The EPA wants to end a requirement that large polluters report their greenhouse gas emissions

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed doing away with a program that has required large, mostly industrial polluters to report their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to the government.

The program requires refineries, power plants, oil wells and landfills to report their emissions without risk of penalty as officials seek to identify high-polluting facilities and develop policies to lower emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Experts say the reporting held the companies publicly accountable for their emissions.

Since the program began in 2009, U.S. industry has collectively reported a 20% drop in carbon emissions, mostly driven by the closure of coal-fired power plants.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program “burdensome” and unhelpful to improving human health and the environment.

Removing the rule would save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in regulatory costs over 10 years while maintaining the agency’s statutory obligations under the Clean Air Act, Zeldin said. If finalized, the proposal would remove reporting obligations for most large industrial facilities in the United States, as well as fuel and industrial gas suppliers and carbon dioxide injection sites.

“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality,” Zeldin said in a statement.

“It costs American businesses and manufacturing billions of dollars, driving up the cost of living, jeopardizing our nation’s prosperity and hurting American communities,” he said. “With this proposal, we show once again that fulfilling EPA’s statutory obligations and Powering the Great American Comeback is not a binary choice.”

But experts say dropping the requirement — as Zeldin promised in March when he unleashed what he called the greatest day of deregulation in U.S. history — risks a big increase in emissions, since companies would no longer be publicly accountable for what they discharge into the air. And they say losing the data — at the same time the EPA is cutting air quality monitoring elsewhere — would make it tougher to fight climate change.

Joseph Goffman, who led EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation under President Joe Biden, said eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program “blinds Americans to the facts about climate pollution. Without it, policymakers, businesses and communities cannot make sound decisions about how to cut emissions and protect public health.”

By hiding pollution information from the public, “Administrator Zeldin is denying Americans the ability to see the damaging results of his actions on climate pollution, air quality and public health,” Goffman said, calling the plan “yet another example of the Trump administration putting polluters before people’s health.”

David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, called the proposal “a cynical effort to keep the American public in the dark, because if they don’t know who the polluters are, they can’t do anything to hold them responsible.”

Big polluters may want to keep their climate pollution secret, he added, but the public, states and local policymakers “have depended on this data” for more than 15 years. Public accountability and pushback from investors have led many companies to reduce their climate pollution even before EPA sets stricter standards, Doniger said.

But Zeldin said reducing the overall regulatory burden on U.S. industry will allow companies to “focus compliance expenditures on actual, tangible environmental benefits.”

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program covers 47 source categories and requires more than 8,000 facilities and suppliers in the U.S. to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions annually, Zeldin said.

“Following a careful review, EPA proposed that there is no requirement under (the Clean Air Act) to collect GHG emission information from businesses, nor is continuing the ongoing costly data collection useful to fulfill any of the agency’s statutory obligations,” he said.

The EPA will accept public comments on the proposal for more than six weeks after the plan is published in the Federal Register, expected in coming days.