Trump terminates three-week-old methane proposal, claims $45 billion saved, at rally for oil-state Senate hopeful

…(cont) The methane proposal did not catch up to its own agency's promise until October 28th, in Lubbock, Texas, at a campaign rally for Senate candidate Ken Paxton. There the president did not describe a proposal in progress. He described a completed act. "Tonight, I'm officially terminating Biden's expensive and unnecessary methane regulations," he said, and attached two figures to the termination: $45 billion in savings for consumers and producers, and 210 million barrels of oil unlocked, about ten days of national consumption.

Run that against the filing. Three weeks before the rally, the same administration had not released a specific proposal, only a press release saying one was coming. The rule a crowd in Lubbock was told had been terminated had not yet been written down anywhere the public could read it. A number that precise, $45 billion, attached to a document that does not exist in public form yet, is not a savings estimate. It is a number assigned to a feeling, hon.

Grist ran its own ledger against the same proposal and put the industry side in the billions. The other side of that ledger, the methane that keeps leaking and the warming it adds, Grist measured in decades. Decades do not fit on a stage next to $45 billion, so they did not go up.

Three agencies, three weeks, one column of beneficiaries. Oil and gas companies get a liability shield for dead polar bears, a bait rule that helps hunters find more of them, and a $45 billion number read aloud before the underlying rule exists. The column for what the public gets back has no entry yet. That is not an oversight in the filing. That is the filing.