Trump is killing Mother Gaia.
Environmental groups filed a lawsuit seeking to reinstate tougher restrictions of methane emissions at oil facilities on federal lands that were approved by the Obama administration and later overturned by President Donald Trump.
A prominent environmental organization in Montana said the rules are needed not only for public health and environmental reasons but to protect taxpayers from losing out on royalties that now can’t be collected on the wasted gas.
A prominent petroleum group in the state called the Obama-era rule federal overreach that would have harmed the industry in Montana particularly smaller stripper wells located on Indian reservations.
The rules affect emissions of methane at oil and gas operations on public land across the West overseen by the Bureau of Land Management including 2,561 leases on almost 2 million acres in Montana in addition to leases controlled by Indian tribes.
“It’s a pollutant greenhouse gas,” Anne Hedges of the Helena-based Montana Environmental Information Center said of methane, a prime constituent of natural gas.
MEIC is a party to the lawsuit.
“It’s also a valued commodity that’s a public resource when it’s extracted on public lands,” Hedges said. “We don’t believe the BLM should allow companies to waste this resource that the public owns and that’s exactly what this rule is doing.”
A coalition of 17 conservation and tribal citizen groups filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in California challenging a BLM Waste Prevention Rule, originally approved under then-President Barrack Obama, and revised after President Trump took office.
The groups argue the Trump revisions gutted the rule in violation of federal policies.
The states of New Mexico and California previously filed a lawsuit challenging the BLM revisions.
Eliminating the protections will allow oil and gas companies to vent, leak, or flare $824 million worth of publicly-owned natural gas into the air over the next decade, with states, local and tribal taxpayers losing millions of dollars of royalty payments, the environmental groups said.
“It’s a problem because they are stealing from taxpayers and they are wasting a resource that’s then contributing to climate change,” Hedges said.