Ending the Climate Confessional: Trump Administration Brings Sanity to EPA’s Emissions Database
18 hours ago Guest Blogger
Charles Rotter
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/climate/epa-database-useeio-greenhouse-gases.html?smid=tw-shareThe Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to stop updating its “Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Emission Factors” database marks a turning point away from the ritualized burden of corporate “climate confessions” toward a more streamlined, reality-based approach to governance. Under the Trump administration, this shift reflects an overdue rebalancing of priorities—away from the endless accounting of speculative environmental sins and toward focusing on the agency’s core mission of protecting health and the environment with proven, relevant science.
Naturally, The New York Times treated the decision as if it were the collapse of civilization itself. The tone of their coverage was pure caterwauling—lamenting a “major setback for corporate climate action” and wringing hands over the supposed loss of “one of the most important data sets available” for estimating value chain emissions. Readers could almost hear the background violins as the paper mourned the plight of corporations now deprived of an EPA-maintained moral scorecard for their supply chains.
The USEEIO model, developed by Wesley Ingwersen, was essentially a carbon confessional booth for corporations. Companies could input their expenditures on wood, metal, shipping, or other supply chain components and receive an estimate—laden with assumptions—of their greenhouse gas “footprint.” This exercise was not voluntary for many; European Union regulations and California’s forthcoming 2027 reporting mandate ensured that businesses had to play along or face penalties. In practice, this meant businesses were pressured to adopt costly changes in operations, not because of concrete, measurable harm, but because a statistical model said so.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/10/ending-the-climate-confessional-trump-administration-brings-sanity-to-epas-emissions-database/
