GENERALLY SPEAKING / From the desk of Gentner Drummond
Amajor focus of mine since taking office as Attorney General has been to fight back against a pattern of federal overreach by the Biden-Harris Administration. A frequent target of that overreach is Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry.
As you know, this industry is profoundly critical to our economic well-being. A 2023 study by the Oklahoma City-based economic research firm RegionTrack found that oil and natural gas contributed $55.7 billion to Oklahoma’s gross domestic product. That figure represents 22% of all economic activity in the state. Moreover, the industry contributed nearly $3 billion in taxes last year.
Recently I had the opportunity to update members of the Oklahoma Gas Association at their annual conference about how my office is working to protect oil and gas from the federal policies that take aim at them and, by extension, Oklahoma.
Shortly after taking office, I filed a federal lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its excessive plan to reduce ozone emissions. Like all states, Oklahoma had been tasked with submitting such a plan to comply with the Clean Air Act. Yet the implementation plans of half of U.S. states, including Oklahoma, saw their implementation plans rejected by the EPA with no feedback or collaboration from our own boots-on-the-ground experts in the field.
Not surprisingly, the EPA’s solution was an unduly burdensome, onesize fits-all strategy. A few months later, we successfully won a stay of the EPA rule that disapproved our ozone emissions plan.
I also sued the Biden-Harris Administration when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species. This onerous rule unnecessarily impedes the development of energy pipelines and oil drilling, and it places undue restrictions on Oklahoma ranchers needing to graze livestock. As you can imagine, this, too, would have a severely negative effect on our state.
More recently, I took the lead in organizing a coalition of state attorneys general challenging the EPA’s new rule to reduce methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations. The rule is a textbook example of federal overreach, as the EPA is attempting to unlawfully take away states’ authority to regulate such emissions.
Finally, Oklahoma has joined another coalition of state attorneys general to file suit against the U.S. Department of Energy’s ban on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. This prohibition undoubtedly would have disrupted the development and production of natural gas. Moreover, the ban poses serious concerns about national security. If our nation’s LNG market were to evaporate, consumers would be forced to turn to the next largest producers — namely Russia, Iran and China. Thankfully, our coalition was successful last month in blocking this dangerous ban.
Simply put, an attack on the oil and gas industry is an attack on Oklahoma. As Attorney General, I am committed to continuing the fight against the feds’ assault on an industry that indisputably is Oklahoma’s economic bedrock.
