Trump budget would cut emissions tracking
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s critics argue that pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord will lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
If Trump has his way, the world may never know.
The president’s budget request to Congress would eliminate or gut core programs across the federal government that track the heat-trapping gases. If those cuts go ahead, the government may not be able to tell if emissions are rising or falling.
“The first step in any decent regulatory program is a requirement for monitoring,” David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. “If you don’t know what’s there, it’s harder for the public or the regulators to do anything about it.”
Stephen Cole, a spokesman for NASA, which is slated under the president’s proposed budget to lose money for a satellite-based carbonmeasuring system, said the cut reflects budget constraints. “NASA remains committed to studying our home planet and the universe, but we are reshaping our focus within the resources available to us,” he said in an email.
Whether the cuts happen will depend on Congress, and the degree to which Republicans share Trump’s priorities.
Critics of government climate efforts, meanwhile, support the administration’s cuts, calling emissions-monitoring programs a waste of taxpayers’ money. “This doesn’t necessarily need to be housed within the federal government,” said Nick Loris, a research fellow for the Heritage Foundation. “If the private sector wants to continue to pursue greenhouse gas monitoring, that’s fine.”
The government has two basic tools for tracking emissions. The Trump administration is proposing to cut or wind down both of them.
The first approach is to measure gases at their source. Every factory or other installation that emits the equivalent of 25,000 tons or more of carbon dioxide, the primary contributor to global warming, must track and report those emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency makes those emissions public through its annual Greenhouse Gas Inventory.
That inventory makes it possible for the federal government to measure total emissions, and also to see changes in emissions by industry and by region. It also fulfills the U.S. commitment under a 1992 United Nations climate treaty, signed by President George H. W. Bush and ratified by the Senate, to publish “national inventories of anthropogenic emissions by sources.”
Trump’s budget request would reduce funding for the EPA’s greenhouse-gas reporting program by 86 percent, to $14 million in 2018 from $95 million this year. It’s not clear how the EPA would be able to continue the inventory with that cut, according to Janet McCabe, who was responsible for it as head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation under President Barack Obama.