Earlier this month, the environmental protection agency announced that it would cease to force polluting companies to report their emissions of greenhouse gases into it, excluding a critical tool that the United States is used to track the emissions and formation of climate policy. The climatic non -governmental organizations say that their work can help to arrange some gap in the data, but they and other experts fears that the EPA work cannot be completely compared.
“I do not think that this system can be completely replaced,” says Joseph Hoffman, a former assistant to the EPA administrator in air control and EPA radiation. “I think it can be approximately – but it will take time.”
Clean air law Requires States for collecting data on local pollution levels, which are then turned into the federal government. Over the past 15 years, EPA has also collected data on carbon dioxide, methaneand others greenhouse gases Of the sources throughout the country that emit on a certain threshold of emissions. This program is known as a reporting program for greenhouse gases (GHGRP) and “is really the basis of the reporting system for the quality of air in the United States,” says Kevin Gernie, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Northern Arizona.
Like many other data collection processes that have been stopped or stopped from the beginning of this year, the Trump administration placed this program in crossing. In March, EPA announced that she would completely revise the GHGRP program. In September, the agency passed to the proposed rule to eliminate reporting obligations from sources, from power plants to oil and gas transportation and chemical facilities – all the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (Agency Claims This refusal of GHGRP will save $ 2.4 billion. USA for normative expenses, and that the program “is nothing more than a bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”)
Joseph says that the closure of this program of savvy tendons “the main practical ability of the government to formulate a climate policy.” Understanding how new technologies for reducing emissions work, or examination, which industries are decarbonized and which are not, “it is extremely difficult to do if you do not have this data.”
The data collected by the GHGRP, which is publicly available, underlies most of the federal climatic policy: understanding which sectors contribute, which types of emissions are the first step in the formation of strategies aimed at reducing these emissions. These data are also the basis for most of the international climate policy in the United States: the collection of data on greenhouse gas emissions is prescribed by the UN Freimvorki Convention to change the climate, which underestimates the Paris Agreement. (While the United States left the Paris Agreement for the second time on the first day of the second term of Trump, it remains-Detko, the part of the countless.) The data collected by GHGRP also are crucial for the state and local climate policy, helping politicians outside the federal government to summarize local pollution, forms of emissions and restoration and tracking of progress in reducing emissions.
There is a hope that non -governmental actors can help. In recent years, various groups have gone to the table to help calculate the emissions of greenhouse gases from sources in both the US and throughout the country. These groups use a combination of federal, state, industrial and private data – from the databases of the oil and gas industry to state and private satellites to federal data, such as what EPA provides, to create instruments that help politicians and the public understand where greenhouse gas emissions come from and how they affect people in various ways. The technology also grew borders, since artificial intelligence models become more advanced both when tracking and in modeling emissions from different sources.
In the days that have passed after the EPA announcement, groups that collect and simulate data on emissions say that they calls the challenges from various interested parties trying to find out the solutions whether the EPA is canceled the program. Hoffman, who left EPA at the beginning of this year, says that the agency has staff, trying to “connect or become part of the university effort” to continue collecting data.
One of the most high -profile efforts in uncontrolized emissions of emissions is a coalition called Climate traceWhich was founded in 2019, after a donation from Google to observe global emissions using satellites. The group, which has since grown to more than 100 cooperating organizations, has developed many AI models that they combine with data from various sources to track and simulate emissions from around the world.
According to the co -founder Gavin McCormic, there is a dark time in which the EPA is represented to complete the GHGRP after Climate Trace created its own models, which are so relied on on EPA data. “We started this project on the thesis that America has the best emissions in the world, and other countries can quickly reduce emissions if they have reached the same quality as America,” says McCormik. “We just spent five years, creating this system of AI in order to try to give other countries to get closer to the same system.”
This is not only climatic consciousness that worry about the future of this data: there is a significant Industry of interest Continuing to collect national data on greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that the US government no longer invests in tracking climate change does not mean that the rest of the world is on board. For example, oil and gas companies with objects in the United States still have a financial interest to track their emissions if they sell to other markets, such as Europe, which It begins to impose Strict requirements for gas methanes imported into the block.
“Our phones exploded over the past ten days or so, from people who say:“ Do we have to start telling you now? You are not an official source, but you are the closest thing, ”says McCormik. “It is not obvious to me that we are the right tool for this. But there are very clear business interests in why the companies would like to continue to report, even if they do not need. ”
Private industry data can also be used to track greenhouse gas emissions – and even cover some emissions that are not reflected in EPA data. For example, the Mountin Rock Institute, a non -profit organization that works on market climatic solutions, uses an index based on a private industry data that monitors emissions from all over the oil and gas production cycle. (RMI is part of the Climate Trace coalition.) These private data allow this index to have Understanding the emissions From the industry that GHGRP could skip or underestimated, including calculations of emissions from sources that do not correspond to the outcome of the reporting.
Nevertheless, all experts who emphasized, said that the termination of the GHGRP data collection will seriously tire the US efforts to measure and combat greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of how good the federal options are. There are many difficulties that are faced with any organization that is trying to accept this monumental task.
“If EPA stopped, demanding this, it is quite possible that the states will continue to do this,” says Gernie. But he says: “No [other] The central warehouse to make a fee. Fifty objects rotated in data files, which are massively complex, is only a huge effort. EPA plays such an important role as such an arbiter of data, guaranteeing that all this corresponds to standardization. Honestly, this is the key to the rest, so as not to do it ourselves, which would be largely prohibitive barrier so that we can figure out this amount of data. ”
There are many different ways to calculate emissions; Methods used to collect and model data may also differ between various organizations and experts. Gernie, for example, was Vocal critic About how climatic traces develop their models. Meanwhile, the EPA reporting requirements on pollution reports are also backed up by the law: “The non -unprofiting organization really cannot demand this,” says Hoffman.
There is also an open question of whether evaluation grades can withstand legally, especially if the policy formed using these assessments is disputed in court. In Louisian, the law adopted last year seriously limits the ability of communities to use inexpensive devices, monitoring emissions, to track the quality of air and filing complaints or judicial claims about emissions; Air monitoring should now be performed exclusively using EPA approved by tools. (Groups that advocate communities living near oil and gas institutions filed a lawsuit in May, saying that tools are excessively expensive for local lawyers and claim The law is a “egregious violation of rights to freedom of community members to use your own independent monitoring of air pollution to increase anxiety about deadly chemicals released in their own homes and schools.”)
This law “really came to my house that it was only partly a scientific issue and you can get a date, and partly from this question about what is to this question,” says McCormik.
