Pruitt Asked by AGs to Suspend Very Methane Rules He Challenged

letter

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter didn’t skip a beat and picked up where former AG and now EPA Director Scott Pruitt left off in challenging the Environmental Protection Agency.

Hunter joined attorneys general from 10 other states this week in filing a request with Pruitt to suspend the Obama administration’s regulations aimed at lowering methane emissions at oil and gas operations. Those rules were finalized late last year as the Obama administration was winding down and preparing to be succeeded by President Donald Trump’s way of running things.

The methane rules were aimed at cutting emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that adds to climate change. They were also the same rules that Pruitt challenged when he was attorney general in Oklahoma. So what will he now do with the rules?

Hunter and the others sent a letter to Pruitt asking for the new EPA regulations to be “suspended and withdrawn.”

“The information request was issued on November 10, 2016 and requires oil and natural gas companies to provide voluminous information and survey responses in support of the Obama Administration’s initiatives to impose onerous requirements upon industry to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses, such as methane.”

The letter points out how 15 states and industry partners filed a legal challenge to the methane rules and the legal fight has just begun. It went on to refer to the rules as “onerous” and called them “burdensome climate rules” which would result in enormous cost and expense.

“We believe the EPA’s requests to be an unnecessary and onerous burden on oil and gas producers that is more harassment than a genuine search for pertinent and appropriate information,” stated the letter. “We hope that the burdensome Obama climate rules never see the light of day.”

The letter was signed not only by Mike Hunter but also by attorneys general of Texas, Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina and West Virginia.