Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon uncovers an amusing interchange between a top federal environmental regulator and an environmental activist.
A senior Environmental Protection Agency official privately complained about “dickheads” in the White House who resisted efforts to regulate an innovative oil and gas extraction technique, newly released documents show.
Michael Goo, then the EPA’s policy chief, complained to a Sierra Club lobbyist that the White House Office of Management and Budget was resisting efforts to regulate hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
“If you want any hope of regulation of fracking then give us more time to try and remove the gun from our head and talk sense into OMB dickheads,” Goo wrote to John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s top climate policy official and one of its team of D.C. lobbyists.
Goo and Coequyt worked extensively behind the scenes to craft major EPA policies under Obama, including, these text messages show, the agency’s first major fracking regulations.
The text message was obtained by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon.
Goo sent the message on the same day that EPA reached an agreement with environmental groups to postpone the issuance of new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas extraction operations.
The message indicates that the OMB, the White House’s chief policy arm, was pushing back on efforts inside the EPA to include fracking regulations in a suite of new rules, known as New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), restricting the oil and gas industry.
