EDGI Spares Soon-Hidden Climate Data

A chart from the “Trends and Accountability in EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program Data” report showing total direct emissions of carbon dioxide by congressional district. Image: EDGI.

Reporter’s Toolbox: EDGI Spares Soon-Hidden Climate Data

By Joseph A. Davis

You say you want to find the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in your state? Better get the data while you can — because the Trump Environmental Protection Agency is making that incriminating information vanish very soon.

Good thing the folks at the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative are posting online the data that the EPA plans to make disappear.

The raw data is still there on the EPA’s site for a little bit longer. Find it on its data sets page, or download spreadsheets from its data summary or data parent pages. 

You may not be able to get the greenhouse gas amount from the EPA if it was emitted after Oct. 30, though. After that, your only hope may be the EDGI site.

A new EDGI report, “Trends and Accountability in EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program Data,” is a must-read for environmental data geeks. 

The report’s authors are mostly academics. Toolbox thanks them — and observes that they have done the sort of excellent reporting and analysis that environmental journalists should be doing. 

What’s EDGI’s lede?

The worst greenhouse gas emissions in the nation are coming from the J.H. Miller coal plants in Alabama and Georgia, the Labadie coal plant in Missouri, the Monroe coal plant in Michigan, and the Gavin coal plant in Ohio. 

And what places in the United States have the worst-trending greenhouse gas emissions overall in recent years? 

Worst of all include East Texas (and Texas generally) and Louisiana (with its petrochemical alley). Best progress? In Illinois. You can see the national trends on a color map. 

U.S. reporting program discontinued

The data is all right there. At the moment. But Toolbox has not seen many journalistic accounts of these villains and heroes in the mainstream media lately. We fear media must use it or lose it.

This is high-quality data because (until recently) EPA regulations required emitters to submit it. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that in September 2025, the EPA announced it was discontinuing its greenhouse gas reporting program, with the last data coming in no later than Sept. 12, 2025. See the Federal Register notice, the docket for this rulemaking and the EPA summary of the rulemaking.

In its press release, the pro-carbon Trump EPA calls the program “burdensome” and says it “has no material impact on improving human health and the environment.” 

 

Ending the program will keep the

public from knowing how badly

the smokestacks are harming

the planet and human health.

 

It does not mention that ending the program will, in actual fact, keep the public from knowing how badly the smokestacks are harming the planet and human health.

Technically, no current law requires the EPA to compile and publish most of the greenhouse gas data. The United States was required to compile and publish it like any other nation under the United Nations’ climate treaty. 

But Trump pulled the country out of the climate treaty the first day of his second term. Pulled out for the second time, that is — with the United States already the only nation to do so even once.

So Toolbox will be relying on EDGI and its collaborators for greenhouse gas emissions data in the future. Although under Toolbox’s Second Law of Data Conservation, we will keep you posted on other ways to get it. Use it or lose it. 

[Editor’s Note: For more on climate change data, see our collection of climate-related Toolboxes on the Climate Change Topic on the Beat page, where you'll also find numerous other climate stories and special reports, and EJToday’s climate change headlines.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 31. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.