Late last week, Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a plan to dramatically cut back the regulation of methane. According to The New York Times, oil and gas companies are currently required to install technology that detects and repairs methane leaks on wells, pipelines, and storage facilities. The administration wants to scrap that rule entirely, and is also arguing that the EPA doesn't even have the authority to regulate methane as a pollutant.

That's potentially disastrous news for the fight against climate change. While activists and environmentalists put an emphasis on lowering carbon emissions, and many scientists argue that countries like the U.S. need to be at least carbon neutral, methane is a more impactful gas. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, while methane doesn't linger in the atmosphere as long as carbon does, it traps much more heat in the short term. And since the window for averting the worst outcomes of climate change is rapidly closing, the short term matters a lot right now.

The move to allow oil and gas companies to more freely leak methane into the atmosphere is in line with the general philosophy of the EPA under Trump: If business performs best when it's unregulated, then environmental regulations are bad. In a 2018 statement from the White House, Trump promised, "We’re ending intrusive EPA regulations that kill jobs." Just a small handful of deregulation examples: In January of last year, the EPA announced that its reading of the Clean Air Act requires it to lower the standards it imposed on plants and factories that emit cancer- and birth-defect-causing pollutants like benzine and dioxin. In September of that year, the agency stopped enforcing an Obama-era rule restricting the emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, another powerful greenhouse gas produced by air conditioners and refrigerators. The administration has been working for over a year now to halt fuel-efficiency standards for new cars. The EPA has proposed exempting new coal plants from installing carbon-capture technology, arguing that requiring them to limit the amount of mercury they release into the air is simply too costly to implement. Just this month, the agency changed rules under the Clean Water Act to make it harder for individual states to try to stop companies from building new oil pipelines.

During his presidential campaign, Trump said of the EPA, "We are going to get rid of it in almost every form. We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out." To that end, he appointed Scott Pruitt to head the agency. Typically, the EPA was headed by figures like Gina McCarthy, who before running the agency under Barack Obama had spent decades working in places like the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. Pruitt spent his tenure as Oklahoma's attorney general suing the EPA a grand total of 14 times to keep the agency from doing things like regulating the carbon output of coal plants, all while dragging his feet to enforce the state's own environmental laws. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Pruitt said that "the degree of human activity’s impact on the climate is subject to more debate," a claim that's not backed up by any reputable scientific body on the planet. In a 2018 interview, he suggested that climate change was maybe a good thing, saying, "I think there's assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing." Pruitt left the EPA in 2018 while under ten separate ethics investigations—including spending $43,000 on installing a private phone booth in his office that violated federal law—and Trump replaced him with Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist.