For a week, NPR has been exploring various solutions to climate change, from quitting fossil fuels to putting coastal homes up on stilts.

In Washington state, it is hard to know how well climate solutions are working.

The state takes up to four years to disclose whether it is keeping its promise—and legal mandate—to slash its climate-damaging pollution.

The Washington Department of Ecology revealed statewide carbon dioxide emissions for 2020 and 2021 in January 2025, two years after its legal deadline.

RELATED: Despite state law, Washington takes 3+ years to reveal its climate pollution

The state’s next greenhouse gas inventory is scheduled to be published by December 1, 2026, to cover data from 2022 and 2023.

Legislators have dedicated more funding and passed legislation to accelerate the state’s pollution tracking, while conservative activists have sued the state over its tardy transparency.

Even so, better visibility into the state’s stubborn carbon problem is still years away.

“The reports coming out of the Department of Ecology are four years old,” said Republican state Sen. Matt Boehnke. “My bill actually just tried to speed it up to say, let’s do this annually, and let’s get more current, accurate data so we can make better decisions now.”

The Democrat-led legislature unanimously passed Boehnke’s bill to require speedier disclosures of carbon emissions — but not before pushing its requirement for annual reporting down the road five years.

“They basically hijacked my bill, frankly, and said, ‘we can’t do this.’ And I said, ‘You can,’” Boehnke told KUOW.

“From an efficiency and from a budget reduction standpoint, we really wanted to ease into the yearly reporting,” Democratic state Rep. Beth Doglio said.

The delay is expected to save $400,000 over five years, according to the Office of Financial Management.

Boenke originally proposed annual disclosure of the previous year’s pollution to begin in 2026. Under the law as signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson in May, annual reporting of the most recent data available would begin in 2031.

The state faces a legal deadline in 2030 to reduce the state’s planet-heating pollution 45% below 1990 levels.

“Calculating total statewide emissions is a time-intensive, technically complicated task that requires many different data sources. No state has produced an inventory with lag time under 2 years,” Ecology spokesperson Jordyn Bauerlein said in an email.

The U.S Environmental Protection Agency published a draft national greenhouse gas inventory for 2023, 13 months after the year’s end, in January 2025. The agency’s monitoring of climate pollution is being eyed for elimination by the Trump administration.

“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is another example of a bureaucratic government program that does not improve air quality,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a press release in March. “Instead, it costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”

Zeldin has falsely called the scientific phenomenon of climate change a “religion.”

Multinational polluters including Amazon and Microsoft publicly report their emissions within months.

Researchers at the New York-based Rhodium Group produced a preliminary estimate of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions for 2024 on Jan. 9, 2025. The research group estimated that U.S. emissions fell 0.2% while the economy grew 2.7% that year.

According to a global analysis released Jan. 10 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2024 was the planet’s warmest year on record, with data going back to 1850.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/15/washingtons-climate-pollution-slow-to-see-light-of-day-despite-new-law/