The Environmental Protection Agency just finalized one of the Biden administration’s only outstanding climate rules, aimed at cracking down on leaks of methane — a potent planet-warming gas with an outsized impact on the climate.
The rule, proposed nearly a year ago, was mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act, which could make it more difficult for the second Trump administration to dismantle.
The new rule charges high-emitting oil and gas producers a fee for wasting methane above a certain threshold by venting or flaring it into the atmosphere instead of capturing it. The methane fee will be charged by the federal government until the companies fix the leaks.
This fee was paired with financial incentives for oil and gas companies to fix leaky pipelines or infrastructure.
Methane is an odorless and invisible gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Methane is the main component of the gas that heats our homes and powers our stoves, and it’s one of the main byproducts of oil and gas drilling.
It’s also dramatically warming the planet. An international body of scientists has concluded that the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is higher now than any time in at least 800,000 years. It’s responsible for as much as a third of the global warming the planet has experienced so far, according to the EPA.
The rule could prove tricky for the incoming Trump administration to overturn because the program was included in Biden’s climate law, which passed Congress in 2022. Undoing it would take another act of Congress; while not impossible if Republicans take the House of Representatives, it could be an uphill climb and take longer than if the Trump administration were acting on its own.
“EPA has been engaging with industry, states, and communities to reduce methane emissions so that natural gas ultimately makes it to consumers as usable fuel instead of as a harmful greenhouse gas,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.
According to the EPA, this rule alone would prevent 1.2 million metric tons of methane from polluting the atmosphere – the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
