From now until July 1, 2025, the Department of Environmental Conservation's (DEC) proposed Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule. is open for public comment. After the comment period, DEC will review the feedback and release a final version of the rule. If you live in New York and care about the future of clean energy, jobs, and cleaner air in your neighborhood, this is your chance to let your voice be heard.
In the face of a Big Polluter-backed White House determined to ignore facts and drag the economy backward, New York can deliver a clear message: Clean air, public health, corporate accountability, and climate action are non-negotiable, regardless of political headwinds.
Now, the Empire State is making an important down payment toward a long-awaited cap-and-invest program that would set economy-wide greenhouse gas pollution limits. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) recently proposed a new rule that will require major polluters, including fuel suppliers, waste haulers and transporters, electric power entities, and others to report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Collecting this data and understanding where pollution is coming from is the crucial first step toward implementing cap-and-invest and other critical climate initiatives.
The sooner this system launches, the sooner New York can hold polluters accountable, ensure cleaner air and lower costs for working families, and build a more sustainable future.
Also referred to as the Clean Air Initiative, New York’s proposed cap-and-invest program will set enforceable statewide emissions caps that decline year by year. To keep emissions below those caps, the state government would distribute an annual supply of emissions allowances—permits to emit a certain volume of GHGs—through an auction to major polluting entities. The permit auction creates a de facto carbon price for major polluters as they bid to continue producing GHGs. Setting the permit supply in line with annual emissions caps means New York’s major polluting industries will have to cut GHG pollution to remain in compliance—or face heavy fines.
Following the allowance auction, the cap-and-invest program then reinvests the revenues it generates into communities, especially those hardest hit by pollution, to help lower household energy costs, pay for transportation infrastructure upgrades, and invest in decarbonization efforts. Versions of this program are already successfully in place in California, Oregon, and Washington.
Cap-and-invest makes polluters, not everyday New Yorkers, pay to cut pollution and build a more sustainable state economy.
The program also builds on the successes of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a regional cap-and-invest system that New York and 10 other Northeastern states have participated in for decades. Since 2005, the RGGI states have reduced annual power sector pollution by 50 percent, nearly 50 percent faster than the rest of the U.S., and have raised over $8.3 billion to build out clean energy infrastructure, reduce emissions, and save consumers energy and money.
The program will reinvest the revenue it generates into decarbonization efforts, transportation infrastructure upgrades, and other projects that could help lower energy costs. © 2016 100% Campaign/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The cap-and-invest program is projected to raise between $6 and $10 billion and promises to deliver billions in consumer rebates, infrastructure investments, local jobs, and healthier communities. The program aims to address an unfair reality for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, who bear the burden of pollution and face impossible choices between medicine or energy bills, food or rent. For these residents, cap-and-invest means cleaner air to breathe, fewer sick days, lower healthcare costs, and utility rebates to make hard financial decisions a little easier.
Clean air shouldn’t be a luxury, and residents shouldn’t be forced to live with Big Polluters’ messes. Amid heat waves, more frequent storms, and rising energy costs, New Yorkers can’t afford to wait. The new reporting rule is the essential first step in getting the program off the ground.
Without knowing how much pollution companies are currently emitting, the state can’t put in place fair emissions caps—you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Better data also means smarter decisions on how and where to cut pollution, where to spend money on clean investments, and how to support communities affected by the climate crisis. That’s why the reporting rule is so critical to implementing the Clean Air Initiative.
The proposed rule requires the largest, most polluting businesses in New York to report, verify, and monitor their greenhouse gas emissions annually through the New York State Greenhouse Gas Reporting Tool (NYS-eGGRT). This includes facilities that directly generate pollution (e.g., cement kilns, glassmakers) and companies that supply products that create pollution down the line (e.g., heating fuel and gasoline suppliers).
Thousands of polluting facilities across New York could be covered, and those that would be explicitly mandated to report include:
To ensure all relevant companies contribute data, the NYS-eGGRT also helps facilities determine whether or not they meet the reporting thresholds in the first place.
Thousands of polluting facilities, including power plants, across New York could be covered by the new rule. © 2015 Maëlick/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The draft rule goes into extensive detail on distinct reporting requirements for the nearly two dozen covered subsectors based on where and how they pollute. Generally speaking, these requirements mean that polluting entities will have to tally up both direct and indirect pollution, along with other related activities that contribute to climate pollution.
To ensure record-keeping is accurate and consistent, some larger emission sources will be validated by third parties or monitoring systems, and all reporting entities must use standardized or approved methods of measurement.
The rule provides stringent guidelines for enforcing these reporting requirements: Each day past a missed reporting deadline is a single, separate violation, and each metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted, but not reported, is a separate violation. Though the rule does not specify enforcement tools for these violations, it makes clear that ongoing noncompliance can incur increasingly heavy penalties.
These requirements closely mirror California’s GHG reporting rule, which sets similar thresholds for who’s required to report emissions and the data they’re expected to provide. California’s rule has been on the books since 2007, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has likewise operated a GHG reporting program, covering the country’s most polluting facilities, since 2010. New York’s proposed rule is well within the bounds of proven regulatory frameworks, the compliance costs of which have been studied in depth (PDF).
Taken together, these precedents demonstrate clearly that emissions reporting is a very achievable task for major polluters. Any New York businesses that object, saying compliance is too burdensome, can look to the thousands of facilities that have already followed similar rules for guidance.
Climate action requires data; if we don’t know where pollution is coming from, we can’t hope to mitigate it. New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) has set some of the most ambitious climate pollution reduction targets in the country, including reaching 100 percent clean electricity by 2040 and an 85 percent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. But the New York DEC currently lacks a full understanding of pollution sources and their scale.
This rule is designed to fill those knowledge gaps with data so New York can target the most polluting entities and keep the state on track with its climate goals, regardless of federal policy changes. This means that even if climate deniers in the White House roll back essential federal pollution monitoring programs, New York can still have a full picture of its emissions—and the green light to do something about it.
The data generated by this reporting rule will be critical for cutting pollution from all sectors and forging ahead on cap-and-invest. With the reporting rule, New York’s regulators can draw on a wealth of data to set smart, ambitious emissions caps. Without it, cap-and-invest would be unworkable, and our climate targets would be that much further out of reach.
Medhini is the writing/editing digital lead for Evergreen. Through powerful storytelling, she hopes to help move the needle on climate policy and contribute to our collective fight for a livable planet.
Trevor is the senior industry and workforce policy lead at Evergreen. Since joining the organization in 2020, he has led Evergreen's campaign for the American Climate Corps, developed innovative policy to strengthen domestic clean energy supply chains, and produced a wide range of written materials calling for bold climate action across every sector of the economy.
