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The Environmental Protection Agency moved on Friday to stop requiring thousands of polluting facilities to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that they release into the air.
The E.P.A. 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 Friday 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, E.P.A. continues to live up to the promise of unleashing energy dominance that powers the American dream,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement. “The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape.” He added that ending the program could save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in compliance costs over the next decade.
For the past 15 years, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program 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 program’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 E.P.A. 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 E.P.A. 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.
Dustin Meyer, senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, said in a statement that “the oil and gas industry has a long track record of reporting greenhouse gas emissions to a variety of stakeholders, and we remain committed to doing so in a transparent and accurate way.”
The proposal to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program injects uncertainty into a different program 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 E.P.A.
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 E.P.A. proposal is published in the Federal Register, the E.P.A. will solicit public comments for 47 days. Then the agency will finalize the proposal, likely within the next year.
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