Congressional Democrats will attempt to use a procedural tool to cancel a Trump administration action that would essentially block the Environmental Protection Agency from controlling methane emissions from oil and gas production.
Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine and Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich introduced a resolution on Thursday under the Congressional Review Act to scrap the methane rollback.
“Rather than trying to allow the EPA to fulfill its role, the previous administration chose environmental sabotage and eased regulation on polluters,” King said in a statement.
“This isn’t a difficult decision, nor is it an expensive one — capturing methane emissions can be done at a modest cost for a gigantic benefit for our planet and our grandchildren,” King added.
EPA ELIMINATES OBAMA METHANE CONTROLS, DRAWING IRE FROM OIL MAJORS AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS
The resolution is co-sponsored by more than a dozen other senators, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who called the CRA "just one of many initiatives the Senate Democratic majority will undertake to address the climate crisis." A coalition of Democrats, led by Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, is introducing a companion resolution in the House.
The CRA allows both chambers of Congress to pass a joint resolution to end recently implemented regulations. Critically, CRA resolutions require only a simple majority vote from the Senate, and they can be fast-tracked to come quickly to the floor.
Lawmakers have until next week to introduce the resolutions, and Congress must vote on them by mid-May, according to rough deadlines tallied by Public Citizen.
The Trump EPA action that King and Heinrich are targeting took aim at the agency’s ability to regulate the potent greenhouse gas methane from oil and gas facilities directly.
The Trump EPA, adopting arguments from oil industry trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, removed requirements that oil and gas drillers monitor, detect, and repair leaks of methane. Instead, oil and gas operators would only be required to curb emissions of volatile organic compounds, air pollutants that are precursors to smog.
Oil and gas trade groups cheered the action at the time, while individual majors such as BP and Shell criticized the move. Since President Joe Biden’s election, however, API and several other big oil trade groups have shifted their position to support direct regulation of methane from their operations — though it isn’t clear how strict of controls they would accept.
Biden has promised significantly tighter controls on oil and gas methane as part of his aggressive climate agenda. The Trump administration’s action stands in his way, and his EPA would likely have to reverse it before issuing its own methane controls.
If Congress scraps the methane rollback using the CRA, the EPA could skip that step and begin to tighten leak detection and repair requirements for drillers immediately.
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Thus far, Democrats have been less willing to use the CRA to block Trump administration rules than Republicans were in 2017, when they had full control of the government and canceled more than a dozen Obama administration rules using the legislative tool.
This is the second CRA resolution that Democrats have introduced to scrap Trump's actions. Earlier this week, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia introduced a resolution to scrap a rule from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission changing workplace discrimination claim resolution.
