WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed to eliminate a program that requires large-scale industrial polluters to report greenhouse gas emissions to the government to warm the planet.
The program requires refineries, power plants, oil wells and landfills to report emissions Without the risk of penalty, officials are trying to identify highly polluted facilities and develop policies to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Experts say the report makes businesses publicly responsible for emissions.
Since the program was launched in 2009, US industry has collectively reported a 20% decline in carbon emissions, driven primarily by the closure of coal-fired power plants.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin called the greenhouse gas reporting program a “burden” and did not help improve human health and the environment.
Zeldin said that removing the rules would save American companies over a decade, while saving up to $2.4 billion in regulatory costs over a decade. If confirmed, this proposal removes reporting obligations for most large industrial facilities in the United States, as well as fuel and industrial gas suppliers, carbon dioxide injection sites.
“The greenhouse gas reporting programme is nothing more than a bureaucratic deficit that does nothing to improve air quality,” Zeldin said in a statement.
“It drives American businesses and billions of dollars of manufacturing, living expenses, risking the prosperity of our country and hurting the American community,” he said.
But experts say they’ll drop the requirements – as Zeldin promised when he unleashed what he called in March The biggest day of deregulation In US history, large increases in emissions take risks as businesses are not publicly responsible for what they emit into the air. And they say that while losing data, the EPA is reducing air quality monitoring elsewhere – it will do that It’s difficult to fight climate change.
Joseph Goffman, who headed the EPA’s Air and Radiation Department under President Joe Biden, said he would eliminate the greenhouse gas reporting program.
By hiding pollution information from the public, “Manager Zeldin denis Americans the ability to see the harmful consequences of his actions regarding climate pollution, air quality and public health,” Goffman said. The Trump administration places polluters in front of people’s health. ”
“If you don’t know who the polluters are, they can’t do anything to hold them accountable,” said David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
While large-scale polluters may want to keep climate pollution a secret, he added that public, state and local policymakers “relied on this data” for more than 15 years. Even before the EPA set stricter standards, Doniger said many have led many to reduce climate pollution.
However, Zeldin said that reducing the overall regulatory burden on the US industry allows businesses to “focus compliance spending on actual, concrete environmental benefits.”
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program covers 47 source categories, with more than 8,000 U.S. facilities and suppliers need to calculate greenhouse gas emissions each year, Zeldin said.
“Following a careful review, the EPA proposed that there is no requirement for collecting GHG emissions information from businesses (The Clean Air Act) and will not continue to collect ongoing, costly data that will help meet the agency’s legal duties,” he said.
The EPA will accept public comments on the proposal more than six weeks after the plans are published in the federal register, which is expected in the coming days.