In 'Latest Pro-Polluter Move,' Trump EPA to End Emissions Data Collection

Citing US President Donald Trump's anti-climate executive actions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Friday unveiled a proposal to end a program that requires power plants, refineries, landfills, and more to report their emissions.

While Zeldin claimed that "the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality," experts and climate advocates emphasized the importance of the data collection, which began in 2010.

"President Trump promised Americans would have the cleanest air on Earth, but once again, Trump's EPA is taking actions that move us further from that goal," Joseph Goffman, who led the EPA Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration, said in a statement from the Environmental Protection Network, a group for former agency staff.

"Cutting 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," he explained.

As The New York Times reported:

For the past 15 years, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program has collected data from about 8,000 of the country's largest industrial facilities. That information has helped guide numerous decisions on federal policy and has been shared with the United Nations, which has required developed countries to submit tallies of their emissions.

In addition, private companies often rely on the program's data to demonstrate to investors that their efforts to cut emissions are working. And communities often use it to determine whether local facilities are releasing air pollution that threatens public health.

"By hiding this 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. "It's a further addition to the deliberate blockade against future action on climate change—and yet another example of the administration putting polluters before people's health."

Sierra Club's director of climate policy and advocacy, Patrick Drupp, stressed Friday that "EPA cannot avoid the climate crisis by simply burying its head in the sand as it baselessly cuts off its main source of greenhouse gas emissions data."

"The agency has provided no defensible reason to cancel the program; this is nothing more than EPA's latest action to deny the reality of climate change and do everything it can to put the fossil fuel industry and corporate polluters before people," he added. "The Sierra Club will oppose this proposal every step of the way.”

Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, similarly said that "the Trump administration's latest pro-polluter move to eliminate the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is just another brazen step in their Polluters First agenda."

Responding to the administration's claim that the proposal would save businesses up to $2.4 billion in regulatory costs, Alt said that "under the guise of saving Americans money, this is an attempt on the part of Trump, Lee Zeldin, and their polluter buddies to hide the ball and avoid responsibility for the deadly, dangerous, and expensive pollution they produce."

"If they succeed, the nation's biggest polluters will spew climate-wrecking pollution without accountability," she warned. "The idea that tracking pollution does 'nothing to improve air quality' is absurd," she added. "If you don't measure it, you can't manage it. Hiding information and allowing fossil fuel companies to avoid accountability are the true goals of this rule."

BlueGreen Alliance executive director Jason Walsh declared that "the Trump administration continues to prove it does not care about the American people and their basic right to breathe clean air. This flies in the face of the EPA's core mission—to protect the environment and public health."

"The proposal is wildly unpopular with even industry groups speaking against it because they know the value of having this emissions data available," he noted. "Everybody in this country deserves to know the air quality in their community and how their lives can be affected when they live near high-emitting facilities."

“Knowledge is power and—in this case—health," he concluded. "The administration shouldn't be keeping people in the dark about the air they and their neighbors are breathing."

This proposal from Zeldin came a day after the EPA moved to reverse rules protecting people from unsafe levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called "forever chemicals," in US drinking water, provoking similar criticism. Earthjustice attorney Katherine O'Brien said that his PFAS decision "prioritizes chemical industry profits and utility companies' bottom line over the health of children and families across the country."