The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday announced it was withdrawing a request that operators of existing oil and gas wells provide the agency with extensive information about their equipment and its emissions of methane, undermining a last-ditch Obama administration climate change initiative.
The EPA announcement was a first step toward reversing an Obama administration effort — which only got underway two days after Donald Trump’s election — to gather information about methane, a short-lived but extremely powerful climate pollutant that is responsible for about a quarter of global warming to date.
The agency cited a letter sent by the attorneys general of several conservative and oil-producing states complaining that the information request “furthers the previous administration’s climate agenda and supports … the imposition of burdensome climate rules on existing sites, the cost and expense of which will be enormous.”
Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said the agency took those complaints seriously. “Today’s action will reduce burdens on businesses while we take a closer look at the need for additional information from this industry,” he said in a statement.
Environmental advocates saw the move as something else entirely.
“With this action, Administrator Pruitt is effectively telling oil and gas companies to go ahead and withhold vital pollution data from the American public,” Mark Brownstein, vice president climate and energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview. “This was a good faith effort on the part of the agency to collect additional information on oil and gas industry operations and the pollution that comes from them. (Now), it’s a complete lack of transparency.”