EPA starts tracking greenhouse gases this month

Sep 2 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Kevin Wiatrowski Tampa Tribune, Fla.

The Tampa Bay region's largest polluters have until the end of the month to tell federal officials how many tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses they produced in 2010.

The Environmental Protection Agency has spent the last year collecting emissions data from lots of polluters, ranging from power plants to pig farmers. The deadline is Sept. 30.

The registry echoes the agency's long-established Toxic Release Inventory, which tracks industrial pollution such as lead and mercury.

Congress set up the greenhouse registry as a way to track emissions with an eye toward future limits on the heat-trapping chemicals that scientists say have warmed the planet for the last century or more. Reporting is mandatory for companies that produce more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gasses in a year.

Environmentalists say the registry is an important step toward getting a handle on future climate change.

"Regardless of how one feels about cap and trade, carbon management of any kind will require accurate emissions data, and companies that know how to estimate them," said Evan Juska, U.S. policy chief for The Climate Group, in an email. "As the saying goes, 'You can't manage what you don't measure.'"

Gov. Charlie Crist brought Juska's London-based environmental group to Florida in 2007 to study ways government and businesses can work together to reduce climate change by reducing greenhouse gasses and increasing the use of clean energy, such as wind and solar.

In the Tampa Bay region, the registry's reach may be limited to power plants and landfills. EPA officials couldn't provide a list of Florida companies they expect to file with the greenhouse inventory, but this region lacks a lot of the heavy industries, large agricultural operations and other polluters mentioned in the registry framework.

Two local businesses that will tally their greenhouse footprints with the EPA are Tampa Electric Co. and Progress Energy Florida, the region's two big electricity generators. Both run coal-fired power plants that release thousands of tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Both companies have shrunk their carbon footprints in recent years by switching some power plants from coal to gas. But they still remain among the region's biggest polluters.

Both already report their greenhouse emissions to nongovernmental groups.

Tampa Electric reports its pollution output to the Chicago Futures Exchange, which tracks emissions from companies across the country and runs its own version of a cap-and-trade program to help bring down emissions. The exchange was created to help businesses prepare for a federal cap-and-trade program.

The exchange's owners announced last month said they'll close the money-losing project early next year because there's no sign that a federal cap-and-trade program is on the horizon.

Progress Energy Florida spokeswoman Suzanne Grant said her company has reported its greenhouse-gas releases for several years to The Climate Registry, a nonprofit online clearinghouse for greenhouse release information.

Progress Energy's latest filing, for 2009, showed the company emitted more than 48,000 tons of carbon dioxide from its operations in both Florida and North Carolina. Polluters that release less than 25,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide a year don't have to report.

The EPA program dovetails with what Progress is already doing, Grant said.

"Our goal is to be the type of organization that shares information with its customers," Grant said.

Progress Energy's soon-to-be parent company, North Carolina-based Duke Energy, does not report to The Climate Registry and has challenged some parts of the EPA greenhouse gas program.

Progress Energy's greenhouse footprint has fluctuated in recent years, rising lately with the shutdown of the damaged Crystal River nuclear plant in Citrus County, Grant said. Another planned nuclear plant in neighboring Levy County should bring Progress Energy's greenhouse gas profile back down in the coming years, she said.

The EPA's greenhouse rule focuses on large, stationary polluters because they're easier to track than mobile pollution sources, such as cars, said EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn.

"Over the years, cars have actually gotten pretty clean," Milbourn said.

An earlier EPA rule forced carmakers to start controlling greenhouse gasses with their 2012 models. Similar rules have previously reduced other tailpipe emissions, such as those that create smog, Milbourn said.

Despite those changes, cars remain the largest single source of greenhouse gasses in Tampa, accounting for half of the 8.9 million tons of climate-change pollutants emitted in 2009, according to a report released this week by the City Council.

City officials have pledged to reduce Tampa's carbon footprint to its 1990 size by 2025. As things stand now, the city is already 16 percent over that goal and climbing.

The greenhouse registry has raised the ire of congressional Republicans, who passed a measure -- the Energy Tax Prevention Act -- in the House of Representatives last spring that would ban the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide and even from collecting data about it and other greenhouse gasses such as methane. The measure has been sent to the Senate for consideration.

The EPA's greenhouse-gas registry comes two years after the Obama Administration proposed setting up a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The proposal would set a limit on greenhouse emissions nationwide, then let big polluters buy emission credits from smaller polluters. A similar strategy helped reduce the pollutants that cause acid rain.

Obama's cap-and-trade proposal ran afoul last year of power companies, which argued that the policy amounted to a tax on them and would drive up power bills.

Since then, cap-and-trade has largely vanished from the public radar.