Feds delay Obama greenhouse rules
Climate change: Obama greenhouse rules put on hold
Trump administration officials said Wednesday they will delay until 2019 a set of rules aimed at reducing climate-changing methane gas emissions from wells on federal lands — a disclosure made shortly before a federal magistrate said the administration had acted illegally in trying to block the regulations this year.
The net result is that the Bureau of Land Management will go ahead with its proposal for a one-year postponement in restrictions on methane flaring that were due to take effect in January, but amid judicial skepticism about the administration’s timing and rationale.
The bureau, part of the Interior Department, cited costs and regulatory burdens for the oil and gas industries as reasons for the delay. But U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte of San Francisco said the agency “entirely failed to consider the benefits (of lower emissions) such as decreased resource waste, air pollution, and enhanced public revenue.”
Laporte questioned whether the Trump administration’s replacement rules would be ready by January, and said there was no guarantee they would hold up in court. Attorney Robin Cooley of the environmental group Earthjustice said a delay in curbs on flaring could be challenged in court as a waste of natural resources.
The rules were approved by President Barack Obama’s administration last November, after a lengthy review, and took effect Jan. 17 despite a legal challenge by industry groups and the states of Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and Texas. One regulation requires producers of oil and gas on federal and tribal lands, starting next Jan.17, to reduce flaring and venting that lower gas production while leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The Bureau of Land Management under Trump then announced in June that it was postponing the flaring reductions, and was promptly sued by California and New Mexico. The states were joined by environmental and tribal groups. The plaintiffs argued, and Laporte agreed Wednesday, that the bureau had failed to state a valid reason for its action, because it had considered only the industries’ arguments, and had failed to seek public comment as required by law.
Her order, however, does not prevent the Trump administration from proposing its own rules that would effectively delay or repeal the Obama regulations.
In Wednesday’s filing that seeks to delay the flaring reductions for at least a year, government lawyers said the restrictions impose “a substantial burden on industry.” They also cited Trump’s executive order in March that called for “promoting energy independence and economic growth” through “clean and safe development of our nation’s vast energy resources.”