The contradictions at the heart of the fight over methane rules

In 2014, Colorado became the first state to regulate methane emissions from oil and gas drilling, with the goal of shrinking its carbon footprint and improving local air quality. While a couple industry trade groups fought the rules, some producers, including Encana, Devon Energy and Anadarko, supported the measures. They even helped write the rules with the state and the Environmental Defense Fund. A couple years in, even the trade groups agree that the rules are reasonable and effective. This is about as close as the environmental regulatory world ever gets to kumbaya.  But when the Bureau of Land Management, a federal land agency, finalized its own rules to cut methane emissions from oil and gas operations this fall, collaborative agreements proved far more elusive. Instead, the BLM faced stiff blowback from industry, despite the fact that the rules, developed over a nearly two-year public process, are similar to Colorado’s, and to a successful North Dakota program. Environmentalists call them common sense, but industry groups and a handful of Western states responded by immediately slapping the BLM with a lawsuit, claiming the BLM can’t regulate air quality, and that the rules are too expensive and unnecessary.