Trump EPA Moves To End The Program That Counts America's Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Country Was Still Keeping Track Of Them

WASHINGTON. Advancing its campaign to unburden American industry, the Environmental Protection Agency on September 16 proposed eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the fifteen-year-old system under which roughly 8,000 power plants, refineries, and industrial facilities are required to tell the federal government how much heat-trapping pollution they release each year, resolving the long-standing concern that the country was still keeping a written record of the emissions warming it.

The program, established in 2009 and in effect since 2010, covers 47 categories of large emitters, each of which reports annually on greenhouse gases released above a threshold of 25,000 metric tons. Under the proposal, reporting obligations would be lifted for nearly every sector, with only petroleum and natural gas systems still required to file, and even there the agency would end natural gas distribution reporting permanently and defer the rest until 2034, by which point the data would describe a decade that had already happened.

Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the change as a matter of arithmetic, announcing that ending the program would save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in the cost of measuring what they emit. The figure represents the expense of the counting rather than the pollution, a distinction the administration did not dwell on, noting only that a country that does not tally its emissions cannot easily be accused of having any.

"We are ending a burdensome, costly program," a senior EPA official said, declining to specify how the government would set climate policy for pollution it had elected to stop measuring. A source within the administration confirmed that the underlying emissions would continue at their present rate, and would simply do so unobserved.

Environmental researchers noted that the reporting program has for years served as the foundational dataset for nearly every federal, state, and academic estimate of industrial emissions, meaning its elimination removes not only a regulatory obligation but the number itself. Industry groups, several of which had relied on the same data, greeted the proposal with the enthusiasm of parties who had just been told the scale would be taken away.

At press time, a natural gas facility in Texas that had reported 3 million metric tons of emissions the previous year was preparing to report a quantity best described as unknown.