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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Environment - "Big Polluters Told to Report Emissions "

This story today by Leslie Kaufman of the NY Times - it begins:

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that it would require the nation’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases to start tracking their emission levels on Jan. 1 and report them to the government.

The E.P.A. said the reporting would cover roughly 85 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States linked to global warming.

The new rules would require 10,000 industrial sites and suppliers of petroleum products to submit the data beginning in 2011. Suppliers of fossil fuels will be asked to estimate how much carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are emitted when the fuels are burned by businesses and consumers in buildings and cars, the agency said.

The E.P.A. said it had no firm estimate on how many businesses had the training and systems in place to report on their emissions.

But a large percentage of those covered by the new regulations are already required to report emissions under other programs sponsored by the agency, it said. The agency said it had also been reaching out to businesses and offering training in how the emissions can be measured.

The E.P.A. said the reporting system would provide vital data to businesses seeking to compare and control their emissions and better information to the government, which has been trying to forge a policy on how to combat climate change since President Obama took office.

“The American public, and industry itself, will finally gain critically important knowledge and with this information we can determine how best to reduce those emissions,” Lisa P. Jackson, the agency’s administrator, said in a statement.

Yet the rules, proposed last March, remain controversial.

Many businesses have asserted that the reporting requirement is a first step toward burdensome and needless government regulation.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 23, 2009 10:19 AM
Posted to Environment