EPA published broad amendments to the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule on December 9, 2016. This December 11 retrospective is weekend context, not a Sunday announcement. One concrete expansion concerns fluorinated heat-transfer fluids that are not also fluorinated greenhouse gases, with reporting beginning for reporting year 2018 under the relevant supplier provisions. [2016-28564][2015-32753]

The required figure is potential emissions from release, not necessarily an actual release. Covered activities include producing, importing, exporting, transforming and destroying the fluids during the calendar year. A reader therefore cannot treat a supplier's reported quantity as an observation of pollution entering the air, or assume that every industrial user is covered by this provision. [2016-28564][2015-32753]

The rule's effective dates answer a different question. Its instructions take effect in stages on January 1, 2017, January 1, 2018 and January 1, 2019. Those dates are assigned to different amendments; they are not three interchangeable deadlines for the same task. The reporting-year reference specifies the period covered by the added fluid information. [2016-28564][2015-32753]

The January 15, 2016 proposal explains why the broader package mixed additions with simplification: EPA anticipated higher burdens where reporting expanded and lower burdens where requirements were removed or simplified. Those were proposal-stage expectations, not final measured costs. Both documents belong to the same rulemaking. Together they explain the change's development, but neither establishes that data quality improved or emissions fell after publication. [2016-28564][2015-32753]

Source documents

  1. 2015 Revisions and Confidentiality Determinations for Data Elements Under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rulehttps://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-12-09/html/2016-28564.htm
  2. 2015 Revisions and Confidentiality Determinations for Data Elements Under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rulehttps://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-01-15/html/2015-32753.htm