Congress is reversing a tax on this climate superpollutant

The Senate voted Thursday to overturn a Biden-era rule that required oil companies to pay a fine for emitting methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that has significantly contributed to climate change.

The vote was 52-47. The House on Wednesday passed a similar resolution scrapping the Environmental Protection Agency rule, and President Donald Trump is expected to sign the measure into law.

Congressional Republicans are working in lockstep with the Trump administration to dismantle many of President Joe Biden’s climate rules and policies. GOP lawmakers also plan to reverse a Biden-era decision to let California ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035.

Overturning the methane rule does not eliminate the EPA’s obligation to levy a fee on methane emissions from large oil and gas facilities. That obligation was written into Biden’s signature 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and fully undoing it would require additional legislation.

EPA officials announced the methane rule in November during the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. Under the rule, the fee started at $900 per metric ton of emissions in 2024 and was to increase to $1,200 in 2025 and $1,500 in 2026.

The EPA estimated the regulation would prevent 1.2 million metric tons of methane from entering Earth’s atmosphere. That is roughly the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas cars off the nation’s roads for a year.

Methane is responsible for nearly a third of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution began, according to the International Energy Agency. Although it breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide, it traps about 80 times as much heat in the Earth’s atmosphere in the short term.

The oil and gas industry ranks as the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. The gas can leak from wells, pipelines, storage tanks and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Large amounts of methane can also escape from microbes — the tiny organisms that live in cows’ stomachs, as well as in agricultural fields and wetlands.

The fossil fuel industry is not a monolith, and some large oil companies have supported efforts to regulate methane, while many small firms have opposed them. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who introduced the resolution to repeal the methane rule, said in an interview Thursday that the regulation has burdened small firms with fewer resources.

“For some of the smaller companies, it’s hard for them to respond to this type of tax,” Hoeven said. “But it also affects consumers because that cost gets passed on to consumers. So repealing this is just beneficial to everybody, but particularly small companies.”

Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration & Production Council, a trade group for mostly small independent oil and gas producers, cheered Thursday’s vote while urging lawmakers to go further.

“While American oil and gas producers are laser focused on continuing to reduce emissions, it’s critical to undo these punitive implementing rules while we will continue to work with Congress to repeal the underlying statute for the tax that risks driving up energy costs,” Bradbury said in a statement.

Environmental groups countered that repealing the methane rule would harm not only the climate but also the profits of major oil companies. When methane leaks into the atmosphere, oil firms are effectively wasting valuable natural gas that could be captured and sold.

“The methane polluter fee is a well-designed, practical, cost-effective solution to reduce wasted natural gas,” said Jon Goldstein, associate vice president for energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund. “These attacks on the methane polluter fee will create uncertainty for oil and gas producers, waste America’s natural resources, and harm Americans’ health and the economy.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, slammed oil companies for lobbying to repeal the methane fee, rather than working to comply with it.

“The methane leakers … could avoid the [fee] if they just met industry standards,” Whitehouse told reporters Thursday. “But it’s easier for them to come here and tell the Republicans what to do and exempt themselves than it is to do the responsible thing and fix their pipes and valves and wells.”

The Senate is also expected to vote soon on a resolution repealing energy-efficiency standards for tankless gas water heaters. The House passed the measure Thursday.