Republican states have called the United States Supreme Court to block sweeping federal regulations limiting “methane emissions.”
It’s the latest legal challenge to the Biden-Harris administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The EPA has pursued an aggressive regulatory agenda targeting oil and gas producers to comply with the globalist green agenda.
The agency claims the plan would reduce methane emissions by up to 80% within a decade.
The Biden-Harris climate agenda has faced pushback from the Supreme Court before.
Most notable was the 2022 case West Virginia v. EPA, in which the court ruled that the EPA cannot force power plants nationwide to shift away from using coal.
In their emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, 24 Republican states blasted the methane rule as a repeat of the EPA’s past efforts to “revolutionize” the Clean Air Act.
“Given its effort to revolutionize that unassuming provision to shut down power plants in favor of other sources of generation, and then to impose an impossible-to-meet standard to achieve that same result, EPA’s use of this provision to attack unlawfully the oil and gas industry comes as no surprise,” the states wrote.
The EPA’s methane reduction plan gives states an “unrealistic” two-year window to regulate hundreds of thousands of existing facilities, the states said.
“The Rule’s imposition of detailed ‘presumptive standards’ for hundreds of thousands of facilities, coupled with an unrealistic two-year deadline, forces State-Applicants into an untenable position.”
“For example, in Oklahoma, the Rule requires the State to regulate over 200,000 existing oil and gas facilities, although Oklahoma had previously only regulated about 10,000 such facilities,” the petition reads.
States that attempt the “monumental task” of developing their own EPA-compliant plans risk massive, non-recoverable economic costs if the rule is ultimately struck down.
The alternative is for the states to give up their lawful control over emissions standards and adopt the EPA’s “presumptive standards” in their entirety.
For example, Kentucky expects it will need to hire at least 100 new employees “immediately.”
Oklahoma projects it will need to increase its existing permitting and compliance staff by 50%.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s EPA projects it may need up to $16,375,000 per year to comply with the Rule.
“The rule effectively forces the states to accept EPA’s ‘presumptive standards,’ thereby limiting the states’ authority to adopt their own standards of performance for regulating methane and VOC emissions from existing facilities,” the states wrote.
In July, a unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit rejected the Republican states’ request.
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