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

Washington – On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed to remove a program that required major polluters, mainly industrial, to report their heating greenhouse gas emissions to the government.

The program requires refineries, power plants, petroleum wells and discharges to report their emissions without risk of penalty while managers seek to identify the installations with high pollutes and to develop policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases. Experts say that reports have publicly held the companies responsible for their programs.

Since the start of the program in 2009, the American industry has collectively reported a 20% drop in carbon emissions, mainly fired by the closure of coal power plants.

EPA’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, qualified the “heavy” greenhouse gases program and no need to improve human health and the environment.

The abolition of the rule would allow American companies up to $ 2.4 billion in regulatory costs over 10 years while maintaining the legal obligations of the agency under the Clean Act, said Zeldin. If it is finalized, the proposal would remove the declaration obligations for most major industrial facilities in the United States, as well as industrial fuel and gas suppliers and carbon dioxide injection sites.

“The program of greenhouse gases is nothing more than bureaucratic administrative formalities that do nothing to improve air quality,” Zeldin said in a statement.

“It costs American and manufacturing companies of billions of dollars, increasing the cost of living, dating the prosperity of our nation and harming the American communities,” he said.

But experts say that the abolition of the requirement – as Zeldin promised in March when he triggered what he called the biggest day of deregulation in the history of the United States – risks a strong increase in emissions, because companies are no longer publicly responsible for what they deposit. And they say that data loss – at the same time EPA cuts air quality surveillance elsewhere – would make climate change more difficult.

Joseph Goffman, who managed the EPA air and radiation office under President Joe Biden, said that the elimination of the greenhouse gas reporting program “blinds the Americans to the facts on climate pollution.

By hiding information on public pollution, “the administrator Zeldin refuses Americans the ability to see the prejudicial results of his actions on climate pollution, air quality and public health,” said Goffman, calling the plan “yet another example of the Trump administration putting pollutors before people’s health”.

David Doniger, a main strategist of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, described the proposal “a cynical effort to keep the American public in the dark, because if they do not know who are the polluters, they can do nothing to keep them responsible”.

Large polluters may want to keep their climate pollution secret, he added, but the public, states and local decision-makers “depend on these data” for more than 15 years. Public responsibility and the decline in investors have led many companies to reduce their climate pollution even before the EPA sets stricter standards, said Doniger.

But Zeldin said that the reduction in the overall regulatory charge of the American industry will allow companies to “concentrate compliance spending on real and tangible environmental benefits”.

The greenhouse gas reports program covers 47 categories of sources and requires more than 8,000 facilities and suppliers in the United States to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions each year, said Zeldin.

“Following a meticulous examination, the EPA proposed that there is no requirement under (the Clean Air Act) to collect information on GHG emissions to companies, and does not continue to collect costly data in progress to fulfill one of the legal obligations of the agency,” he said.

The EPA will accept public comments on the proposal for more than six weeks after the publication of the plan in the Federal Register, scheduled for the coming days.