Trump’s EPA strips away guidance used by companies to measure their carbon footprints

By Zahra Hirji, Bloomberg Green Daily

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly removed multiple online resources for companies on how to measure the carbon footprint of their supply chains, called Scope 3 emissions.

As the Trump administration aggressively rolls back rules and mandates to reduce pollution, it is also taking down climate change-related data, tools, and other information from federal websites that experts say businesses, researchers, and others have long relied on to better understand current and future environmental risks.

“Instead of holding polluters accountable, the EPA under Trump has been focused on reversing and deleting efforts aimed at tackling greenhouse gas emissions,” Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told Bloomberg News. He said he’s introduced a bill that would require the agency to publish even more guidance than it had previously for companies to track their climate pollution.

When asked about the website removals, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran said: “Corporate Climate Leadership is not a statutory obligation.”

Since Trump took office, the agency web page titled “Scope 3 Inventory Guidance” has been taken down, and so have multiple other online references to Scope 3 emissions, according to a Bloomberg News review of the current site and archived versions, including the official government snapshot from January 19, 2025, predating President Donald Trump’s second term. A 2021 EPA webinar titled “Working with Suppliers to Reduce Scope 3 Emissions” was also removed from a landing page for climate risk-related webinars and events.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, May 18, 2026. PFAS, synthetic compounds designed to resist heat, water, and stains used widely in food packaging, cookware, cosmetics, clothing, carpeting, coatings, and firefighting foam, appeared on the EPA’s draft CCL 5 and returns on CCL 6. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

 

This fits into a government-wide push to abandon the mandatory collection of corporate climate information. Last fall, the EPA proposed ending its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which collects annual emissions from major industrial polluters such as coal plants, oil refiners, and chemical plants. In June, the US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed to rescind a rule requiring public companies to report both greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks.

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Korea may invest $120 billion for 8 nuclear reactors in U.S. as part of tariff deal

Seoul is reviewing a proposal by Washington, with Korea looking to build two of the first four and the United States taking the lead on the other two.

 

Korean President Lee Jae Myung, left, chats with U.S. President Donald Trump after concluding their first bilateral summit at the White House in Washington on Aug. 25, 2025. JOINT PRESS CORPS

The Korean government is considering spending $120 billion of its U.S. investment package on eight nuclear reactors in the United States, with negotiations potentially resulting in a memorandum of understanding as early as Sept. 18.

Of the first four, Korea would build two and the United States would construct the other two.

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources told the ruling Democratic Party during a closed-door government-party meeting Monday that Washington proposed last month using Seoul’s U.S. investment fund to build nuclear power plants under a “comprehensive framework” and that the government is reviewing the proposal, according to multiple attendees.

A comprehensive framework refers to a binding agreement that establishes the overall structure and direction of a deal while leaving detailed rules to be worked out later.

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Trump killed Climate.gov. A new website is resurrecting it.

Climate.us, spearheaded by three former NOAA staffers (two of whom are sisters), is picking up where the government site left off.


By  Sept. 10, 2026, 12:58 p.m. 

When I was reporting on climate change, one of the most useful websites in my daily rotation was Climate.gov.

The website from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), launched during President Obama’s first term, provided constant updates on the agency’s climate research in plain English, alongside vivid charts and graphics. It lasted 15 years, until the Trump administration gutted the site in 2025; the entire staff was disbanded through layoffs or unrenewed contracts, and the URL now redirects to NOAA’s website instead.

Text on the site, dated June 24, 2025, says the redirect was done to comply with an executive order and White House policies, and that “future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.”

Anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s second term will recognize the shuttering of Climate.gov as part of a larger project to obfuscate reality, particularly around science and climate change. Cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have created gaps in weather data. Over the summer, the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages about energy efficiency and utility bill savings amid brutal heatwaves that stressed power grids across the country — around the peak of a Cyclospora outbreak that would have been caught sooner if not for cuts to the federal surveillance programs that usually track food-borne illnesses. If the federal government was once the sun around which most scientific research in this country orbited, it has now become a black hole.

Still, some light remains in the dark. In August 2025, a group of former Climate.gov staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to restore the Climate.gov archives and continue its work under a new name: Climate.us. Rebecca Lindsey, the program manager and longtime editorial lead of Climate.gov, spearheaded the effort, which raised $530,000 over six months through individual donors and foundation grants. This year, Lindsey and her colleagues hope to raise an additional $300,000. The team incorporated as a nonprofit and is fiscally sponsored by Multiplier, a California-based nonprofit focused on environmental and social justice issues.

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What is it about shipbuilding that turns young workers off?

Gary Kim, formerly a junior officer with U.S. Navy construction units in Asia, detailed the painful conditions and skilled labor shortages at shipyards around the world

 

Workers walk near the grand block shop at the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia.
Workers walk near the grand block shop at the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia. Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer

By Joseph N. DiStefano, Philadelphia Inquirer,

The U.S. government is spending over a billion dollars to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers it estimates will be needed in Philadelphia and other shipbuilding centers to expand the Navy and compete with lower-cost Chinese yards, as President Donald Trump proposes. The campaign includes “Build Submarines” ads on social media and SEPTA bus shelters and grants to training programs.

“You have to work the parents,” Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, told contractors assembled by Trump and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle in July. “Mom and Dad need to understand their kid is succeeding,” even if they skip college for “AI-proof jobs” as “the wizards behind the warriors — shipfitters, welders, pipe fitters.”

BuildSubmarines.com, a U.S. government-funded marketing effort, is trying to recruit workers for shipyards through public-transit and social-media ads. It also sponsors a Nascar team.
BuildSubmarines.com, a U.S. government-funded marketing effort, is trying to recruit workers for shipyards through public-transit and social-media ads. It also sponsors a Nascar team.U.S. Navy

If would-be college students prove a tough sell, there’s an even larger population of American workers who have what it takes to build ships but don’t want to, said Gary Kim, a Wharton School graduate student who has studied U.S., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean shipyards.

In essays for the U.S. Naval Institute and a series of papers titled The Brutal Realities of Building Ships, Kim, formerly a junior officer with U.S. Navy construction units in Asia and a Detroit manufacturing manager, has detailed rough conditions and skilled-labor shortages and suggested what shipyards have to do to realistically fill those jobs.

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Is the drinking water to your home still traveling through dangerous lead pipes?

Workers install a copper pipe to replace a lead service line that brings drinking water to homes Tuesday, July 21, 2026, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Alyssa Goodman)

By  M.K. WILDEMAN, Associated Press, September 10, 2026
 

Kathryn Pilgrim knew the century-old Victorian she bought in Dunkirk, New York, came with old plumbing. She replaced pipes she suspected of containing lead and later installed a kitchen filter designed to remove heavy metals.

But six years after buying the house, she still can’t be sure that her tap water is lead-free because she doesn’t know what material was used for the pipe that runs under her front yard and connects to the city water supply. Dunkirk is nearly two years behind schedule on an inventory that would give Pilgrim and other residents that information.

Dunkirk, which supplies water to about 5,000 homes and businesses, is one of more than 1,300 public water systems cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to meet an October 2024 deadline to hand in an inventory of the water lines that could be leaching the heavy metal into Americans’ drinking water, an Associated Press analysis of the agency’s enforcement data shows.

Roughly 6,300 water systems serving 3.8 million Americans have still not submitted a required list of how many lead service lines remain in use.

Those inventories are critical for cities to replace all lead pipes by an upcoming 10-year deadline. Failing to document the lines also means residents won’t know if their homes have a potential source of lead exposure.

The full story here

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Grid battery growth uncertain under Trump emergency order

A sweeping yet vaguely worded national emergency declaration targeting Chinese grid tech could put gigawatts of grid battery projects on uncertain legal ground.

 

Factory scene with worker in yellow vest and silver battery products on blue platforms
A worker produces energy storage products for export at the AlphaESS workshop in Nantong, China. (Zhai Huiyong/VCG via Getty Images)

By Jeff St. John, Canary Media, September 10, 2026

The Trump administration’s vaguely worded executive order on grid cybersecurity threatens to slow down the booming U.S. energy storage market.

The order, issued late last month, declares a national security emergency over the risk that foreign-made technologies could be used to hack into and disrupt the U.S. power grid. To combat this threat, the order bans the ​“acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation of any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment.”

These restrictions apply to any transactions ​“initiated” on or after Aug. 26, when the order was issued. But they may also be retroactive: The order gives federal agencies the power to force utilities or energy project owners to ​“identify, isolate, monitor, secure, disconnect, replace, or remove such equipment” that’s already been installed.

While the order isn’t aimed only at batteries — it includes a range of other grid equipment and the communications devices and control software that manages them — it’s the battery market that will potentially be the most affected.

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