The Methane Rules Are Back At The Starting Line. The Gas Kept Going.

There is a reliable way to make a regulation look unfinished: interrupt it whenever it gets close to requiring something. Then announce that you are beginning the serious work of writing a regulation. The industry gets continuity. The public gets a new beginning.

Inside Climate News reports that the Trump administration plans to propose new methane rules this month. Earlier efforts have already traveled through two other administrations and both Trump terms. This is a policy process with a reset button conveniently placed beside the equipment it is supposed to regulate.

Consider the parts being reset. A methane fee due to begin in 2025 was delayed for a decade in Trump’s big spending law. EPA supplied broad exemptions to a restriction on routine flaring at new wells. The administration has also proposed ending greenhouse-gas reporting requirements. Now comes the promise of a fresh proposal, followed by comments and potentially a final rule. The emissions do not need to wait for any of those stages.

That timing is the mechanism. Delay the cost of emitting. Relax an operating requirement. Propose removing the requirement to report. Then return to the first page of a new regulatory process. Each step can be described in administrative language that sounds like movement. Stack the steps together and the thing moving most freely is the gas.

Capturing that gas can cost an operator more than releasing it is worth avoiding. The report describes how gas prices affect that calculation. A rule is supposed to change the calculation; an announcement about a future rule mostly changes the announcement. Methane is spectacularly unresponsive to a press release’s expression of seriousness.

We cannot inspect the promised proposal before it appears. Its actual provisions will matter. But the administration’s completed actions are available for inspection now, and they have given the industry relief from requirements while asking the public to wait for their replacement. It is an unusually generous construction schedule for the party that benefits from an unfinished building.

The same administration can be quite decisive about which energy activities deserve help: geothermal found a friendlier political reception than wind and solar. The capacity to act is present. The question is which obligations get delayed and which accommodations arrive promptly.

A functioning rule eventually has to leave the document and alter what an operator does. Until then, there are two clocks: the official clock, which can be restarted with every announcement, and the physical one, which keeps recording emissions. The first has enjoyed a decade of procedural flexibility. Nobody has located the reset button on the atmosphere.