If annual U.S. carbon emissions fall, it is thanks to President Donald Trump s deregulatory agenda. If they rise, take it as confirmation that Trump has triggered an economic boom.

Thats how Andrew Wheeler , the acting chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and former coal lobbyist, has explained the decline and subsequent spike in greenhouse gas emissions during Trumps first two years in office.

Wheelers agency credits Trumps leadership for a 2.7 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from 2016 and 2017, writing in an October release that the presidents regulatory reform agenda is spurring continued innovation in the energy sector.

The Trump Administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions, Wheeler said in an accompanying statement.

Since then, two separate analyses have documented a sharp rise in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2018. Still, EPA touted the 2017 drop in greenhouse gas emissions in its 2018 year-in-review achievements . The list, published on Monday, makes no mention of last years increase in CO2 emissions.

The federal Energy Information Administration on Monday confirmed that carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. energy sector jumped 2.8 percent last year the largest annual spike since 2010 primarily due to economic growth and weather conditions that drove up energy consumption. The report also forecasts that emissions from the energy sector will drop in each of the next two years by 1.2 percent in 2019 and by 0.8 percent in 2020 as a result of milder summer and winter weather, but that they will still remain above 2017 levels.

That federal analysis comes just three weeks after the Rhodium Group, an economic research company, released a report that estimates overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased 3.4 percent in 2018, the second-largest annual increase in more than two decades. Along with a 1.9 percent spike in power sector emissions, increases occurred in the transportation, industry and buildings sectors. While a growing U.S. economy and a cold start to the year contributed to the overall rise, so too did the limited progress made in developing decarbonization strategies, according to the analysis.

The increase in emissions from the electric power sector would not have been as large without the administrations regulatory rollbacks, Trevor Houser, an energy and climate analyst at Rhodium Group, told The Washington Post at the time.

The tailwinds of Obama administration policy are dissipating, Houser told HuffPost via email Tuesday. Preliminary emissions trends from 2018 make it abundantly clear that energy market trends alone the low cost of natural gas, the increasing competitiveness of renewables are not enough to deliver sustained declines in US emissions.