Natural Gas

California officials are pressing the Trump administration to retain several recordkeeping and reporting mandates for oil and gas transmission and storage facilities, arguing EPA has failed to justify scrapping them in its broader rollback of methane requirements in its 2016 new source performance standards (NSPS).

Labor groups’ mixed reaction to Democrats’ emerging climate change and clean energy proposals highlights the balancing act that the party must perform in demonstrating that such policies will help workers, with Democrats vowing strong worker protections in the plans but some unions raising doubts about the feasibility of the policies.

Republican-led states, industry groups and unions supporting EPA in litigation over its Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) coal plant greenhouse gas rule are hailing EPA’s “return to the limited statutory ambit” for setting Clean Air Act standards at existing sources and for repealing the much more ambitious Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP).

A federal district judge has found that Trump administration officials arbitrarily relied on their aggressively scaled-back social cost of carbon (SCC) metric to justify a rollback of Obama-era methane standards for oil and gas equipment, a decision that could undermine efforts to scrap a host of climate mitigation policies.