Trump’s planned environmental rollbacks hit major roadblocks

Activists slam EPA plan to shelve methane rules

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump flouts international calls to act on climate change, his administration is finding the pressure at home tougher to ignore.

The limitations of Trump’s power to reset U.S. climate policy have been on full display over the past few days in Washington. White House plans to scrap restrictions on the release of a potent greenhouse gas are getting stymied by the courts, by forceful public opposition and even by Republicans in Congress.

The administration’s struggle to free oil and gas companies from Obamaera limits on how much methane they can release into the air reflects the challenge Trump faces in carrying out his “America first” energy policy. Signing executive orders and making speeches were the easy part. Pushing policies to fruition is proving more complicated.

The thicket of legal issues entangling the administration on methane comes as it is facing an onslaught on another environmental front. Its plans to roll back national monument protections — ordered by Trump himself — are about to enter a crucial stage and the wind is hardly at the back of the White House as it does.

About 2.5 million Americans have submitted comments as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke prepares to announce which public lands would lose protections. A large sampling analyzed by the Center for Western Priorities found just 1 percent of the comments expressed support for the Trump plan.

The fight over methane — a gas that accelerates global warming at 25 times the rate of carbon — has also proved more fraught than the administration may have anticipated.

After three GOP senators defected from party leaders to vote down a bill that would have scrapped the methane rules on public land, the administration moved to go it alone. It used executive authority to put on hold the public land rule and an even furtherreaching methane rule the Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to enforce nationwide.

But the administration found itself stymied again last week, when a federal court ruled that the EPA didn’t have the authority to delay enforcement by even 90 days.

By Monday, emboldened activists were making a show of force at EPA headquarters in Washington, where scores of them appeared to testify against the agency’s broader plan to shelve the methane rules for two years, which appeared unlikely given the court ruling. They vastly outnumbered oil and gas industry representatives at the hearing and presented an unflattering picture for the administration.

One mother from Texas showed an X-ray of an asthmatic child’s lungs, which she said had been damaged by release of the gas. Another mother from Pennsylvania explained how her daughter carried around a personal air monitor that often goes off when she is at school, which is within half a mile of 22 wells. Religious leaders told EPA officials they should be ashamed.

“How can anyone with any moral sensibility possibly believe that knowingly doing harm to children when the same could be avoided is acceptable?” asked the Rev. Alison Cornish of the advocacy group Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light. “It would be unconscionable not to uphold this rule.”

Reversing course on methane was not supposed to be so challenging for Trump. The rules at issue were completed late in the Obama administration, and were pilloried by the oil and gas industry as an unnecessary nuisance.

But the fierce public opposition moved lawmakers to waver, and the administration found itself battling alone.