From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

The 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.

The model’s popularity was undeniable—it ranked as the third most-viewed dataset on Data.gov. But popularity is not proof of accuracy or necessity. Like a bestselling fad diet, the USEEIO system appealed because it promised a tidy way to quantify virtue—or the lack of it. The problem is that climate accounting of this kind is riddled with uncertainties. It assumes, for example, that entire supply chains exist wholly within the United States, ignoring the reality that many goods are imported from countries with vastly different production profiles. This means the output is, at best, an approximation, and at worst, a misleading guide for costly policy and business decisions.

Seen in the larger context, the system also fed directly into a global investment machinery that has grown around the “climate crisis” narrative. Partnerships like the one formed in 2007 between Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Silicon Valley venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers were designed explicitly to channel capital into businesses positioned to profit from regulations, subsidies, and market shifts created by climate policy. Their joint focus included renewable energy, building efficiency, “cleaner” fossil energy, sustainable agriculture, and carbon markets—all sectors that benefit from the kind of compliance burdens the USEEIO database helped enforce.

The Times framed the departure of Dr. Ingwersen—suspended after signing a politically charged letter accusing the administration of undermining the EPA’s mission—as the martyrdom of a noble scientist. But the EPA made clear it will not tolerate career bureaucrats using their positions to “undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public” as expressed at the ballot box. Science should inform policy, not serve as a shield for political activism conducted on taxpayer time.

Critics like former EPA official Paul Anastas warn that shifting research to the private sector could reduce credibility. Yet in this case, a private consortium—including Stanford University and environmental analytics firms—has already pledged to maintain and even improve the dataset, keeping it free to the public. That arrangement underscores the point: when a project has genuine value, private actors will sustain it without forcing taxpayers to foot the bill indefinitely.

By eliminating the constant churn of updates to a speculative emissions database, the administration has cut a layer of bureaucratic fat that was masquerading as moral necessity. The companies that genuinely want this data—either for public relations purposes or to meet foreign regulatory demands—can still access it, now funded by those who find it indispensable. For the rest, it’s one less mandatory climate confession, and one more reminder that federal agencies are not in the business of enforcing faith in models, but of safeguarding the public interest with sound, verifiable science.

If anything, this move should be seen as an example of governance sanity—removing the compulsion to genuflect before uncertain numbers, deflating the kind of NYT melodrama that mistakes a data management decision for an attack on civilization, and slowing the seamless conversion of taxpayer-funded “climate data” into private investment opportunities. The private sector can handle virtue-signaling exercises for those who want them. Washington, meanwhile, has more pressing and tangible environmental concerns to address.