Republican AGs Urge Supreme Court to Halt Biden Methane Rule

Two dozen Republican-led states on Tuesday asked the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court to pause the Biden administration's rule intended to slash methane emissions by nearly 80% over the next decade through new requirements for the oil and gas industry.

Arizona's GOP-controlled legislature and 23 state attorneys general—led by Gentner Drummond, who attended the Oklahoma Gas Association's annual conference on Tuesday—filed the request for emergency action by the nation's highest court after launching the legal battle in March.

The Republican filers claimed in their application that their states "will suffer irreparable harm if this court does not grant a stay" halting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule, and the policy's "devastating consequences are contrary to the public interest."

Meanwhile, green groups have welcomed the rule but also pushed the Biden administration to go much further, arguing, as Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said in March, that "the best way to eliminate methane pollution... is to stop fossil fuel drilling, period. In the midst of a climate emergency, we need to take the actions necessary to stop pollution once and for all."

The GOP states' application details the long process that led to the EPA's latest rule on methane, which is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide for its first two decades in the atmosphere. As Courthouse New Service summarized Tuesday:

The EPA began regulating new oil and gas producers in 2016, but the Trump administration rescinded the regulations in 2020. President Joe Biden's EPA repealed the 2020 rules and proposed new standards that would not only reimpose the 2016 standards but also apply those regulations to existing oil and gas sources for the first time.

Biden's standards prohibit all flaring for certain wells, forcing any gas to be recovered, collected, and used for a beneficial purpose. Natural gas pumps will have a zero-emissions standard.

As CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck noted, "This is the 23rd pending emergency application—and the third different EPA rule that applicants are currently asking the justices to block on the shadow docket."

"In all three of these cases, the *only* ruling by a lower court was a summary ruling by the D.C. Circuit denying emergency relief; there's been no other litigation," Vladeck explained on social media. "And in all three of those cases, those rulings came from unanimous *and* ideologically diverse D.C. Circuit panels."

In addition to Arizona and Oklahoma, the states behind the request are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority has a history of being hostile toward environmental regulations, including with its June ruling in Ohio v. EPA, which was about a policy designed to protect people downwind from smog-forming pollution.

Earthjustice senior vice president Sam Sankar warned at the time that "the court's order puts thousands of lives at risk, forces downwind states to regulate their industries more tightly, and tells big polluters that it's open season on our environmental laws."