When Big Oil agrees with the green lobby, inspect the details.

Environmentalists and Big Oil aren’t as much at odds as they claim. Witness their joint opposition this week to the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to ease methane regulation. The dirty secret is that the petrol giants don’t mind rules that hurt small competitors. The Obama EPA in 2016 rushed out new regulations requiring oil and natural gas operators to limit methane emissions from wells, pipelines and storage facilities. As usual it ignored the law. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act directs the EPA to list stationary sources that contribute significantly to “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Yet the Obama EPA never determined if methane from gas or oil production endangered public health, let alone if pipelines or storage were major pollution sources.

More From The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):