Supreme Court won't block - for now - Biden limits on methane emissions from oil and gas industry
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday declined to put on hold Biden administration rules slashing methane pollution from the oil and gas industry while those rules are being challenged.
Industry groups joined a coalition of 23 Republican attorneys generals in arguing the Environmental Protection Agency overreached when imposing new rules this year to address one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Emissions would be reduced through measures such as banning the routine flaring of natural gas that is produced by new oil wells. A "super emitter program" relies rely on remote sensing from third parties to detect large methane releases or leaks by oil and gas companies.
Oklahoma and other states challenging the rules argued halting them while they’re being tested in court wouldn’t harm the EPA since the agency worked on them for more than a decade. And the challengers called the two-year compliance deadline unrealistic.
Oklahoma, for example, would have to regulate hundreds of thousands of existing facilities for the first time, the state’s lawyers said in a filing.
The Supreme Court denied the request for a pause in the rules without comment. There were no noted dissents.
The Biden administration had said pausing the rules would postpone a substantial reduction in emissions.
“Climate change is the Nation’s most pressing environmental challenge,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court in a filing.
Methane emissions from human activity are responsible for one-third of the world’s warming greenhouse gases.
President Joe Biden proposed the rules at a 2021 climate summit in Scotland, calling the reductions critical to achieving a goal of limiting rising global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering the underlying challenge to the regulations, declined in July to pause them during the litigation. A three-judge panel unanimously ruled the challengers “have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review.”