroy two satellites that measure greenhouse gases from space. In contrast, in July, Europe’s first carbon-tracking satellite launched with the goal of capturing more granular emissions data. After the EPA proposal is published in the Federal Register, the EPA will solicit public comments for 47 days. Then the agency will finalize the proposal, likely within the next year.