The EPA wants to terminate a requirement that major polluters report their greenhouse gas emissions

Washington (AP) Environmental Protection Agency on Friday suggested to go away with a program that required large, mostly industrial polluters to report their planet to the planet to the planet. The program requires refineries, power stations, oil pits and landfills to report their emissions without the risk of fine, as officials try to identify high -pollinating facilities and develop policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases. According to experts, the reporting held the businesses publicly accountable for their emissions. Since the program started in 2009, the US industry has jointly reported a 20% drop in carbon emissions, mostly powered by the closure of coal -fired power plants. The EPA administrator Lee Zeldin calls the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program “troublesome” and useful to improve the health of man and the environment. Removal of the rule would save US businesses up to $ 2.4 billion in regulation costs over ten years, while the agency’s statutory obligations are upheld under the Clean Air Act, Zeldin said. If completed, the proposal will remove reporting obligations for most major industrial facilities in the United States, as well as fuel and industrial gas suppliers and carbon dioxide injection locations. “The greenhouse gas reporting program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality,” Zeldin said in a statement. “It costs US businesses and billions of dollars, raising the cost of living, endangering our country’s wealth and injuring American communities,” he said. ” With this proposal, we once again show that compliance with the statutory obligations of the EPA and the Great American Comeback are not a binary choice. “But experts say he dropped the requirements. Deregulation in American history – is a major increase in emissions, as companies would no longer be publicly liable for what they fired in the air. And they say the loss of the data – at the same time monitoring air quality elsewhere – will make it more difficult to fight climate change. Joseph Goffman, who led the EPA’s office of air and radiation under President Joe Biden, said the elimination of the greenhouse gas reporting program “blinds Americans to the facts about climate pollution. Without it, policymakers, businesses and communities cannot make a good decision on how to reduce emissions and protect public health.” By hiding pollution information from the public, the administrator Zeldin Americans deny the ability to see the harmful results of his actions on climate pollution, air quality and public health, “Goffman said, called the plan” another example of the Trump administration that places polluters in front of people’s health. “David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, calls the proposal” a cynical attempt to keep the American public in the dark, because if they don’t know who the polluters are, they can’t do anything to hold them responsible. ” Major pollutants may want to keep their climate pollution secret, he added, but the public, states and local policymakers have more than 15 years of this data dependent on this data. Enterprises will enable “expenses for compliance with the actual, tangible environmental benefits.” The greenhouse gas reporting program covers 47 source categories and needs more than 8,000 facilities and suppliers in the US to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions annually, Zeldin said. useful to fulfill any of the statutory obligations of the agency, ” he said.