Ignoring the climatological impacts of increasing levels of atmospheric methane and abandoning its mission of protecting against destructive environmental and health hazards, the Environmental Protection Agency will today announce that it is rolling back yet one more Obama era rule. This time, it’s a mandate that the oil and gas industry install new equipment to gauge methane leaks and repair them. The rule will enter a 60-day public comment period and presumably be finalized sometime early in 2020.
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that acts as lobbyist for the oil and gas industry, supports the rollback, but two of its key members—Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, respectively the 2nd and 5th largest oil companies in the world—are opposed. This makes no never mind to the Trump regime’s EPA, which in its top ranks has become a hothouse of climate science denial. Nor to the White House, where the chief denier is intent on boosting already-record-high oil and gas production by doing things like reversing rules for fracking operations on public lands so that drillers would no longer have to reveal what chemicals they are using.
Methane is the second-most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. But over the short run it is 84-86 times more powerful than CO2 in its contribution to global warming. A couple of weeks ago, Robert W. Howarth, a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist at Cornell University, published a paper at Biogeosciences examining whether shale-derived natural gas has been a recent driver of a significant increase of methane in the atmosphere:
… we conclude that shale-gas production in North America over the past decade may have contributed more than half of all of the increased emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately one-third of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade.
Previously, the increase of methane since 2008 has been attributed to a rise in biogenic methane sources, particularly agriculture, particularly cow burps.
A Wall Street Journal analysis concluded that methane emissions of the oil and gas industry were equal to the greenhouse-gas emissions of more than 69 million cars, about a quarter of all cars registered in the United States.
Most shale gas has been pried from the rock by hydraulic fracturing—fracking—which has a number of environmental problems in addition to leaks at the wellhead, in tanks, and in pipelines.
At The Wall Street Journal, Timothy Puko reports:
“The purpose of this rule is to get to the fundamental basis of whether [methane] should have been regulated in the first place,” said Anne Idsal, the acting assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, referring to the proposed rollback. “It’s not about whether we’re doing the maximum we can or should do to deal with” climate change.
“I don’t see that there’s going to be some big climate concern here,” Ms. Idsal added.
That’s a blinkered assessment destined to exhaust today’s supply of face-palms. In fact, that pfffffffft Idsal gives to concern over this rollback is almost certain to be followed by years of litigation.
Lisa Friedman at The New York Times reports:
“This is extraordinarily harmful,” Rachel Kyte, the United Nations special representative on sustainable energy, said of this and other Trump administration efforts to undo climate regulations. “Just at a time when the federal government’s job should be to help localities and states move faster toward cleaner energy and a cleaner economy, just at that moment when speed and scale is what’s at stake, the government is walking off the field.”
As for why ExxonMobil and Shell don’t favor the rollback, Puko notes that they believe dumping the Obama rule could damage the industry’s claims—amid falling prices of renewables—that natural gas is the cleaner fuel. And dragged-out court battles would mean market uncertainty and a long run before deregulation would lower the industry’s costs.
Ah, pragmatists.