The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released an official annual report to the United Nations (UN) on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.  The report is drafted, held for 30 days of public comment, then released to the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) each year in April.
This year's report is the ninth since the EPA began producing the emissions inventory in 1997, after the US signed and ratified the UNFCCC in 1992.  The UNFCCC, a legally non-binding treaty created to address global warming, is not as well known as the Kyoto Protocol, which is a more recently updated protocol based on that treaty.  The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol; however, it was ratified by 127 other nations and went into effect for them on February 16, 2005.
The EPA report covers the period 1990-2003, with particular emphasis on the 2003 period (there is a one-year delay in preparation).  Major findings include:
The period beginning in 1990 is of interest, since that is the period addressed by the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to reduce the average greenhouse gas emissions for each country to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels.
Gases covered in the report included six major greenhouse gases.  The first three gases are produced both naturally and by human activity, but the last three gases are mainly produced by human activity:
About 80% of the total emissions came from the burning of fossil fuels.  Other major natural greenhouse gases are water vapor (H2O), which actually traps more heat in the atmosphere than all the listed gases combined; and ozone (O3), a gas well-known for a "hole" in the ozone layer being discovered over the earth's polar regions in recent decades.
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U.S. EPA submits 2003 greenhouse gas inventory to U.N.