A bureaucratic printer jam holds up a major Biden climate rule
The Biden administration flew into last year's international climate negotiations with a big announcement: The U.S. had finished a major climate rule aimed at slashing methane emissions from the oil and gas industry.
But nearly three months later, the government still hasn’t officially printed the rule — which means the clock hasn’t started for the regulation to take effect. The printing process typically takes just a few days.
The rule will finally appear in the Federal Register on March 8, the government said in a notice Friday, a day after POLITICO’s E&E News had written about the logjam. Federal officials have offered little explanation for the delay, aside from noting its size — well over 1,000 pages — and complexity.
The delay had stressed out environmental and public health advocates, who still fear a broader bureaucratic bottleneck as the Biden administration hustles to roll out lengthy and ambitious policies this year with alooming threat of possible rollbacks from a second Trump administration.
“I’m glad it’s happening,” Paul Billings, the national senior vice president for public policy at the American Lung Association, said after the publication was scheduled. “It certainly took a while.”
In an earlier interview, Billings had said: “This is the most important rule that the Biden administration did in 2023 on climate by far, and one they’ve been working on really since they came in the door in January 2021."
The new standards,EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in December at the U.N. climate talks in Dubai, will help the United States........
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