Court rejects Trump’s delay of methane rules
By
Daniel de Vries
8 July 2017
A federal appellate court in Washington, D.C. earlier this week blocked the Trump administration from arbitrarily postponing compliance with a rule to limit methane pollution from new oil and gas industry sources. The court’s 2-1 ruling is a modest, temporary hurdle for the administration as it attempts to unravel the regulatory framework put in place decades ago.
The decision grants a request by an environmental group to void a 90-day administrative freeze by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and requires immediate implementation of the rule. However, it does nothing to prevent the agency from moving forward with a formal proposal to delay compliance, provided it follows public review and comment procedures laid out in the Clean Air Act. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced earlier this year that he is pursuing just such a course as he considers rewriting or scrapping the rule altogether, as required by a March executive order.
The methane regulation, finalized in May 2016, was a component of President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan. It places minimal requirements on new hydraulic fracturing and conventional oil and gas wells such as mandating formal schedules or procedures to repair gas leaks. In most cases it requires no additional pollution control equipment to be installed.
Methane is a potent global warming gas 25 times more powerful over the long term than carbon dioxide. The rapid expansion of natural gas production via fracking under the Obama administration has been accompanied by concerns about the impact on climate change, in addition to the harm caused by the poisoning of water resources. While carbon pollution from power plants has declined over the last…