The Trump administration on Friday announced that it plans to stop requiring more than 8,000 polluters to report greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal would see industrial facilities like coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, and steel mills no longer have to track and report the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and other emissions they emit—a requirement that had been in place since 2010.
The agency said that U.S. businesses could save as much as $2.4 billion in regulatory costs over the next decade as a result of the change. Some experts have argued that the societal costs of emissions from companies in the U.S. could run into the tens of trillions by 2050.
The EPA in its release said that requiring facilities to report emissions had “no material impact on improving human health and the environment.” It comes after months of work by the Trump administration to dismantle various federal programs designed to combat climate change and cuts to research funding to study the phenomenon.
The administration’s efforts to pull back on climate change is at odds with the broad scientific consensus that human-driven warming is linked to extreme weather and health risks. A study published in Nature this past week, for example, showed that 180 of the world’s biggest fossil fuel and cement producers made 213 extreme heatwaves between 2000 and 2023 more likely and more dangerous.
What does greenhouse gas reporting do?
Since 2010, the greenhouse gas reporting program has collected emissions data from about 8,000 of the largest industrial facilities in the U.S. from 47 different source categories. In turn, this information has historically been shared with the United Nations, but for the first time in nearly 30 years, the Trump administration missed an April deadline to submit data on U.S. climate emissions.
As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations has required industrialized countries to reduce their emissions to combat climate change. U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his first day in office that the U.S. would withdraw from this agreement for the second time (Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement during his first term).
“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality,” Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said in a statement. “Instead, it costs American businesses and manufacturing billions of dollars, driving up the cost of living, jeopardizing our nation’s prosperity and hurting American communities.”
“Unlike other mandatory information collections under the Clean Air Act, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is not directly related to a potential regulation and has no material impact on improving human health and the environment. By reducing the overall regulatory burden, current regulated parties will be able to focus compliance expenditures on actual, tangible environmental benefits,” an EPA spokesperson told Fast Company in a statement.
Certain oil and gas facilities will still be required to report emissions data as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, although the EPA’s proposal would allow these facilities to suspend reporting until 2034.
Critics point to cost of losing data
Environmental advocates criticized the proposal as hampering future policy making.
“With this move, they’re taking away the practical and material capacity of the federal government to do the basic elements of climate policymaking,” a former EPA official under the Biden administration told The New York TImes.
The proposal would eliminate data that the public, states, and local policymakers have depended on for more than 15 years, leaving Americans “in the dark” about where pollution is coming from, David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, told The Associated Press.
Before this proposal is finalized, the EPA will hold a virtual public hearing and accept public comments for 47 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register.