by Sharon Lerner

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program documents the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.

“This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute.........

© ProPublica