In November 2021, EPA proposed standards to regulate methane emissions from new and existing sources in the oil and natural gas sector. Policy Integrity submitted comments supporting the proposed standards, and recommending that EPA strengthen its proposal by regulating additional leaky sources in the industry such as abandoned wells and flares. In addition, we also recommend that EPA strengthen and expand its regulatory analysis by conducting a distributional analysis of the rule's expected impacts, extending the time frame of its analysis, quantifying co-benefits, and disaggregating costs and benefits to demonstrate that its proposed standards are both individually and cumulatively net beneficial.
We also submitted joint comments with a coalition of other environmental groups on EPA's use of the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) in its proposed regulation, recommending that the agency expand its justification of its discount rates and inclusion of global damages in the SC-GHG, and affirm that the SC-GHG is a lower bound of projected climate impacts.