The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent full accounting, the 2022 Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, puts total national emissions at 6,343.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The same inventory notes that forests, croplands, grasslands, wetlands, and settlements together absorbed enough carbon to offset roughly 13 percent of that gross number, leaving the land sector as a net sink rather than another smokestack on the ledger.

That single line, buried in a technical appendix, is one of the more consequential facts in American climate accounting. It is also a fact the country may soon stop measuring.

The EPA has proposed permanently removing reporting obligations for most categories of industrial facilities under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the data pipeline that has fed the national inventory. In the months since, the agency has extended reporting deadlines, by which point the rule stripping the requirement may already be final.

What the 2022 inventory captured, in other words, is a snapshot of something the federal government is in the process of no longer looking at.

What the 6,343.2 million metric ton figure actually contains

The gross number sums carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and a set of fluorinated gases, each converted into a common unit using global warming potentials. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels does most of the work. Methane from oil and gas systems, livestock, and landfills adds a smaller but potent share. Nitrous oxide comes largely from fertilized soils. The fluorinated gases, used in refrigeration and electronics, are a rounding error by mass and a real contributor by warming effect.

Transportation is the single largest slice. Electric power generation is second. According to the EPA’s own figures cited by ABC News, the power sector accounts for about 24 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, just behind transportation. Industry, agriculture, and buildings fill out the rest.

The EPA’s public breakdown of emission sources keeps the categories clean, but the interesting arithmetic is at the bottom of the table, where the land shows up with a negative sign.

The land as a net sink

Land use, land use change, and forestry, abbreviated LULUCF in the inventory, is where trees, soils, and standing biomass get counted. In 2022, that sector absorbed roughly 800 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent more than it emitted. Divide that into the gross total and the result is close to 13 percent.

Most of the pull-down comes from forests. Trees regrowing on land that was farmed a century ago, in New England, the Southeast, the Upper Midwest, are still adding wood. Wood is roughly half carbon by dry weight. Every board foot of pine or oak added to a trunk is carbon that was, until recently, in the atmosphere.

Croplands and grasslands contribute more modestly, and in some years they are net emitters depending on tillage, fire, and drought. Wetlands can go either way. Urban trees, oddly, contribute a measurable amount, because settlements in the U.S. contain a surprising volume of standing biomass.

None of this is a policy. It is an accident of history and biology, running quietly in the background.

How the forests got there

The eastern U.S. forest that is doing most of the sinking today is, in large part, farmland that was abandoned between roughly 1850 and 1950 as agriculture moved west and then consolidated. Old stone walls run through mature hardwood stands in Vermont and Massachusetts for that reason. The trees came back on their own.

They came back with help, too, from animals that do not know they are helping. A single grey squirrel caches several thousand nuts a season and forgets a good share of them, leaving acorns planted at roughly the correct depth in open ground. Multiply that across a continent and several centuries, and a fair portion of the oak canopy now doing the carbon work was planted by rodents who never came back for lunch.

The sink is not permanent. Older forests slow their uptake. Fire, drought, and insect outbreaks turn stored carbon back into atmospheric carbon on a schedule nobody controls. The 13 percent figure describes 2022. It is not a promise about 2032.

Why the number is about to get harder to verify

The national inventory is not built from satellite readings of the sky. It is built, in large part, from data that facilities report to the EPA under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, cross-checked against fuel sales, agricultural statistics, and land-cover surveys. Pull the reporting program apart and the inventory loses one of its main inputs.

The EPA has argued the program is burdensome and would save industry costs if scrapped. Only petroleum and natural gas systems would remain covered, because federal law requires it, and even that reporting would be pushed back under the proposal.

Industry groups have not uniformly welcomed the change. Some have argued against full rescission, warning that without a federal dataset, companies could face a patchwork of state-level requirements. Environmental groups have contended that the projected savings would be minimal outside the oil and gas sector.

The parallel rollback on power plants

The reporting question sits alongside a bigger regulatory one. In September 2026, the EPA repealed pollution limits on fossil fuel power plants that had been set during the Biden administration. Those rules had required existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants to cut their carbon pollution, largely by adopting carbon capture technology.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called it the largest deregulatory action for the United States power sector in American history. The agency’s proposed rule argues that U.S. power sector emissions do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution or climate change because the U.S. share of global greenhouse gas concentrations is relatively minor and declining.

The 2022 inventory figure sits awkwardly against that claim. The power sector alone accounts for roughly a quarter of the 6,343.2 million metric ton total, which places it among the largest single national sources of CO₂ on the planet.

The endangerment finding, and what it means for the inventory

The legal architecture underneath all federal greenhouse gas regulation rests on the 2009 endangerment finding, the EPA’s scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The agency has moved to repeal that finding, a step now being contested in court by states and environmental groups.

If the finding falls, the legal basis for both the reporting program and the power plant rules weakens further. The EPA missed its April 2025 deadline to publish the annual inventory, its first lapse in nearly three decades, and researchers at the University of Maryland stepped in to fill the gap, publishing their own version built on the methodology the EPA has historically used.

Whether the 2022 numbers get a formal 2023 or 2024 successor from the agency itself is now an open question. The land will keep doing whatever it does. The measurement of it is the part in doubt.

What the 13 percent does and does not mean

The offset figure is easy to misread. It does not mean the U.S. is 13 percent of the way to carbon neutrality. It means gross emissions were 6,343.2 million metric tons, land absorbed enough to bring the net figure down by roughly 800 million, and the country still added the rest to the atmosphere.

It also does not mean the sink is safe. Forest carbon uptake in the U.S. has been slowing for years as stands mature, as western fires convert biomass to smoke, and as drought stress climbs. The sector could flip to a net source within decades on the current trajectory.

A number that looks like a bonus, in other words, is a loan the atmosphere is making, at an interest rate that keeps rising.

The 2022 inventory recorded that loan in a table. Whether the 2026 or 2027 inventory records anything at all is what the current fight is about.