The U.S. 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.
This fits into a government-wide push to abandon the mandatory collection of corporate climate information. Last fall, the EPA proposed to effectively end its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program that collects annual emissions from big industrial polluters, such as coal plants, oil refiners and chemical plants. In June, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed to rescind a rule requiring public companies to report both greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks.
Corporate climate emissions fall into three buckets. Scope 1 includes the direct emissions associated with a company’s activities, while Scope 2 is the indirect emissions from the energy a company purchases. The EPA’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions guidance is still online. The final – and often the largest – category is Scope 3, which includes most other sources of indirect corporate emissions.
EPA’s now-deleted Scope 3 material included practical guidance for companies on how to calculate such emissions, as well as links to both internal and external resources on the topic. The Scope 3 information seems to have disappeared from EPA’s website last December, according to a review of multiple archived versions of the site taken last year hosted by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
