The Trump EPA tried to bury some good news » Yale Climate Connections

The Trump administration has taken an ostrich-like approach to climate change. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is required to publish a report about the country’s sources of climate-changing pollution each year by April 15. This year, that didn’t happen. But the completed report was recently made public as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Environmental Defense Fund.

This latest U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report provides granular detail on U.S. emissions in 2023. It’s unclear why the administration withheld this report, which had been completed, and thus its suppression offered no budgetary benefit. But suppressing the report lines up with the Trump Administration’s general attack on climate action. 

Among his Day One executive orders, the president announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and declared “a national energy emergency” that focused primarily on expanding fossil fuel production while largely halting low-carbon wind power development. His administration subsequently began purging the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites, dismantling climate and weather research, firing climate scientists at federal agencies, and even attempting to cancel the next National Climate Assessment Report.

The EPA report itself offers some good news regarding modest reductions in U.S. climate pollution through 2023. But it’s a trend that may not continue, let alone accelerate as needed to meet climate targets, if the administration and Congress are successful in implementing proposed rollbacks of pollution regulations and clean energy policies.

U.S. coal consumption and climate pollution declined in 2023

The EPA report documents that in 2023, U.S. climate pollution fell by 2.3%. That’s about 147 million metric tons, or MMT, of reduced carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases.

2023 was the first full year after President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ signature climate law that committed hundreds of billions of dollars to reducing climate pollution. 

The continued long-term decline in U.S. coal consumption accounted for the bulk of the reduction in emissions in 2023. In fact, an 18% decline in carbon pollution from coal accounted for 164 MMT in reduced emissions, which is more than the nation’s overall emissions reduction for the year. Higher carbon emissions from natural gas offset some of that coal decline, increasing by 1%, or a bit under 18 MMT.

Climate pollution from the U.S. industrial sector has also modestly declined over time, due in part to improved efficiency and a shift to cleaner technologies, and to the use of increasingly low-carbon electricity. Emissions from most other sectors of the economy have remained relatively stagnant. Transportation has become the country’s largest source of climate pollution, as electric vehicles haven’t yet made much of a dent in the number of polluting cars on the nation’s roads.

In total, the U.S. released 6,197 MMT of climate pollution in 2023. The country’s natural carbon sinks, like trees that pull carbon out of the air through the process of photosynthesis, removed about 940 MMT. 

Combining those sources and sinks, U.S. net emissions of 5,257 MMT in 2023 were about 20% below the country’s highest annual level in 2005. For perspective, under the Paris Agreement, the U.S. committed to reducing its climate pollution by at least 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030.

What’s happening with U.S. forests and agriculture

About one-third of U.S. land area is covered by forests, and those trees absorb a significant amount of annual U.S. carbon pollution. The country’s natural carbon sinks absorbed just over 15% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. Nearly all of that work was done by trees growing in forests and in cities and by the planting of new trees to expand forests.

The amount of carbon absorbed by the country’s natural carbon sinks has remained relatively stable in recent years, although it’s become threatened by a combination of aging forests and climate-worsened wildfires. A 2023 report by the think tank Resources for the Future concluded that avoiding a significant future reduction in the amount of carbon naturally absorbed by U.S. forests would require major sustained efforts to plant more trees and expand the nation’s forests.

Agricultural activities were responsible for a little over 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution in 2023. Close to half those emissions were associated with nitrous oxide from “soils management.” This term describes farming practices that are intended to increase crop yields, primarily the application of synthetic fertilizers that are made with chemicals rather than natural sources. Nitrous oxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas that stays in the atmosphere for over a century and is 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. It’s the third-largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, behind carbon dioxide and methane, accounting for 6% of the country’s total climate pollution. About three-quarters of the nation’s nitrous oxide emissions stem from synthetic nitrogen fertilizer applications.

Most of the rest of U.S. agricultural emissions were associated with animal farming. The specific sources are “enteric fermentation,” which refers to the methane released by ruminant livestock like cattle, primarily in their burps, and manure management. Overall, greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. agriculture have remained relatively stable over the past several decades.

What’s happening with methane

Carbon dioxide was responsible for nearly four-fifths of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, but methane accounted for a further 11%. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, especially over short timescales, but it breaks down in the atmosphere into less-potent carbon dioxide and water vapor over time. As a result, experts often identify reducing methane emissions as a way to significantly slow climate change in the short term. 

Animal agriculture accounted for about one-third of U.S. methane emissions in 2023, primarily from cow burps, with leakage from natural gas systems causing another 22%, and landfills being the third-largest source at 17%. The EPA reports that U.S. methane emissions were 23% lower in 2023 than in 1990 due to the installation of landfill gas collection systems and reduced leakage from the distribution, transportation, and storage of natural gas.

That trend in declining gas industry methane leakage was poised to accelerate with new regulations from the EPA, combined with a fee penalizing noncompliance, passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. But Congress voted in February to prohibit the EPA methane rule from taking effect and has proposed to freeze the methane fee in the so-called ‘one big beautiful’ budget reconciliation package.

The U.S. is making slow, steady progress at curbing its climate pollution

Over the past decade, U.S. climate pollution has declined at an average rate of 1-1.5% per year, mostly due to the replacement of coal power with cheaper and cleaner sources of electricity. A continuation of that trend would leave the U.S. about halfway short of its Paris commitment by 2030. U.S. emissions fell faster than the long-term average in 2023, but preliminary estimates suggest that they didn’t budge very much in 2024.

That’s in large part because American demand for power increased in 2024 – a trend that is expected to continue in the foreseeable future due to expanding data centers, artificial intelligence, increased air conditioning use in a hotter climate, and electrification of vehicles and buildings. If Congress repeals most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives, as proposed by the House of Representatives, fewer new low-carbon power would be deployed to meet that growing demand. That scenario would translate into higher emissions and household energy bills, combined with declining domestic manufacturing and economic activity, according to modeling by energy systems experts at Princeton, Energy Innovation, and Rhodium Group.

The nation’s 2023 climate pollution reductions are a good news story that the Trump administration didn’t want to tell, but it’s a story that’s poised to sour in the future as administration officials roll back climate regulations and Congress aims to slash the financial incentives that contributed to rapid deployment of clean energy resources in 2023.