Greenhouse Gas Reporting and Disclosure: Key Elements of a Prospective U.S. Program

Conclusions

A mandatory greenhouse gas reporting and disclosure program is an essential step in any effort to address climate change. The program outlined in this paper would ultimately track at least 75 percent of the human-induced GHG emissions in the United States, providing policy-makers and the public a sound basis for developing a comprehensive GHG reduction strategy, and creating incentives for entities to reduce their GHG emissions. These elements are important for the establishment of a sound, credible, and cost-effective reporting program. Such a program should be put in place without delay.

See also: The Toxics Release Inventory: A Model Reporting Program [1]

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Endnotes

1 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2000 Draft For Public Comment, February 2002.
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2 Direct emissions are emissions from sources that are owned or controlled by the reporting entity, e.g., emissions from factory stacks, manufacturing processes and vents, and from company-owned/controlled vehicles. Indirect emissions are emissions that are a consequence of the reporting entity’s activities, but occur from sources owned or controlled by another entity, e.g., emissions from the production of purchased electricity, contract manufacturing, employee travel on scheduled flights, and emissions occurring during the product use phase. World Business Council for Sustainable Development — World Resources Institute (WBCSD/WRI), The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative: Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard, October 2001, www.ghgprotocol.org [5].
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3 U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases 2000, February 2000.
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4 D. Lashof and D. Hawkins, Less than Meets the Eye: An Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emission “Reductions” Reported by Electric Utilities, Natural Resources Defense Council, March 2000.
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5 These are the greenhouses gases addressed by the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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6 WBCSD/WRI, The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. Also Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Step By Step Guideline for Emission Calculation, Record Keeping and Reporting for Airborne Contaminant Discharge, April 2001.
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7 Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (Public Law 101-549), Section 821.
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8 WBCSD/WRI, The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. The first “module” under this protocol consists of standards, guidelines, and calculation tools for companies and other organizations wanting to account and report their direct and indirect emissions of the six GHGs covered by the Kyoto Protocol. A future module under development will provide accounting and reporting standards for project-based GHG reduction activities.
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9 See endnote 2 above.
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10 Trade secrets are treated differently by different federal statutes. Under the Clean Air Act, for example, emissions information cannot be withheld on the basis of trade secrecy. Under the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA), which created the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), however, a reporting entity may seek trade secret protection of information which: (1) has not been disclosed by the entity to any other person, unless under a confidentiality arrangement; (2) has not been disclosed under another law; (3) if disclosed, would cause substantial harm to the competitive position of the reporting entity; and (4) is not readily discoverable through reverse engineering. Upon showing that all four of these tests can be met, the specific chemical identity can be withheld from disclosure, and replaced by the generic class or category of the reported chemical. The rest of the reported information must be disclosed. (See SARA Section 322.) A similar approach under a GHG reporting program (once the trade secret determination had been made) would provide for disclosure of all the information except the identity of the specific greenhouse gas, which could be represented instead by its carbon dioxide equivalence.
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11 A production-based emissions report, for example, could state the amount of GHGs emitted per unit of product manufactured (for reporting entities that are manufacturers) or per unit of electricity generated (for reporting entities that sell electricity). Such a rate-based approach could provide important information on efficiency improvements that are not transparent from reporting absolute measures (e.g., metric tons).
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12 The Pew Center’s review of existing statutory authorities indicates that the Executive Branch currently lacks authority to assure that current efforts to reduce GHG emissions receive credit under a future law. If a baseline protection program is to have binding effect, it must be authorized by law. To an extent, neither the Executive Branch nor the current Congress can bind a future Congress. However, the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Winstar Corp., (116 S.Ct. 2432 (1996)), recognized several limitations on Congress’s ability to enact later inconsistent law. “First, if the agreement makes ‘unmistakably clear’ that future regulatory authority is being surrendered, then the courts will recognize the effect of the agreement. Second, even if such a surrender is not unmistakably clear, the federal government may be deemed to have agreed to shift the risk of regulatory change from the regulated entity to the government and thereby provide the regulated entity a damages remedy against the government. Thus, a properly drafted agreement within the scope of the agency’s authority could provide participants substantial comfort that the government commitment would be honored or, if not, the government would be liable for damages.” R. Nordhaus and S. Fotis, Early Action & Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Early Action Crediting Proposals, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, October 1998.
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