The Trump administration on Friday proposed to end a program requiring coal-fired power plants, industrial factories and oil refining facilities to report their planet-warming pollution to the federal government.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program has been active since 2010, compelling more than 8,000 facilities and suppliers in the United States to report their climate pollution every year, and uses the data to help shape rules to reduce the amount of pollution in the air.
The action taken Friday goes beyond instructions to some regulators to ramp down rule enforcement against the oil and gas industry, which CNN previously reported.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the new steps as a move to end burdensome regulations.
“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality,” Zeldin 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.”
Environmental advocates blasted the proposal as another way the Trump administration is giving polluters a free pass.
“Big polluters may want to keep their climate pollution secret, but more than 15 years ago Congress ordered EPA to collect and publish this data each year,” David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “This proposal gives polluters the secrecy they want in violation of the law.”
The EPA in its news release said that after a review, it had determined it was not required by law to compel fossil fuel producers and major industrial businesses to report their emissions under the Clean Air Act. Only certain oil and gas facilities, including natural gas pipelines, will still be mandated to report emissions of gases like methane, but can delay reporting those emissions until the year 2034.
The data is also used by local communities to track harmful air pollution emitted by nearly industry, and by the United Nations as part of US duties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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