The fossil fuel-funded Energy in Depth seems to be a new favorite of the Daily Caller’s churnalists, with Michael Bastasch turning to their "analysis” of newly announced regulations on methane emissions.
With a headline claiming that these new regulations will only “Reduce Global Warming 0.004 Degrees Celsius,” Bastasch puts the predictable Daily Caller spin on the announcement. That figure, which admittedly seems like a small number, comes from the combined efforts of two clearly biased sources. Steve Everley of Energy in Depth (which, to Bastasch’s credit, is identified as “industry-backed” when he finally gets around to justifying the story’s title in the very last paragraph) used an analysis by Koch-founded Cato Institute to come up with the 0.004 degree Celsius figure.
Given the source of the figure, its accuracy is highly unlikely. But even if it were correct, that still doesn’t mean the regulations are useless. For one thing, the figure applies to past fracking figures, which means it is a low-end estimate when one considers the fact that fracking is a rapidly growing practice. As a result, the amount of future warming prevented by these regulations will almost certainly be larger than the amount for the recent past, which this number is based on.
More importantly, framing it like this is simply wrong. Methane regulations are necessary for limiting warming, but are by no means sufficient to do so on their own . Focusing on the impact of one specific regulation on one specific industry for one specific climate pollutant is always going to lead to an unimpressive figure , given the massive scale of the climate problem.
As the deniers continue to play around with piecemeal accounting, they’ll never get their numbers right. They cherry-pick timespans and data sets when talking about warming, so it's no surprise that they miss the big picture when looking at regulations.
Makes one wonder if it's on purpose...