In the summer of 2020, when Donald Trump was president for the first time and the United States was in the early and incredibly deadly months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump floated an idea for bringing down cases.
“Think of this, if we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases,” Trump said during a White House press conference. “If we did another, you cut that in half, we would have, yet again, half of that. But the headlines are always testing.”
Five years later, the second Trump Administration is putting a similar approach into practice for climate change: it wants to stop monitoring greenhouse gas emissions.
Since 2010, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program has collected data on carbon, methane, and other gases from some 8,000 industrial facilities across the country, including everything from coal-fired power plants to petrochemical facilities. The data is the single-most important benchmark for how well (or how poorly) the country is doing at combating the climate crisis — and as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the GGRP data is a huge facet of tracking progress toward hitting the Paris Agreement goals.
Why Does Emissions Reporting Matter?
Between trying to undo the federal basis for regulating carbon emissions and now trying not to keep track of them at all, the Trump Administration could not give a bigger sign that it is not going to do anything about climate change. And since Black Americans tend to live in communities that are most threatened by the climate crisis, they have the most immediately on the line as floods, heat waves, and hurricanes — all of which disproportionately affect Black people — get increasingly worse.
“With this move, they’re taking away the practical and material capacity of the federal government to do the basic elements of climate policymaking,” Joseph Goffman, the head of the EPA’s office of air and radiation under President Biden, told the New York Times.
How the EPA Is Justifying the Rollback
Of course, the Environmental Protection Agency, which the GGRP is a part of, is framing the proposed change in terms of deregulation.
“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality,” EPA administrator Lee 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.”
A Period of Public Comment
The proposed change will go through a period of public comment before it is finalized, likely sometime next year. Rather than do away with the program entirely, the EPA is instead pushing off certain reporting requirements for an extended period of time, until 2034.
For the time being, the reporting of other toxic emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities, which Black Americans are disproportionately exposed to, will continue.
