The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it would stop making polluting companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to it, eliminating a crucial tool the US uses to track emissions and form climate policy. Climate NGOs say their work could help plug some of the data gap, but they and other experts fear the EPA’s work can’t be fully matched.
“I don’t think this system can be fully replaced,” says Joseph Goffman, the former assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “I think it could be approximated—but it’s going to take time.”
The Clean Air Act requires states to collect data on local pollution levels, which states then turn over to the federal government. For the past 15 years, the EPA has also collected data on carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from sources around the country that emit over a certain threshold of emissions. This program is known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) and “is really the backbone of the air quality reporting system in the United States,” says Kevin Gurney, a professor of atmospheric science at Northern Arizona University.
Like a myriad of other data-collection processes that have been stalled or halted since the start of this year, the Trump administration has put this program in the crosshairs. In March, the EPA announced it would be reconsidering the GHGRP program entirely. In September, the agency trotted out a proposed rule to eliminate reporting obligations from sources ranging from power plants to oil and gas refineries to chemical facilities—all major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (The agency claims that rolling back the GHGRP will save $2.4 billion in regulatory costs, and that the program is “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”)
Joseph says shutting down this program hamstrings “the government’s basic practical capacity to formulate climate policy.” Understanding how new emissions-reduction technologies are working, or surveying which industries are decarbonizing and which are not, “is extremely hard to do if you don’t have this data.”
Data collected by the GHGRP, which is publicly available, underpins much of federal climate policy: understanding which sectors are contributing which kinds of emissions is the first step in forming strategies to draw those emissions down. This data is also the backbone of much of international US climate policy: collection of greenhouse gas emissions data is mandated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which undergirds the Paris Agreement. (While the US exited the Paris Agreement for the second time on the first day of Trump’s second term, it remains—tenuously—a part of the UNFCCC.) Data collected by the GHGRP is also crucial to state and local climate policies, helping policymakers outside the federal government take stock of local pollution, form emissions-reductions goals, and track progress on bringing down emissions.
There’s some hope that nongovernmental actors could help. In recent years, various groups have stepped up to the table to help calculate greenhouse gas emissions from sources both in the US and nationwide. These groups use a mix of federal, state, industry, and private data—from oil and gas industry databases to public and private satellites to federal data like what the EPA provides—to create tools that help policymakers and the public understand where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from, and how they impact people in various ways. Technology has also grown leaps and bounds, too, as artificial intelligence models are getting more advanced at both tracking and modeling emissions from different sources.
