Trump EPA Gives Oil And Gas Industry 18 More Months To Keep Leaking Methane, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Polluters Were About To Be Asked To Stop Polluting

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it would delay its own limits on methane pollution from oil and gas operations by eighteen months, resolving a long-standing concern within the petroleum industry that it was about to be required to stop releasing the gas into the air at no charge.

The interim final rule, signed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, pushes compliance deadlines for the 2024 methane standards to January 2027, granting the nation's drillers, processors, and pipeline operators an additional year and a half to keep venting, flaring, and leaking a greenhouse gas roughly eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year span. The standards being postponed had asked companies to do little more than locate their own leaks, repair them, and replace equipment specifically engineered to release gas on purpose.

"We listened very carefully to the people most affected by this regulation, namely the people who would have had to follow it," said one senior EPA official, who explained that the agency had received a formal request from the oil and gas industry for more time and had concluded, after extensive deliberation, that the oil and gas industry should be given more time. "It would be premature to ask companies to stop wasting a product they sell. We are simply restoring their freedom to lose money and degrade the air at the same time."

By the agency's own accounting, the delay is expected to release an additional 3.8 million tons of methane into the atmosphere between 2028 and 2038, a quantity that outside analysts likened to the annual emissions of tens of millions of gasoline-powered cars. Officials confirmed the figure had appeared in the EPA's own fact sheet for the rule, where it was presented not as a warning but as a plain description of the benefit being conferred.

The American Petroleum Institute, which had petitioned for the extension, praised the agency for recognizing the industry's need for more time to implement the very rule it had spent the previous year asking the agency not to implement. Environmental and public health groups filed suit within days, citing respiratory and climate harms that the EPA's supporting documents acknowledged in writing and then walked calmly past.

At press time, the EPA had reassured the public that the methane currently escaping from thousands of wellheads across the country would indeed be regulated eventually, just later, after a good deal more of it had finished entering the nation's lungs and the upper atmosphere.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who campaigned on "drill, baby, drill" and converted the slogan into eighteen extra months of unregulated emissions for the donors who paid for the campaign.
§U.S. oil and gas producers, excused from the expense of finding and fixing their own leaks and permitted to keep selling, or simply releasing, the gas in the meantime.
§The American Petroleum Institute, which asked the agency it lobbies to delay a rule, then congratulated the agency it lobbies for delaying the rule.
§Fossil fuel donors to the 2024 campaign, whose contributions matured precisely on schedule.
§EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has organized his tenure around the proposition that the Environmental Protection Agency exists chiefly to protect the things that pollute the environment.
§The roughly 3.8 million additional tons of methane, granted a year and a half of uninterrupted residence in the atmosphere that warms the planet for everyone living beneath it.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment