AUSTIN (Nexstar) — To open his media remarks at the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin expressed his gratitude to get away from Washington D.C. to “allow the residents of the San Antonio area to very conveniently be able to raise their concerns.”
His main message — the Trump administration has solved the balance between protecting the environment without burdening the economy.
“You don’t have to choose between one or the other,” Zeldin said. “We reject that notion.”
Zeldin’s most recent example, a proposed walkback of a Joe Biden-era rule intended to limit pollution.
As part of the Clean Air Act, the EPA previously phased out routine ‘flaring’ except in 24-hour windows for maintenance.
“Basically flaring is when you have excess natural gas at the wellhead and you don’t have any way to get rid of it,” Loren Steffy, a journalist who’s written about the Texas oil and gas industry for years, said. “If you’re drilling for oil, you usually hit natural gas as well… and if you don’t have equipment to capture that gas and process it, then it’s usually burned off.”
The EPA’s proposed change would extend the flaring window to 72 hours, with extensions for inclement weather. Zeldin estimates this will save the industry $2.5 billion over the next 15 years.
“In and of itself, this rule is very technical and it’s really very industry specific,” Steffy said. “It probably doesn’t have much impact in terms of the general public.”
While Zeldin’s press release said “these cost savings will help lower gasoline and energy costs across the board,” Friday’s inflation numbers told a different story. Overall inflation went up 0.9% from February to March, the first full month of the U.S. war in Iran.
The impacts on energy prices were staggering. Overall, energy prices went up 10.9% from February to March — with gas prices increasing by 21.2% month-over-month.
When asked, Zeldin tried to contextualize the inflation data.
“Sen. (Chuck) Schumer (D, NY) posted on social media a chart of the last decade or so of inflation, and I’m not sure he realized who and what he was actually owning by posting that chart,” Zeldin said.
In the referenced post, Schumer shared a graph posted by Navy Federal’s Chief Economist Heather Long. The graph shows inflation from 2019 to the present, with a large spike in the middle of the Biden administration.
In her post, Long said “inflation in March alone rose 0.9%. That’s the biggest one-month jump since June 2022.”
“If you look at a period of a few years of the last administration, the height of that chart was many, many magnitudes higher than where it is right now,” Zeldin said. “It’s just important to be honest with the American public and the fact is we went through a few years where people were struggling with massively high increases in inflation.”
However, Steffy thinks this case is unique.
“In a lot of ways, we’re in unprecedented territory,” he said. “To see this big of an increase — and to see it in both oil and natural gas — is really not something we’ve ever seen, certainly not in our lifetimes.”
Somewhat surprisingly, the sharp rise in energy prices did not transfer to the rest of the economy. Food prices remained stable month-over-month, with groceries prices even slightly dipping.
However, that’s unlikely to last long.
“There’s always a lag effect,” Ranchbot CEO Andrew Coppin said. Coppin’s company works with ranchers to set up automated management systems on their land. He says this service can save ranchers 30-40% on fuel.
“People in business, if they see some short-term issue within the supply chain, they’d prefer to try and manage it and not impose on the consumer if they can help it,” he said. “But obviously the longer it goes on and the more sustained it is, the more challenging that is because you’re eroding your own margin. At the end of the day, businesses have a duty to their own shareholders and their own staff and their own stakeholder to make sure that they maintain it.”
