This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The past several days have been dim for those concerned about climate change. They will likely be for some time.

But on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a proposal that some industry, government and independent experts say could actually, to a modest degree, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

It's a rare bright spot, albeit small, for environmentalists during a presidency that's already seen significant regulatory rollback on the issues they care about. Just don't expect the Trump administration to trumpet that fact as it tries to sell the plan.

As part of the White House's "infrastructure week" counter-programming to former FBI Director James Comey's testimony on Thursday, Trump formally proposed spinning off the U.S. air-traffic control system to be managed by a private nonprofit corporation rather than by the federal government.

It's an idea that's been floated before — once under the Clinton administration and, more recently, by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

As the Trump administration tells it, a private agency could more quickly and cheaply modernize the outdated airplane tracking system in the United States.

"The current system cannot keep up, has not been able to keep up for many years," Trump said on Monday. "We're still stuck with an ancient, broken, antiquated, horrible system that doesn't work."

Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration is in the midst of transitioning from a radar-based tracking system to one that relies on GPS to direct flights and find the shortest routes. But that and other efforts part of the FAA's modernization program, called NextGen, have been plagued with delays.

As The Washington Post's John Wagner reports: "Although elements of the modernization program have come online, reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Transportation Department's inspector general have portrayed the effort as bogged down in bureaucracy."

A privatized agency, the thinking goes, could shape up more quickly. But the plan is not without its opponents, which include both congressional Republicans and Democrats leery of handing over safety oversight to the private sector.

So where do greenhouse gases come in?

Essentially, shorter routes equal less jet fuel burned. And in turn, less jet fuel equals less carbon dioxide and other pollutants emitted into the air.

Air travel is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions, and cutting emissions from that source has become a focus of many in the environmental community and airline business.

"Simply put, modernizing our skies will result in shorter, more direct flights for consumers that burn less fuel and omit fewer emissions," said Vaughn Jennings, managing director for government and regulatory communications at Airlines for America, a trade association that supports Trump's proposal.

The switch from the radar- to GPS-based tracking system is on track with or without privatization, said Antonio Trani, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who has studied flight emissions. But steps further down the pipeline, like allowing planes to fly more closely to one another, could be sped up if some FAA functions are privatized.

"Once the air traffic agency becomes privatized," Trani said, "it can implement the efficiency improvements faster."

But so far, we haven't seen that rhetoric from the Trump administration.

Both during a speech and in a four-page document outlining the plan, Trump and his staff listed decreasing delays and shortening flights as reasons Congress should adopt the plan. Left entirely unmentioned: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing climate change.

This wasn't the case under President Barack Obama. In 2012, the FAA report cited the pending overhaul of its flight-tracking system as one of many steps in "a multi-pronged approach to achieve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions."

The omission is consistent with Trump's approach to the Paris climate accord. In a speech announcing that policy shift on Thursday, Trump again did not make more than a passing reference to climate change, instead focusing on job creation and economic growth.

Even if just a byproduct of a larger policy goal, the Trump administration could have claimed a modest "win" on reducing pollution when it talked up privatizing the airline industry. But that did not happen.