This is corruption, pure and simple. The biggest winner from this rule change is Texas oil billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand, whose company Hilcorp built its fortune buying up old, leaky wells and ranks as the nation's top methane emitter by one analysis of EPA data. After never being a big political giver, he and his wife poured $15 million into Trump and Republicans. Then Trump made his wife an ambassador and put his former lobbyist in charge of rewriting this very rule at the EPA. It's also really stupid policy. Imagine your gas bill keeps climbing and the utility company finds a leak in the line to your house. Instead of fixing it, they decide to stop checking for leaks altogether. That's basically what the Trump administration just did to the whole country. Methane is natural gas, the same stuff that heats our homes and runs our stoves. A rule on the books was supposed to make companies find the biggest leaks and fix them. Now it's being gutted. Some of the worst offenders are small, older wells like Hildebrand's. They produce only about 6% of our oil and gas but account for up to half the methane leaking from the fields. Families living near these wells breathe that pollution every day, and methane drives about a third of the warming we're seeing. And letting wells leak won't lower what you pay at the pump one bit. Fix the leaks, save the energy, keep the air clean. That's common sense, and the opposite of the corruption and stupidity we're seeing. apnews.com/article/trump-met…