The federal agency responsible for protecting the environment in the United States will stop requiring most polluters to report their emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

The upcoming policy shift by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), first reported by ProPublica on Thursday, will effectively render the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, and largest historical emitter, blind to the pollution caused by its factories, fossil fuel industry and chemical plants.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, a publicly accessible database tracking US emissions since 2010, is widely used by lawmakers across the country to make policy decisions on health and environmental considerations of polluting facilities in local communities and to hold companies accountable for damages. The program currently tracks an estimated 90% of US emissions.

The EPA will cut reporting requirements for 40 out of 41 sectors currently required to submit emissions data, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica. The single sector that will remain under reporting obligations is known as Subpart W, and covers facilities involved in onshore and offshore production, processing, transmission, storage, and distribution of oil and natural gas products.

Only 2,300 of the 8,000 facilities currently required to report emissions will still be subject to the reporting requirements after the rule change. The rollback will make public scrutiny of heavy polluters more difficult as emissions that are not tracked cannot be regulated. It is likely to primarily benefit the petrochemical and energy-intensive manufacturing industries, such as cement, glass, iron and steel, by reducing compliance costs.

The program is also the source of a vast majority of the data submitted by the US to the United Nations on its emissions trajectory required under the Paris Climate Agreement, which Trump exited on his first day in office. 

The move comes as countries around the world try to move in the opposite direction and reduce emissions as weather threats intensified by climate change drive increasingly severe floods, storms and droughts globally. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement saw the US  join Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries on the planet that are not part of the accord. 

Why?

The motivation for the move, while reflecting the Trump administration’s position that the federal government should not be involved in fighting or studying the effects of climate change on the US and the world, is not immediately clear. The primary beneficiaries, however, will be large industrial polluters.

The move was first hinted at in a press release posted by the EPA on 12 March, when Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, announced that his agency was “reconsidering” the emissions reporting programme as part of a set of 31 policy reviews in “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in the history of the United States.”

“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is another example of a bureaucratic government program that does not improve air quality,” Zeldin said at the time. “Instead, it costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”

The move to gut emissions reporting is directly referenced in Project 2025, the behemoth 900-page far-right policy blueprint underpinning many actions taken by the Trump administration in its early months. The document echoes Zeldin’s critique that it is a burden on small businesses, advising the EPA to “remove” it.

Yet to qualify for mandatory reporting requirements, businesses must emit at least 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year – a high threshold that excludes the vast majority of what may be considered “small businesses.”

This is equivalent to 58,000 barrels of oil consumed or nearly 14,000 tonnes of coal burned, according to the EPA’s own Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator. At the average price of $80.53 per barrel for Brent crude oil in 2024, those barrels would be worth about $4.7 million.

The regulation was designed with this high threshold specifically to protect small businesses from onerous reporting requirements. 

Eliminating reporting as emissions rise

One plausible benefit of the elimination of the programme is to limit public scrutiny of emissions amid plans by the Trump administration and Project 2025’s policy paper to vastly increase US emissions.

An analysis of plans published by the Trump administration conducted by Carbon Brief found his re-election was likely to add four billion tonnes of US emissions by 2030, equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the European Union’s 27 member-states and Japan, or 140 of the world’s smallest emitter nations.

“Put another way, the extra 4GtCO2e from a second Trump term would negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” the analysis found.

Project 2025 meanwhile proposes a similar trajectory. A separate analysis found the policy proposals outlined would increase US emissions by 2.7 billion tonnes above its current trajectory by 2030. Ross Vought, the architect of Project 2025, is in Trump’s cabinet and leads the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Regardless of the stated justifications, the policy shift clearly aligns with the broader agenda of the administration that the federal government should have nothing to do with studying or funding climate change initiatives.

In what Zeldin termed the “most momentous day in the history of the EPA” in March when he first mentioned eliminating the GHG Reporting Program, his agency announced the rollback of 31 separate regulations on climate.

These included revising measures “throttling the oil and gas industry,” safety standards for mercury and toxic air that “improperly targeted coal-fired power plants,” and slashing national standards set by the EPA that control the discharge of pollutants in wastewater from industrial facilities produced during extraction operations like drilling, fracking, and production, among an array of other measures softening rules on pollution of all kinds.

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” Zeldin said in March. “We are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry.”

The EPA has not responded to a request for comment from Health Policy Watch at the time of publication. 

Lobbyists in control

The political appointees who have tasked the EPA with rolling back reporting requirements have direct and recent ties to America’s petrochemical industry, public records show.

Abigale Tardif, the Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator at the EPA’s Air and Radiation Office, was identified by ProPublica as the appointee who instructed the agency’s staff to draft the regulation that would eliminate emissions reporting.

Tardif was still listed as a lobbyist on the website of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) – an industry group including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries that spent over $27 million lobbying in 2024 – when her appointment was announced.

She previously worked as a lobbyist for the Ohio-based Marathon Petroleum, which is a member of AFPM, according to public records. Her lobbying portfolio included pushing for the repeal of Biden-era tailpipe emissions standards as well as “unspecified air regulations on refineries and petrochemical plants along with vehicle fuel economy standards,” according to public quarterly disclosure reports seen by Politico.

Aaron Szabo, who is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, was also confirmed to be present at the meeting by ProPublica. His recent work includes lobbying for the American Chemistry Council, which includes fossil fuel titans such as Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute, among others, public records show.

Combined, just three of the clients represented by Tardif and Szabo – the American Petroleum Institute (API), American Chemistry Council (ACC) and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) – spent over $56 million on lobbying in 2024 alone.

Zeldin, the EPA chief, received over $410,000 from the oil and gas industry during his runs for Congress and governor of New York, public records show. He was a frequent opponent of all types of climate action during his time in Congress.

On Tuesday, Zeldin said his EPA supports “clean beautiful coal” following a Trump administration executive order prohibiting federal agencies “discriminate” against coal and waiving crucial air-pollution regulations on plants across the country – effectively granting the industry both increased pollution rights and freedom from public scrutiny.

Climate purge across US government 

Trump is cutting $4 million in federal funding for climate change research at Princeton University, saying the work promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and increased “climate anxiety” among young Americans.#HeadInTheSandwww.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/09/n…

— Climate Risk Economics (@climateeconomics.bsky.social) 2025-04-10T08:10:42.362Z

The plan to stop tracking emissions that cause climate change is part of a wider assault on climate science and discourse that began the day Trump retook the White House.

Beyond the EPA, mentions of climate are being targeted across every government website, grant program and policy.

The Trump administration has gutted government support for scientific research in the US and abroad that contains the word “climate” at all. This ban on referencing the climate crisis in research includes grants issued by federal agencies, research within those agencies, as well as outside academic institutions.

One environmental scientist who did not want to be named told The Guardian their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation for climate-adaptation research had been withdrawn, until they renamed it to remove the word “climate.”

“I still have the grant because I changed the title,” the scientist said. “I was told that I needed to do so before the title of the grant was published on the US DoT website in order to keep it. The explanation was that the priorities of the current administration don’t include climate change.”

Over $20 billion in grants for climate research have been terminated, including $4 million to Princeton University cancelled on Monday, which the White House accused of promoting “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” that increase “climate anxiety” in young Americans. 

Princeton was running programs with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) focused on forecasting weather models for water access and extreme weather events, modeling climate risks and predictions to advance adaptation strategies for a world on track for 3.1C warming by 2100 – catastrophic warming by all model predictions.

“Its focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion,” the Department of Commerce said in a press release announcing the funding cuts to Princeton. 

It added one of the research programs “suggests that the Earth will have a significant fluctuation in its water availability as a result of global warming. Using federal funds to perpetuate these narratives does not align with the priorities of this Administration and such time and resources can be better utilized elsewhere.”

US military drops ‘climate change crap’

John is, of course, correct.

The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap.

We do training and warfighting. https://t.co/eK5Xyf7fN4

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) March 9, 2025

The Pentagon has seen a similar purge despite its long history of climate security planning. The US military has cancelled more than 90 studies related to climate change impacts on national security in the US and abroad. 

“The Department of Defense does not do climate change crap,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on social media, a statement later confirmed as “Fact check true” by an official Pentagon account.

This dramatic shift contradicts the military’s own long-standing position. The Department of Defense has officially recognized climate change as a “threat multiplier” since at least 2010, noting it can exacerbate existing security threats. In 2014, the Pentagon released a Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap that called climate change an “immediate risk to national security.”

“Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does,” then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated in 2021.

US lobbying efforts have historically resulted in military activities being exempted from landmark UN climate agreements. The Kyoto Protocol contained no requirements for military emissions reporting, and the 2015 Paris Agreement makes armed forces emissions reporting optional – exemptions that have also benefited other major military powers like China and Russia.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Defense has become by far the world’s largest single institutional consumer of fossil fuels. A 2023 report found the United States and United Kingdom armed forces emitted at least 430 million tons of CO₂ since the Paris accord was signed — more than the UK’s total emissions in 2022. Ninety percent of those emissions were attributed to the US military.

If the planet’s militaries were a country, they would have the fourth-largest national carbon footprint, exceeding that of Russia. 

“We are stripping away support for these studies to restore the warrior ethos and refocus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot said in a statement. “Climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part of that core mission.”

Image Credits: Gadge Skilmore, Richard Hurd.