Fracking companies won’t have to disclose chemicals thanks to Trump administration rollback
California and a coalition of environmental groups have all filed challenges to the Bureau of Land Management’s fracking rule repeal.
On the one-year anniversary of becoming California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra (D) did something he had done 25 times in the previous year — he filed an environmental lawsuit against the Trump administration.
The challenge was to the Trump administration’s recent rollback of federal regulations on fracking — a method of oil and gas drilling that requires companies to inject large volumes of chemical and sand-laced water into rock formations below ground in order to expose oil and gas trapped within. The regulations, finalized under the Obama administration, would have required companies that frack on federal lands to, among other things, disclose the chemicals used in their operations.
But the rule was immediately challenged by the oil and gas industry, which called it “politically motivated” and “duplicative.” In his March executive order on energy independence, President Donald Trump ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review and repeal the fracking regulations. That process was finalized in late 2017.
But California — as well as a coalition of six environmental groups, which separately filed a lawsuit challenging the repeal on Wednesday — argue that the Bureau of Land Management and Zinke violated federal law by failing to provide sufficient justification for repealing the rule.
“We seek an order invalidating Bureau of Land Management’s unlawful repeal, which would in turn reinstate the fracking rule,” Becerra said during a press conference on Wednesday. “We take this action…to insist that the rule of law be followed by everyone, including the occupant of the White House.”
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