Fear and Flaring in San Antonio: The EPA Saves the Oil Industry $2.5 Billion While Your Gas Bill Catches Fire

SAN ANTONIO — The man was standing at a podium in front of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, wearing the kind of suit that says I am here to help you while his briefcase says but not you specifically, and he was talking about flaring. Lee Zeldin, the EPA Administrator, former congressman from Long Island, the man charged with protecting the environment the way a fox is charged with protecting a henhouse — he was down in Texas on a Thursday evening, far from Washington, far from the war, far from the inflation numbers that had just detonated across every financial terminal in the country like a cluster bomb made of math, and he was talking about the freedom to burn gas.

Not your gas. Not the gas you just paid 21.2% more for at the pump this month compared to last month. No. He was talking about the oil industry's gas — the excess natural gas that bubbles up at the wellhead when you're drilling for crude, the stuff that used to get burned off in 24-hour maintenance windows under a Biden-era Clean Air Act rule. Zeldin's EPA has proposed extending that window to 72 hours. Three full days of burning. The industry will save $2.5 billion over fifteen years, he announced, with the quiet satisfaction of a man handing a birthday present to someone who already owns everything.

Two point five billion dollars. For the industry. Over fifteen years. Meanwhile, in the real economy — the one where people buy groceries and fill up their tanks and wonder why the numbers on the receipt keep getting bigger — energy prices rose 10.9% in a single month. Gas prices leapt 21.2% from February to March. Overall inflation hit 0.9% in one month, the biggest single-month jump since June 2022. This was the first full month of the U.S. war in Iran, and the war is apparently being fought on two fronts: one in the Persian Gulf and one at every gas station in America.

Zeldin's press release — and I want you to sit down for this, maybe have some water — said that these cost savings would "help lower gasoline and energy costs across the board." Across the board. He said this on the same day that the board caught fire. I checked — the savings break down to roughly $167 million per year for an industry that measures its annual revenue in the trillions. This is the equivalent of finding a quarter in the couch cushions of a mansion while the mansion is actively flooding.

Loren Steffy, a journalist who has covered the Texas oil and gas industry for years, was polite about it in the way that only Texans can be polite about something they find ridiculous. The rule change, he said, is "very technical and it's really very industry specific. It probably doesn't have much impact in terms of the general public." Probably doesn't have much impact. That's the epitaph, right there. That's what they'll carve on the tombstone of this particular regulatory rollback: It Probably Didn't Help.

But here's where it gets beautiful, in the way that a car crash in slow motion is beautiful. When reporters asked Zeldin about the inflation numbers — the real ones, the ones involving real people paying real money — he pivoted with the practiced grace of a man who has rehearsed his deflections in front of a mirror. He brought up Chuck Schumer. Senator Schumer, he said, had posted a chart on social media showing inflation over the last decade, and Zeldin suggested that Schumer had accidentally owned himself by revealing that Biden-era inflation was worse.

The chart in question was originally shared by Heather Long, the Chief Economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, who had noted that "inflation in March alone rose 0.9%. That's the biggest one-month jump since June 2022." But Zeldin didn't dwell on that part. He preferred the scenic route through the Biden years, pointing to the big spike in the middle of the graph and saying, in essence, look over there.

"It's just important to be honest with the American public," Zeldin said, and I had to set my coffee down because you cannot hold hot liquid when a man who just proposed saving the oil industry $2.5 billion while gas prices are up 21% tells you it's important to be honest. The body rejects it. Some kind of immune response.

Steffy, for his part, was less diplomatic about the broader picture. "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." Unprecedented. Not in our lifetimes. These are not phrases economists use when things are going well. These are phrases they use when they're trying to warn you without scaring you, which is like trying to describe a fire without mentioning the heat.

The food prices haven't moved yet. That's the one bright spot, the single candle in the coal mine. Groceries actually dipped slightly in March. But Andrew Coppin, the CEO of a company called Ranchbot that helps ranchers automate their operations, had the cheerful news that this is just the lag. "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."

Translation: the grocery bill is a grenade with a slow fuse. The pin is out. You just haven't heard the bang yet.

So here is the full picture, from thirty thousand feet, with the smoke rising: Lee Zeldin flew to San Antonio to announce that the oil industry can now burn natural gas for three days instead of one, saving them $2.5 billion over a decade and a half, while the people who actually use energy — which is everyone, everywhere, doing everything — watched prices surge by double digits in a single month during a war that nobody voted for. He was asked about this. He blamed the previous administration. The oil industry's journalist of record said the savings won't reach the public. The chief economist said the inflation spike is historic. The rancher tech CEO said the food prices will follow. And Zeldin stood at that podium in San Antonio and said the words "you don't have to choose" between protecting the environment and protecting the economy, as if he had done either.

The flares will burn for 72 hours now. Three days of fire at the wellhead, lighting up the Texas sky like birthday candles on a cake that nobody ordered and everybody's paying for. Somewhere in San Antonio, the chamber of commerce applauded. Somewhere on the highway, a family watched the gas pump numbers spin past what they budgeted. The distance between those two rooms is everything that's wrong, and it is growing, and nobody in the first room can see it because the flare is too bright and their eyes have adjusted to the glare.