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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

There may be more to this story. I believe "Big Oil" actually wanted tighter control of methane emissions to remain in place when the previous administration proposed relaxing them. The problem may be with smaller producers, who would be favored by that relaxation if they have less resources for compliance than bigger companies do:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/13/901863874/trumps-methane-roll...

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yes agree - I posted here about methane, small "cowboy" oil and gas in West Texas, and some conflict with Big Oil at the time.. remote methane detection using specialized sensors and Deep Learning on the sensing data, has pulled the kimono from this situation.. Big Oil saw a political liability, and did advocate to that US Fed Administration to be strict, and the opposite happened. I very much appreciate the Daylight here on this topic, much needed

I’m sure the smaller producers are lying about methane too. Call it a hunch.

There is truth to the GP post.

Large producers have a tendency to prefer stronger regulations, especially new regulations because they have a competitive advantage in being able to implement them fully while their smaller competitors will be more likely to struggle and ultimately fail and sell cheap to the bigger fish.

In other words for a lot of regulations a considerable portion of the cost to implement is fixed and does not scale with org size which tends to put smaller operators at a further competitive disadvantage.

I think it's more the large producers are global companies who have exposure to investors with different goals than smaller companies who have investors essentially looking at them like the lotto.

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