The Trump administration rescinded regulations on methane Thursday, allowing oil and gas companies to keep emitting a powerful climate-changing gas even as a wave of droughts, powerful storms and extreme heat hit the country.

The Environmental Protection Agencys long-anticipated changes to the rule scrap federal requirements that producers install technology and establish procedures to detect, disclose and plug methane leaks from most wells, pipelines and storage facilities.

The agency argued that the regulation the Obama administration put in place in 2016 failed to meet legal standards under the Clean Air Act, and unfairly punished small producers with onerous requirements.

On a call with reporters Thursday afternoon, two senior administration officials defended the changes as a more balanced approach to regulating methane. One official, whom the EPA declined to name on the record, told HuffPost emissions are going to continue to go down despite the rollback and the notion that its going to change that trajectory is inaccurate.

The rule comes as emissions of methane, which traps 90 times more heat in the atmosphere over a two-decade period than carbon dioxide, reach record levels. Since 2000, scientists estimate methane emissions from the United States increased by close to 5 million tons per year, equivalent to adding 35 million cars to the road, according to a study published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters. The spike reflects the drilling boom, driven by hydraulic fracturing, that made the United States a top exporter of gas and oil, said Rob Jackson, a co-author of the study.

Our increases in the U.S. are coming mostly from oil and gas companies, not because the industry is doing a poor job, but because were producing almost twice as much as we were a decade ago, said Jackson, an earth scientist who leads Stanford Universitys Global Carbon Project. Simply increasing production leads to greater methane emissions. Were drilling more wells and moving more natural gas around.