EPA Will No Longer Collect GHG Emissions Data From Corporations, Utilities; Can Anyone Else Compile Information?

The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it would stop making polluting companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to it, eliminating a crucial tool the U.S. uses to track emissions and form climate policy. Climate NGOs say their work could help plug some of the data gap, but they and other experts fear the EPA’s work can’t be fully matched. “I don’t think this system can be fully replaced,” said Joseph Goffman, the former assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “I think it could be approximated — but it’s going to take time.”

The Clean Air Act requires states to collect data on local pollution levels, which states then turn over to the federal government. For the past 15 years, the EPA has also collected data on carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from sources around the country that emit over a certain threshold of emissions. This program is known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, or GHGRP, and “is really the backbone of the air quality reporting system in the United States,” said Kevin Gurney, a professor of atmospheric science at Northern Arizona University.

Like a myriad of other data-collection processes that have been stalled or halted since the start of this year, the Trump administration has put this program in the crosshairs. In March, the EPA announced it would be reconsidering the GHGRP program entirely. In September, the agency trotted out a proposed rule to eliminate reporting obligations from sources ranging from power plants to oil and gas refineries to chemical facilities — all major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (The agency claims that rolling back the GHGRP will save $2.4 billion in regulatory costs, and that the program is “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”)

EDlT

“If the EPA stopped requiring this, it’s entirely possible that states will continue to do it,” said Gurney. But, he said, “there is no [other] central warehouse to do the collating. Fifty entities turning in data files, which are massively complex, is just a huge endeavor. The EPA plays such an important role as this kind of data arbiter, ensuring that it’s all complying with standardization. That’s key for the rest of us, frankly, to not have to do that ourselves, which would be pretty much a prohibitive barrier for us to be able to make sense of that amount of data.” There are many different ways to calculate emissions; the techniques used to collect and model data can also differ between different organizations and experts. Gurney, for instance, has been a vocal critic of the way Climate TRACE designs its models. The EPA’s pollution reporting requirements, meanwhile, are also backed by law: “A nongovernmental entity really can’t require that,” Goffman said.

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https://grist.org/accountability/the-epa-is-ending-greenhouse-gas-data-collection-who-will-step-up-to-fill-the-gap/