A little-known yet foundational White House climate initiative could be in jeopardy if former President Donald Trump wins another term, experts say.
The project, launched in 2023, establishes a new national system for measuring, monitoring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors of the economy. And it coordinates these efforts among the many federal agencies, research institutes, local governments and other entities collecting data on the country’s carbon footprint.
Trump has not talked specifically about this initiative, and his campaign did not respond to requests to POLITICO’s E&E News for comment. But the Republican presidential candidate and many of his allies have dismissed global warming as a pressing problem, and they have threatened to unwind a broad swath of climate programs and agreements.
Climate experts say the demise of the new White House initiative could hamper U.S. researchers’ ability to answer some of the most basic questions about global warming. How much carbon is the country releasing into the atmosphere? Where exactly are those emissions coming from? And — most importantly — are the existing carbon-cutting strategies actually working?
They’re deceptively complex questions.
The federal government does a good job of estimating the country’s national emissions every year, scientists say. But it’s harder to calculate emissions for individual states, cities, corporations or sectors of the economy, where more granular data is necessary to make accurate estimates.
And it’s difficult too to compare the various measurements collected by different agencies, companies and research organizations on the same sources of emissions.
Addressing these issues is growing more important than ever, experts say.
“In order to meet our climate objectives and ensure that both the United States and other countries are advancing towards our international agreements on getting emissions down, we need to be able to verify that we’re actually making the progress,” said Costa Samaras, director of the Carnegie Mellon University Scott Institute for Energy Innovation.
“We need to be able to verify that greenhouse gas emissions are going down,” added Samaras, who served as chief adviser for the clean energy transition in the Biden administration’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The strategy in question, released last November by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, laid out a road map for a new national greenhouse gas measurement, monitoring and information system.
It’s a first step toward consolidating the many different data sources on U.S. emissions and establishing science-based standards for greenhouse gas monitoring across all sectors of the economy.
The strategy included a range of recommendations for improving greenhouse gas monitoring efforts and fostering better coordination among the federal agencies that collect these observations.
It also launched a number of demonstration projects and prototype programs, including a new urban greenhouse gas monitoring system to be tested in Indianapolis and in the Baltimore and Washington area.
And it established the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center, a data portal for greenhouse gas measurements from a variety of sources, including satellites, ground-based observation systems and models.
All of it aims to address some of the difficulties researchers have when attempting to reconcile different measurements from the many agencies and organizations that monitor U.S. emissions.
Some agencies, such as NOAA and NASA, use satellites and aircraft to keep tabs on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Others, like EPA and the Department of Agriculture, might collect ground-based observations or use statistical models and computer simulations to monitor the same emission sources.
Some local governments might collect their own measurements in their own ways. Same goes for companies and independent research institutes. And they don’t always use the same methods to come up with their estimates, making it difficult to compare one dataset with another.
Meanwhile, new carbon-reducing policies across the country are making accurate measurements more important than ever.
It’s difficult for government officials to determine whether corporations are complying with pollution regulations — or for companies to keep track of their own progress — without fast and accurate ways to measure emissions from specific sources.
“We’re moving into an era where there are new policies, regulations and voluntary programs by certain industries to cut emissions, and those programs need local-scale, granular information to drive those programs,” said Riley Duren, CEO of the greenhouse gas monitoring nonprofit Carbon Mapper.
Scientists have warned for years that better coordination and standardization is necessary for accurate emissions accounting systems. Studies have found that cities frequently underestimate their own emissions, as do corporations. And federal agencies sometimes underestimate emissions from certain sectors, such as methane emissions from landfills or from oil and gas operations.
In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine published a report acknowledging that the huge number of different greenhouse gas monitoring and reporting systems around the world can be difficult to coordinate and reconcile, and that some of them still suffer from inaccuracies.
The report recommended a single global clearinghouse for greenhouse gas information, which would make emissions data easily accessible with transparent information on how it was collected. This could help decisionmakers evaluate different greenhouse gas accounting methods, choose their data sources and devise their own monitoring systems.
The national strategy takes one step in that direction.
“That coordination effort is no small feat,” said Kevin Gurney, a climate scientist and emissions monitoring expert at Northern Arizona University, as well as a member of the committee that wrote the National Academies report.
“And there’s beginning steps to that — the greenhouse gas center being a very good first example of an attempt to put into practice what the strategy talked about,” Gurney added.
‘A slow-moving train’
Experts say the strategy likely would disappear under a second Trump term, along with many other Biden-era climate strategies and regulations.
In his last term, Trump systematically dismantled dozens of Obama-era environmental regulations focused on water, wildlife, climate and other forms of pollution. He also withdrew from the Paris Agreement — and his campaign says he would do it again if reelected.
That makes it likely that climate-related efforts including the national strategy on greenhouse gas monitoring would find themselves on the chopping block in a second term, said Samaras, the former OSTP adviser.
“If the goal is to do nothing on climate change, then eliminating efforts to understand where emissions are coming from would be a key part of that strategy,” he said.
Project 2025, the sprawling policy plan outlined by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, recommends the U.S. entirely withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that facilitates the Paris Agreement.
It’s unclear whether Trump is seriously considering such a move, although industry lawyers have penned at least one draft executive order that calls for a UNFCCC exit.
Nations participating in the UNFCCC submit a greenhouse gas inventory each year accounting for its country-level emissions. The U.S. submission is considered one of the most robust in the world, experts say.
But if the U.S. were to withdraw from the UNFCCC, it no longer would be technically obligated to calculate and submit its own inventory — and it’s unclear whether it would continue to do so voluntarily.
Project 2025 also advises that a second Trump administration “reshape” the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research on climate and the environment. As of this month, USGCRP has been charged with facilitating the implementation of the national strategy on greenhouse gas monitoring.
Project 2025 also suggests the “Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, and it’s unclear to what extent he would pursue its specific policy proposals if he were reelected.
If the strategy were to be undone, it could hinder U.S. momentum on climate change, said Gurney, the Northern Arizona University scientist.
“The effort matters sort of writ large for climate change,” he said. “We know we need to build this information, we know we need to standardize and deploy it. The loss of it just means the U.S. is that much farther behind on doing something and contributing to the solution for the problem.”
Even if another administration were to restart the strategy four years later, along with other dismantled environmental policies, that’s still valuable lost time for national and global climate action, he added.
Plus, the strategy itself is a long-term work in progress with different components involving the cooperation of multiple federal agencies — efforts that could take years to fully implement.
“We’re just so out of time on this problem that it can be very devastating,” Gurney said. “Getting that flywheel turning again just doesn’t happen fast in a complex thing like the U.S. federalist governance system. It’s a slow-moving train.”