Methane
SEE 2 BAK
see action
// GLOBAL WARMING, SUPPORT MEANS ACT ON,
methane bomb 1219 on tip pt game over, see carbon bomb, ANWR
promote primary 818
methane bomb runaway feedback loop permafrost or deep ocean went out of fashion, but now baaaack?! both 2x recent est?!
html sprawling
1021 bak
---
biden BBB will cap wells?
no lnx no grfx
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112022/who-were-the-worst-climate-polluters-in-the-us-in-2021
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions climbed by 4.1 percent from major industrial sources in 2021, according to new data recently released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The increase is the largest year-on-year rise in emissions tallied across more than a decade of reporting and comes at a time when global climate pollution must quickly be curtailed to limit further warming.
The emissions, 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, were self-reported to the agency by more than 8,100 of the nation’s largest climate polluters under the agency’s mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The emissions represent about half of all U.S. climate pollution and the annual update provides the most comprehensive, site-by-site assessment of the nation’s largest polluters.
The increase in emissions came amid a rise in economic activity and industrial production following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. While emissions from large polluters—generally defined as facilities that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year—shot up in 2021, they were 5.25 percent lower than their pre-pandemic level in 2019.
Evan Gillespie, a partner with Industrious Labs, a recently formed environmental organization focused on decarbonizing heavy industry, said such swings in pollution have to cease in order to hit emission reduction targets under the Paris Climate agreement.
“We cannot have emissions linked to production,” Gillespie said. “We have a lot of work to do over the next eight years to get industrial emissions on track.”
The Worst of the Worst
Andy Knott, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign for the nation’s central region, said he is seeing a lot of progress in the shutdown of large coal-fired power plants from many, but not all, electric utilities.
“When I look at the largest carbon polluters, many of them, the utilities that own them, don’t have plans to retire them anytime at all,” Knott said. “We need to retire all coal by 2030 and all fossil fuels in the electric sector by 2035.”
Carbon dioxide is the primary driver of climate change and CO2 emissions from coal and natural gas fired power plants were the largest source of emissions. However, other pollutants including methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated greenhouse gases, such as hydrofluorocarbons used in refrigerators and air conditioners, were also significant sources of emissions. These “non-CO2” greenhouse gases are far more potent than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound basis and in many cases remain in the atmosphere for a relatively short time compared to CO2. Curbing their emissions is increasingly seen as a key to stopping near term warming.
The following is a listof the country’s top polluters for each of the leading greenhouse gases tracked by the EPA. Also included are some of the highest emitters for different sectors of the economy.
Carbon Dioxide: The James H. Miller Jr. power plant in Quinton, Alabama was the largest coal fired power plant in the U.S in terms of power generation in 2021 and was also the nation’s biggest emitter of CO2.The plant, owned by The Southern Company, emitted 20,834,019 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. Company executives announced plans last year to shut down nearly 80 percent of its coal power capacity by 2028 on the way to having net-zero emissions by 2050. The planned shutdowns do not include the James H. Miller plant.
Methane: The Bailey Mine, a coal mine owned by Consol Energy in southwestern Pennsylvaniais the largest single source of methane in the U.S. with 90,743 tons of methane emissions in 2021. The near-term climate impact of the emissions are equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1.6 million automobiles, according to the EPA. Consol Energy does capture and destroy some additional methane emissions from the mine as part of a methane destruction pilot program.
Nitrous Oxide: Ascend Performance Materials’ nylon plant in Cantonment, Floridareleased 24,657 metric tons of nitrous oxide in 2021, four times more nitrous oxide than any other industrial facility in the country, though the figure is still pending final EPA verification. The plant makes adipic acid, a main ingredient in nylon 6,6, a strong, durable plastic used in everything from stockings to carpeting, seat belts and air bags, and also emits large amounts of nitrous oxide, an unwanted byproduct.
Nitrous oxide is 273 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide on a pound for pound basis. Assuming the currently reported emissions are correct, emissions from the facility in 2021 equaled the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1.5 million automobiles, according to the EPA. Other adipic acid plants in the U.S and Europe installed abatement technology to destroy virtually all of their nitrous oxide emissions in the late 1990s.
Company officials told Inside Climate News in early 2020 that they would reduce nitrous oxide emissions from the production of adipic acid by 50 percent by mid-2020 and by more than 95 percent by February of 2022. However, nitrous oxide emissions from adipic acid production at the plant climbed by 38 percent from 2019 to 2021 according to emissions data the company reported to EPA. Ascend Performance Materials’ spokeswoman, Alison Jahn, did not respond directly to questions about the increase but said that Ascend has set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all of its facilities by 80 percent by 2030.
Hydrofluorocarbons: Hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23) is 14,600 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide on a pound for pound basis, making it one of the worst climate pollutants ever identified by the scientists with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2021, chemical manufacturer Chemours vented 180 metric tons of HFC-23, a synthetic gas and unwanted byproduct, from its Louisville, Kentucky plant. The emissions, which can be destroyed through incineration, are equal to the annual emissions of 566,000 automobiles. However, HFC-23 emissions from the Louisville plant could soon be a thing of the past.
In October, 2021, EPA required Chemours to use or destroy 99.9 percent of the HFC-23 it produces by this October. Chemours missed the deadline to complete the installation “due in part to supply chain issues” according to the EPA, which granted the company’s request for a 6-month extension. The company has installed and is now operating the pollution controls but is continuing to validate and optimize the system, Chemours spokeswoman Cassie Olszewski, said.
Sulfur Hexafluoride: Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 25,200 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide,making it the most potent greenhouse gas ever assessed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Once released, SF6 remains in the atmosphere, warming the planet, for 3,200 years. The synthetic gas is used in high-voltage circuit breakers to quickly interrupt electric current. In 2021, American Electric Power (AEP) released 18 tons of SF6 from electric utility substations across 10 states, emissions equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 99,000 automobiles. While AEP had the highest total emissions, Duke Energy Carolinas had the highest SF6 leak rate—6 percent of all the SF6 it used in 2021—a rate more than twice that of AEP.
Eighty-eight U.S. utilities are part of a voluntary program that the EPA started in 1999 to help utilities slash their SF6 emissions. Duke Energy, the largest electric power corporation in the U.S. based on revenue, is not a part of the program.
“We are certainly working to learn more about the group [and] are reconsidering our involvement,” Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks said.
Methane from Gas Storage:The Petal Gas Storage Compressor Station vented 2,517 tons of methane from leaky compressors at an underground natural gas storage facility in Petal, Mississippi in 2021. Emissions from the facility declined by 49 percent from the prior year. However, Petal’s emissions remain nearly twice that of any other gas storage site in the country despite being a relatively small gas storage repository.
“We are continuing our methane emissions reduction efforts at Petal and across our system,” Jillian Kirkconnell, a spokeswoman for Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, said.
Boardwalk owns the Petal gas storage facility as well as the Gulf South Pipeline – Bistineau Station gas storage facility, the second-highest emitting gas storage facility in the country, which leaked 1,301 tons of methane in 2021.
Methane from Landfills: Sampson County Disposal, a privately owned landfill in Roseboro, North Carolina emitted an estimated 32,983 tons of methane, more than any other municipal or industrial landfill in 2021, according to company data reported to the EPA. The near-term climate impact of the emissions are equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 575,000 automobiles according to the EPA.
Joy Grahek, executive vice president of strategic initiatives with GFL Environmental, the landfill’s owner, said the company has taken measures to reduce emissions and that the models used by the EPA to estimate emissions are incorrect.
“We have implemented a number of different operational and engineered strategies to minimize fugitive methane generation at the landfill, including the use of impermeable cover materials, an extensive gas collection system to capture landfill gas, and flaring of the captured gas,” Grahek said. “The models are widely recognized as containing significant uncertainty and using the EPA Reports as a basis for ranking the relative performance of landfills in controlling fugitive emissions is inaccurate.”
Emissions estimates for landfills vary widely depending on which method operators use to calculate their emissions and may underestimate actual emissions by as much as “a factor of two.”
The EPA recently proposed changes on how to better calculate methane emissions from landfills.
Phil McKenna
==
an 7 22
In mere weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency is set to unveil a supplemental draft rule aimed at cracking down on the oil and gas industry’s rampant methane emissions. This rule, which sidesteps the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling, provides a necessary advancement to 2016 rules that were rolled out similarly regulating methane emissions as part of the Obama administration’s ambitious climate goals. New rules could not come at a better time, given recent findings of rampant methane emissions in the oil-rich Permian Basin, where some fossil fuel companies are relentlessly polluting the region with nonstop methane emissions.
Taking data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab project known as Carbon Mapper, the Associated Press found dozens of so-called “super emitters” located in the area, of which just 10 companies owned 164 sites responsible for major methane emissions. The Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute Director, Kassie Siegel, provided an eye-opening analogy to the methane issue: “If carbon dioxide is the fossil-fuel broiler of our heating planet, methane is a blowtorch,” Siegel told the Associated Press. It’s long been understood that methane is more than 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Yet polluters freely emit methane with little to no consequence because, at this juncture, it is ultimately a company’s responsibility to account for its own bad actions. This has been a massive issue throughout the Gulf South and beyond. In Colorado, local air quality monitoring found that company reports of reduced methane emissions were an outright lie. Officials in towns and counties near Boulder were alarmed that claims of methane emissions being reduced by half weren’t even close to what on-the-ground air quality monitors had found. Colorado is considered a leader in methane emission regulation, yet there is still much work to be done to ensure that fossil fuel companies aren’t continuing to do their worst.
The Associated Press cites years of inaction and the difficulty of tracking methane emissions that are intermittent as major culprits, along with the oil and gas industry’s own practices of simply flaring and venting its methane because companies are overwhelmed by their own output. Regional oversight has all but signaled its support of such actions. An environmental consultant told the outlet that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rarely, if ever, inspects oil and gas sites. And the primary agency overseeing onshore oil and gas projects in the state—the Texas Railroad Commission—itself benefits from a lack of oversight, allowing oil-loving commissioners to continue sitting on their hands in favor of constant fossil fuel development and production. If states like Colorado can’t even seem to get things right, it feels like Texas doesn’t even stand a chance to do right by its citizens.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/oil-executives-recording-trump-access-812511/
oil executives have been reveling in all of the access and influence they now have because President Donald Trump is in office. A recording of a meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows executives bragging about how they can affect change in both Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency regulations after their former lawyer, David Bernhardt, was nominated to be the number two official at Interior.
“We know [Berndardt] very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” Dan Naatz, IPAA’s political director said, in an hour-long recording of a June 2017 meeting
...ed in 'Dozens' of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
Bernhardt is now up for a promotion: he is Acting Secretary of the Interior and is Trump’s nominee to replace former Interior chiefRyan Zinke.
“It’s really a new thing for us,” Barry Russell, CEO of IAPP said, bragging about his upcoming meetings with Trump officials. “For example, next week I’m invited to the White House to talk about tax code. Last week we were talking to [EPA] Secretary [Scott] Pruitt, and in about two weeks we have a meeting with [Interior] Secretary Zinke. So we have unprecedented access to people that are in these positions who are trying to help us, which is great, "
russell also laughed recalling a meeting with then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt where Pruitt’s staff wrote down Russell’s criticisms of the EPA.
“Scott Pruitt, he came from Oklahoma, and we have a lot of friends in common and I thought that’s what we were going to talk about, we did that for about three minutes,” Russell said. “And then he started asking very technical questions about methane, about ozone… And what was really great is there was aboutfour or five EPA staffers there, who were all like, ‘Write that down, write that down,’ all the way through this. And when we left, I said that was just our overview.”
This prompted the audience to laugh at how easy it was for Russell to influence policy.
“So it’s really a new world for us and very, very helpful,” Russell concluded.
On the recording, the executives also discussed a “wish list” they drafted and gave to the administration detailing EPA regulations they wanted rolled back, including removing fracking regulations that protect water sources;limits on methane gas releases; restoration of publicly-owned land harmed by the oil industry and regulations to protect migratory bird populations. Each of those requests was granted.
Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society environmental group, told Reveal: “The IPAA’s wish list was granted as asked, in the executive order, and in the actions taken by the Department of the Interior. It pains me to say it.”
And, of course, with Bernhardt’s confirmation hearings approaching, groups like IAPP stand to gain even more as their access and influence within the Trump Administration grows.
Oil Industry Wages Major Lobbying Campaign to Kill Proposed Methane Fee
After expressing support for carbon pricing earlier this year, the American Petroleum Institute and other oil lobby groups are pressuring Congress to not put a tax on methane. Critics see yet another cynical attempt to block climate action.
onSep 14, 2021
:{
}:
:{
no lnx many no twt
The oil industry has launched an all-out pressure campaign to kill an attempt by Congressional Democrats to tax methane – an extremely powerful greenhouse gas – for the first time.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s most powerful lobbying group, enlisted over 130 state-level chambers of commerce, oil lobbying outfits, and labor groups, and together they wrote a letter on September 7 to U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which is considering the methane fee as part of the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill.
This is despite top oil companies and their trade associations earlier this year claiming they were in favor of carbon pricing as their preferred policy choice to address climate change.
In the same month as the industry made headlines for supporting carbon pricing, U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced a bill in March 2021, the Methane Emissions Reduction Act of 2021, which would impose a $1,800 per ton fee on methane emissions beginning in 2023, and rise by 2 percent per year above inflation going forward.
The senators saw the bill as having the potential to end methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, taking a large bite out of potential warming.
That bill, or some version of it, now has a chance of getting folded into the budget package that Congressional Democrats are currently writing. The House Energy and Commerce Committee included a lower fee in its portion of the package working its way through the House.
With details still murky and Congress working at a blistering pace to put the sweeping budget bill into place, things could still change. But over the next few weeks or months, a methane fee has a real chance of being signed into law by the President.
Faced with the reality of a price being put on methane, the oil industry has begun mobilizing to attack the idea, claiming that regulation is preferred instead. The about-face is consistent with longstanding efforts by the fossil fuel industry to oppose environmental regulations and derail any action on climate change.
“[T]he industry has a long history of opposing whatever’s on the table by saying it supports something else (e.g., it wants cap and trade when a carbon tax is on the table, and it wants a carbon tax when cap and trade is on the table),” said Ben Franta, a JD/PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Law School and Department of History who studies the history of climate denial.
“The end result,” he told DeSmog via email, “is nothing getting passed.”
Congress Eyes Methane Fee
Methane is over 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas when released into the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Due to this shorter lifespan compared to CO2, it is seen as a low-hanging fruit for climate action. Scientists say urgent and deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are needed to slow the rate of global warming, and slashing methane offers one of the most immediate and impactful ways of achieving this.
The oil and gas industry is one of the largest emitters of methane, which leaks at every stage of the production and distribution process. Methane seeps out from drilling sites, pipelines, compressor stations, storage tanks, and liquefied natural gas terminals. The problem is also not geographically isolated, but is common across the entire global oil and gas industry.
Cutting methane could have an enormous impact. Eliminating 50 percent of methane from oil and gas operations could achieve the equivalent climate benefit of shuttering all of the coal plants in China, according to environmental group Clean Air Task Force.
“Putting a price on methane pollution that discourages oil and gas companies from continuing their practice of virtually unfettered methane pollution is one of the most effective immediate steps we can take to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Senator Whitehouse said in a statement in March. “We believe our new bill would put a stop to virtually all methane emissions from the industry.”
But the oil industry is scrambling to prevent such a scenario from playing out.
Gas flare in Permian Basin, Eddy County, New Mexico. ]
Oil Industry’s Lobbying Frenzy
In its letter last week to the Senate committee weighing a methane fee as part of the budget bill, API called the proposal a “punitive fee” that could “jeopardize affordable and reliable energy with likely little reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
But research suggests the penalty may not be steep enough.
“We’re effectively subsidizing fossil fuels relative to renewables by picking up the tab for the climate change they cause, for the air pollution they cause, and so on,” Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth Science at Duke University, and contributor to the UN’s Global Methane Assessment, told DeSmog in an email. He said each ton of methane causes roughly $4,300 in damages.
“So that’s the subsidy that fossil fuel companies (and other methane sources) currently are receiving,” he said.
On the same day that the API sent its letter, the American Gas Association (AGA), a lobby group for gas utilities, wrote a separate letter to the House and Senate leadership from both parties in opposition to the methane fee. AGA said it would be a“regressive tax on low-income” families, a line of argument that has been a particular favorite of the industry in recent years.
API’s new interest in regulating methane is “akin to more smoke and mirrors than a genuine change of policy position.”
Oil Change International
It isn’t just the major D.C.-based national oil lobby groups, however, that have launched a media campaign on this issue. Many state-level equivalents fanned out across the country, writing op-eds in local newspapers and pressing their congressional delegations to kill the methane fee. The arguments are often mirror images of each other.
In the Kansas City Star, the Kansas Oil Independent Oil & Gas Association made the case that a methane fee is “duplicative, punitive, and costly,” echoing API’s talking points. It was also unnecessary, the Kansas lobby group said, because reducing methane is already “a top priority for the oil and gas industry.”
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a lobby group for Appalachian gas drillers, said the fee is an “unreasonable, punitive tax.”
The Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) has been leaning on lawmakers from both parties, decrying provisions in the budget bill that would “decimate” the oil and gas industry, referring to the potential removal of subsidies and the methane fee.
TheGas and Oil Association of West Virginia sent a letter in early September to Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other members of the state’s congressional delegation, arguing the methane tax would “raise costs for all Americans … and provide virtually no environment benefit.”
Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined in on the action, writing a letter to Democratic leadership on the same day as API launched its effort. Sen. Cramer urged Democrats “to resist the insatiable demands from the environmental left and do what is right for all Americans by opposing a new fee on methane emissions from oil and natural gas facilities.”
He called the tax “punitive” and “unnecessary,” echoing industry talking points. “One would be hard-pressed to find an oil and gas company not committed to reducing methane emissions,” he said.
Various oil lobbies, including IPAA and the American Exploration & Production Council, a lobbying outfit for large U.S. oil drillers, were quick to promote Sen. Cramer’s letter on Twitter. Notably, during his last election cycle in 2018, Sen. Cramer received more than $540,000 in donations from the oil and gas industry; the sector represented his largest source of fundraising.
While some are focused on the Senate, other opponents of the methane tax are trying to block action on the other side of the Capitol. “I actually believe our best chance to stop these tax hikes is not in the Senate, they’re in the House. Speaker Pelosi has a razor thin majority,” Congressman Kevin Brady (R-TX) said on Energy Policy Watch, an industry-friendly podcast put on by Hart Energy, an oil industry research firm, and Cornerstone Government Affairs, a D.C.-based lobbying firm.
“I think we can alter what those significant tax hikes look like if we engage now over the next several weeks in the House,” he said. He called on the oil and gas industry to apply pressure to the dozen or so House Democrats who were waffling on the budget bill.
Meanwhile, Energy Citizens, a front group created by API, has been running ads on Facebook targeting Democrats seen as vulnerable in the 2022 midterm elections, according to E&E News.
API launched a seven-figure campaign — both TV and online ads — aimed at killing the methane fee.
Oil Lobby’s Shifting Positions
:{
}:
Revelations of Exxon’s lobbying strategy as exposed in June by Unearthed and Channel 4 news has obvious echoes to the oil industry’s current predicament.
:{
}:
Keith McCoy, ExxonMobil’s lobbyist who was caught on tape, said the company publicly professes support for a carbon tax because it knows one will never occur. “Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that, but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,” he said.
:{
}:
API, it appears, is taking a similar approach.
“Thanks to the ExxonMobil lobbyist caught on tape, it’s confirmed that Big Oil opposes behind closed doors the climate policies they publicly support,” Lauren Pagel, national methane co-chair at Earthworks, told DeSmog in an email. “What’s different here is that new methane rules definitely will happen, and oil companies think they’ll have a better chance to weaken them if they publicly support them.”
“API claims to support carbon pricing, and methane pricing is simply a subset of carbon pricing,” Senator Whitehouse said in a statement to DeSmog. API said in March 2021 that they support carbon pricing. “API’s ever-shifting and contradictory positioning on methane pollution is a clear indication that the industry is desperate to escape any accountability for the massive damage it’s knowingly doing to our planet.”
Instead of a fee, the oil industry says it prefers federal regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “If the objective is to reduce methane emissions, direct regulation of methane is the best method to implement such a government policy,” API said in its September 7 letter.
In fact, the EPA does plan on announcing new federal regulations on methane, on both new and existing oil and gas sites. On September 8, over 70 community, health, tribal and environmental organizations sent a letter to the EPA, urging the agency to craft strong rules.
But critics see hypocrisy and opportunism in API’s new position, which is nothing more than the latest tactic in a long history of blocking climate legislation.
An April 2021 report from Oil Change International looked at API’s newfound interest in regulation, and identified the countless times that API in fact opposed methane regulation over the past decade.
The oil lobby “has apparently abandoned more than a decade of opposition to the regulation of the climate super-pollutant methane, to suddenly being all about it,” the report said, adding that the new position in favor of regulation is “akin to more smoke and mirrors than a genuine change of policy position.”
Over the past decade API consistently stated that methane regulation by the federal government was not needed because companies were already capturing methane, they had every incentive to capture it, they were implementing innovative technologies, and any regulation would be costly. In any case, the industry argued, methane emissions from drillers were already declining.
Many if not all of those assertions were misleading at best, if not outright untrue. Studies show that methane emissions have soared and are growing at an alarming rate, and that the oil and gas industry is one of the largest sources. Methane emissions in the Permian basin, for example, are back to pre-pandemic levels.
Studies also show that the industry could eliminate as much as 75 percent of its methane emissions using technologies that already exist, and two-thirds of that could be done at no additional cost.
But much of the industry hasn’t been taking the steps needed to cut emissions – such as detecting and plugging leaks, and conducting regular upkeep to ensure equipment operates properly – because there is little scrutiny or regulatory requirements to do so. Oil companies face virtually no penalty for letting methane leak into the atmosphere.
“You can’t both claim that you’re going to take care of the problem but that you don’t need anyone to kind of force your hand on it,” said Shannon Heyck-Williams, senior director for climate and energy policy at the National Wildlife Federation, referring to the oil industry’s shifting positions on methane. “It’s just not going to work to say that any longer given the stage of the climate crisis we’re in.”
Gas flares in Colorado. ]
In 2016, API sued EPA to block methane regulations being implemented under President Obama, which would have only impacted new facilities, not existing ones. Shortly after, however, President Trump was in office, and API urged him to roll back these rules.
In August 2020, the Trump administration finalized the rollback of the Obama-era regulations on methane, leaving in place little oversight for methane pollution. Even some in the oil industry were uneasy about unfettered methane pollution – BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil opposed the rollback. But API supported the move.
In the early days of the Biden administration, API changed course, and voiced support for regulation, which appeared to be a sea change. But as Oil Change International notes, API offered no specifics, no stated targets, instead simply issuing statements of support for “cost-effective” regulation.
According to Franta’s research, the API’s climate denial dates back to at least 1980. He said that when API says it supports regulation, “that could mean anything.”
Federal regulations also take time to craft and implement, and are subject to litigation. Even if they are finalized, they can be rolled back by the next administration. If a methane fee becomes law as part of the budget bill currently under consideration, on the other hand, it will become much harder to undo — rather than being able to use an executive order, a separate law would have to be passed by Congress to remove the tax.
API did not respond to a list of questions from DeSmog. When DeSmog requested access to a press call API hosted on methane on September 9, API did not respond. The Marcellus Shale Coalition and the Independent Petroleum Association of America did not respond to questions.
Senator Whitehouse, one of the methane tax’s main proponents, denounced the oil lobby group. “API has zero credibility on this issue. While it now claims to support methane regulations, it opposed them during the Trump years,” he said. “It’s obvious that API’s newfound support for regulations is just a smokescreen to try and tank a pricing regime where companies would face a price if they continued to pollute.”
}:
sv 350 921
Last month’s release of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report was the first ever to include a chapter on methane and other short-lived pollutants. Even so, experts argue the treatment of this "short-lived climate pollutant" was wholly insufficient, especially in light of a May 2021 UN report that said a reduction in human-caused methane emissions is “one of the most cost-effective strategies to rapidly reduce the rate of warming and...limit temperature rise to 1.5°C.” Methane’s global warming potential is about 101 times that of carbon dioxide over methane's 12 year lifespan in the atmosphere (this is often reported as 86 times more potent a greenhouse gas over 20 years); if unabated, the gas could be responsible for 30 percent of global warming by 2050.
Much of the focus on Congress this year has been on these emissions from the oil and gas industry. The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package passed by the Senate last month would allocate $21 million to cleaning up abandoned mines and superfund sites, and plugging old oil and gas wells, which are estimated to produce 280,000 metric tons of methane per year. The reconciliation bill, now under construction, is expected to include a “methane polluter fee” based on legislation introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in March. Whitehouse’s plan proposes levying a $1,800/ton fee on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, beginning in 2023. One issue? Recent research indicates that the EPA has been underestimating methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by as much as fifty percent.
Short-lived climate pollutants will likely be a top priority of 350 Silicon Valley’s policy advocacy through the 2022 legislative session. Please join the Legislative team at our regular meeting on Tuesday, September 28, 7pm PT, when we’ll be reviewing our list of priority bills for the next session and planning our strategy for the coming months. Previous agendas and the zoom link for the meeting are here.
Jun 30, 2021President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a bill repealing a Trump-era rule that rolled back regulations on methane emissions -- a particularly potent greenhouse gas believed to contribute ...
Attention turns to EPA on methane regulation after Biden ...
President Biden Joe Biden Biden emphasizes unity in his July 4 remarks: "America is coming together" Governor of Oregon: Heat wave toll is "absolutely unacceptable" Army braces for change radical in the reform of justice MORE Restoring Obama-era rules on methane emissions shifts all attention to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as regulators say they plan to crack down further ...
:{Biden EPA Targets NatGas with Damaging Methane Emissions :(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{...:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:
Get ready, it's coming this month. The completely radicalized Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Joe Biden and EPA Administrator Michael Regan (formerly the failed head of North Carolina's environmental agency) will issue a new regulation targeting so-called methane emissions, a rule that is "expected to be stricter even than an Obama-era standard set in 2016" which was ...
Focus shifts to EPA on methane regulation after Biden ...
Focus shifts to EPA on methane regulation after Biden action. 's restoration of Obama-era rules on methane emissions is shifting all attention to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as ...
What to look for as EPA readies landmark methane rules
In his day-one executive order on climate, President Biden directed EPA to propose methane rules for oil and gas facilities by this fall. And this summer, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution reversing a Trump-era rollback of methane protections and reaffirming EPA's obligation to reduce methane from both new and older sources in the oil ...
big 3 want regs, give advantage?
fin times
https://www.ft.com/content/b7f67e24-4cd2-43d8-b3c2-6c44b209afab
Trump administration overturns rules on methane leaks
Environmental Protection Agency frees oil and gas industry from Obama-era regulation
The main component of natural gas, millions of tonnes of unburned methane, leak each year from natural gas and petroleum systems © REUTERS
Kiran Stacey in Washington and Gregory Meyer in New York AUGUST 13 2020
Methane leaks from oil and gas wells will no longer be regulated in the US, as the Trump administration rolls back a set of environmental rules even in the face of opposition from large energy companies.
Andrew Wheeler, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced on Thursday that oil and gas production facilities would no longer have to monitor methane leaks.
Pipeline and storage facility owners, meanwhile, will not have to monitor methane or other compounds, known as volatile organic compounds.
The rules sparked anger when first proposed last August, not only from environmental campaigners, but even from large oil and gas companies. The EPA has pushed ahead, however, as part of a wider programme of rolling back environmental protections put in place by the Obama administration.
Speaking in Pennsylvania, a swing state with a large shale gas industry, Mr Wheeler said: “Regulatory burdens put into place by the Obama-Biden administration fell heavily on small and medium-sized energy businesses. Today’s regulatory changes remove redundant paperwork, align with the Clean Air Act, and allow companies the flexibility to satisfy leak-control requirements by complying with equivalent state rules.”
The EPA said they expect the move to save businesses up to $850m in compliance costs from 2021 to 2030. It said last year that it expected an extra 370,000 short tons of methane — equivalent to 8.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide — to be emitted as a result.
:{
}:
The direct federal regulation of methane emissions is a critical step to protecting the environment and keeping the gas in our pipes in order to provide it to the market
David Lawler, chairman of BP America
As the main component of natural gas, millions of tonnes of unburned methane leak each year from natural gas and petroleum systems, according to EPA data.
Methane traps heat in the atmosphere 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide and accounts for 10 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions.
The Environmental Defense Fund, a green campaign group, said on Thursday it planned to sue the Trump administration for announcing the move without scientific justification.
Fred Krupp, the EDF’s president, said: “Like so many other administration rollbacks that have already been rejected by the courts, this one ignores the science, the public health impacts and the low-cost solutions we have at hand.”
BP said it remained committed to adhering to the regulations as put in place by the Obama administration. David Lawler, chairman of BP America, said the company opposed the rollback. “The direct federal regulation of methane emissions is a critical step to protecting the environment and keeping the gas in our pipes in order to provide it to the market,” he said.
ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have also opposed the Trump administration move.
The American Petroleum Institute, however, which lobbies on behalf of small and large US oil and gas operators, supported the changes.
:{
}:
Frank Macchiarola, senior vice-president at the API, said: “Our industry continues to drive down methane emissions from operations while meeting America’s energy needs every day.”
The US backtrack on methane sets it apart from other jurisdictions that have taken steps to control leaks including Canada and Mexico, said Sarah Smith of Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group. In Europe, comments on new methane standards closed last week, she said.
“The US is really alone in rolling this back,” she said.
Lawyers say that Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, who was vice-president to Barack Obama, could reinstate the regulations if he wins November’s election. Mr Biden has pledged to impose “aggressive” methane limits the day he takes office.
Some US oil and gas states are independently cracking down on methane leaks. Colorado, a significant shale producer, has standards in place, while New Mexico and Pennsylvania are pursuing them.
no lnx
PRESS RELEASE // JULY 8, 2020
BREAKING: Conflicted Trump Official Stands To Benefit From Methane Reform Initiative She Is Overseeing
Bloomberg Story Exposes EPA Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator Anne Idsal Has A Financial Interest In Enbridge Projects — And Enbridge Has Spent Millions Lobbying On Methane Issues
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Bloomberg is reporting today that a top Environmental Protection Agency official has worked on environmental rollbacks that stand to benefit a company to which she has financial ties.
“It’s hardly surprising that another Trump administration figure is so close to an official decision that could benefit them financially,” said Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig. “It seems highly unlikely that a company could spend millions to lobby on a policy Anne Idsal’s office is responsible for without talking to her.”
Since 2019, the Canadian energy company Enbridge has spent at least $2,160,000 lobbying the federal government on “issues related to methane emissions.” In August, EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which is run by Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator Anne Idsal.
Although Idsal has recused herself from any dealings with Valley Crossing Pipeline, a pipeline that is entirely owned byEnbridge, her office released two proposals that would stop direct regulation of methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, rules which would stand to benefit Enbridge. The line crosses over Idsal’s family ranch in Texas, which is incidentally the same ranch where Dick Cheney shot a hunting companion in 2006.
EPA’s proposed rulesaim “to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities” and also reopen the question of whether EPA has the authority “to regulate methane as a pollutant.” The methane rules have yet to be finalized.
bbc
Climate change: Five things we have learned from the IPCC report
By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent
Published 9 August
The UN report on the science of climate change is set to make a huge impact. Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath considers some of the key lessons from it.
Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying - and it's down to us
For those who live in the West, the dangers of warming our planet are no longer something distant, impacting people in faraway places.
"Climate change is not a problem of the future, it's here and now and affecting every region in the world," said Dr Friederike Otto from the University of Oxford, and one of the many authors on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
It is the confidence of the assertions that the scientists are now making that is the real strength of this new publication.
The phrase "very likely" appears 42 times in the 40-odd pages of the Summary for Policymakers. In scientific terms, that's 90-100% certain that something is real.
Infographic
"I think there's not one single kind of new surprise that comes out, it's the over-arching solidness that makes this the strongest IPCC report ever made," Prof Arthur Petersen, from University College London (UCL), told BBC News.
Prof Petersen is a former Dutch government representative at the IPCC, and was an observer at the approval session that produced this report.
"It's understated, it's cool, it's not accusing, it's just bang, bang, bang, one clear point after the other."
The clearest of these points is about the responsibility of humanity for climate change.
There's no longer any equivocating - it's us.
[More than 100 people were killed in floods that ravaged parts of Europe in July 2021]
The 1.5C temperature limit is on life support
When the last IPCC report on the science of climate change was published in 2013, the idea of 1.5C being the safe global limit for warming was barely considered.
:{
}:
But in the political negotiations leading up to the Paris climate agreement in 2015, many developing countries and island states pushed for this lower temperature limit, arguing that it was a matter of survival for them.
:{
}:
A special report on 1.5C in 2018 showed the advantages of staying under the limit were massive compared to a 2C world. Getting there would require carbon emissions to be cut in half, essentially, by 2030 and net zero emissions reached by 2050. Otherwise, the limit would be reached between 2030 and 2052.
:{
}:
This new report re-affirms this finding. Under all scenarios, the threshold is reached by 2040. If emissions aren't reined in, 1.5C could be gone in around a decade.
Reaching net zero involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible using clean technology, then absorbing any remaining ones by, for example, planting trees.
While the situation is very serious, it is not a sudden drop into calamity.
"The 1.5C threshold is an important threshold politically, of course, but from a climatic point of view, it is not a cliff edge - that once we go over 1.5C, suddenly everything will become very catastrophic," explained Dr Amanda Maycock, from the University of Leeds, and one of the authors of the new report.
"The very lowest emissions scenario that we assess in this report shows that the warming level does stabilise around or below 1.5C later on in the century. If that were the pathway that we would follow, then the the impacts would be significantly avoided."
Infographic
The bad news: No matter what we do, the seas will continue to rise
In the past, the IPCC has been criticised for being way too conservative when it came to assessing the risk of sea-level rise. A lack of clear research saw previous reports exclude the potential impacts of the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Not this time.
The report shows that under current scenarios, the seas could rise above the likely range, going up to 2m by the end of this century and up to 5m by 2150. While these are unlikely figures, they can't be ruled out under a very high greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
That's bad enough - but even if we get a handle on emissions and keep temperatures around 1.5C by 2100, the waters will continue to rise long into the future.
Infographic
"The gorilla that looms large in the background is these very scary sea-level rise numbers in the long term," said Prof Malte Meinshausen from the University of Melbourne and an IPCC author.
"In the paper it shows that even with 1.5C warming we're looking at the long-term of two to three metres. And under the highest scenarios, we could be looking at multi-metre sea-level rise by 2150. That is just scary, because it's maybe not at the end of our lifetime, but it is around the corner and it will be committing this planet to a big legacy."
Even if the sea-level rise is relatively mild, it will have knock-on effects that we cannot avoid.
"With gradual sea-level rise, those extreme sea-level events that have occurred in the past, just once per century, will occur more and more frequently in the future," said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of the IPCC working group that prepared the new report.
"Those that occurred only once per century in the past are expected to occur once or twice per decade by mid-century. The information we provide in this report is extremely important to take into account and prepare for these events."
The good news: Scientists are more certain about what will work
The warnings are clearer and more dire - but there is an important thread of hope running through this report.
Scientists have long been worried that the climate could be more sensitive to carbon dioxide than they thought.
They use a phrase - equilibrium climate sensitivity - to capture the range of warming that could occur if CO2 levels were doubled.
In the last report, in 2013, this ranged from 1.5C to 4.5C, with no best estimate.
This time round, the range has narrowed and the authors opt for 3C as their most likely figure.
Why is this important?
"We are now able to constrain that with a good degree of certainty and then we employ that to really make far more accurate predictions," said Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds, and an author on the report.
"So, that way, we know that net zero will really deliver."
Infographic
Another big surprise in the report is the role of methane, another warming gas.
According to the IPCC, around 0.3C of the 1.1C that the world has already warmed by comes from methane.
Tackling those emissions, from the oil and gas industry, agriculture and rice cultivation, could be a big win in the short-term.
"The report quashes any remaining debate about the urgent need to slash methane pollution, especially from sectors such as oil and gas, where the available reductions are fastest and cheapest," said Fred Krupp, from the US Environmental Defense Fund.
"When it comes to our overheating planet, every fraction of a degree matters - and there is no faster, more achievable way to slow the rate of warming than by cutting human-caused methane emissions."
Politicians will be nervous, the courts will be busy
The timing of this report, coming just a couple of months before the critical COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, means that it will likely be the bedrock of the negotiations. The IPCC has some form here: their previous assessment in 2013 and 2014 paved the way for the Paris climate agreement.
This new study is far stronger, clearer and more confident about what will happen if politicians don't act.
If they don't act quickly enough and COP26 ends in an unsatisfactory fudge, then the courts might become more involved.
Four maps showing how world could get warmer
In recent years, in Ireland and the Netherlands, environmental campaigners have successfully gone to court to force governments and companies to act on the science of climate change.
"We're not going to let this report be shelved by further inaction. Instead, we'll be taking it with us to the courts," said Kaisa Kosonen, senior political adviser at Greenpeace Nordic.
"By strengthening the scientific evidence between human emissions and extreme weather, the IPCC has provided new, powerful means for everyone everywhere to hold the fossil fuel industry and governments directly responsible for the climate emergency.
"One only needs to look at the recent court victory secured by NGOs against Shell to realise how powerful IPCC science can be."
no lnx grafix
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/
Top U.S. meat and dairy companies, along with livestock and agricultural lobbying groups, have spent millions campaigning against climate action and sowing doubt about the links between animal agriculture and climate change, according to new research from New York University.
The study, published this week in the journal Climatic Change, also said the world’s biggest meat and dairy companies aren’t doing enough to curb their greenhouse gas emissions, with only a handful making pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“These companies are some of the world’s biggest contributors to climate change,” said Oliver Lazarus, one of the study’s three authors, now a doctoral student at Harvard University. “They’ve spent a considerable amount of time and money downplaying the link between animal agriculture and climate change."
the research, which builds on data first published in 2017 and 2018 by the advocacy group GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), is the first peer-reviewed study to document the individual carbon footprints of meat and dairy companies.
The authors found that, as of last summer, only four of the 35 companies—Dairy Farmers of America, Nestlé, Danish Crown and Danone—had pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
JBS, Cargill, Hormel, Fonterra and Smithfield had not. China-based Smithfield has since pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030 and Brazil-based JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, announced last week that it would reach net-zero by 2040. A spokeswoman for Hormel said the company was “on a path to zero” and plans to set a target for greenhouse gas reductions by 2023.
These commitments, the authors say, are short on specifics or focus on carbon dioxide reductions, while the bulk of emissions from animal agriculture comes from methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. In some cases, the companies’ commitments don’t address emissions from their whole supply chain.
JBS, for example, has said in public statements that it does not assess land-use change—a major source of agricultural greenhouse gases—from third-party suppliers. These are emissions, the company said in 2019, “over which the Company has no responsibility or indirect responsibility.”
Overall, animal agriculture is responsible for more than 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to calculations by GRAIN and IATP, the five largest livestock-based producers—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) and Fonterra—emitted more greenhouse gases than ExxonMobil. The NYU researchers said they’re not aware of more recent and accessible company-level data, although a 2020 report from IATP found that emissions from individual dairy companies climbed in the years since the GRAIN assessment.
Recent reports, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have found that cutting emissions from agriculture is critical for controlling runaway climate change. But the new research found that only seven of the 16 countries where the largest livestock producers are based mention animal agriculture in their plans to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement.
While the Paris agreement focuses on individual country’s emissions—and their potential to reduce them—the authors of the new report looked at how these companies’ future emissions compared to the emissions reductions pledges of their home countries. They determined that emissions produced by Switzerland-based Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, and New Zealand-based dairy giant, Fonterra, were so high that they would eclipse their respective home country’s emissions pledges, in effect consuming the entirety of those countries’ emissions budgets. Denmark-based Arla, the largest producer of dairy products in Scandinavia, will account for 60 percent of Denmark’s total emissions.
“Those meat and dairy emissions would actually completely wipe out the emissions (those countries) say they’re going to be emitting according to their Paris agreement pledges,” said Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Environmental Studies and one of the authors.
In taking this approach, the authors say, they’re assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions to countries on a corporate basis.
“The Paris agreement suggests that Brazil is responsible for what happens in Brazil. What we said was: What if Brazil was responsible for JBS or China for Smithfield?” Jacquet said.
The authors said they were following the pattern of seminal studies on the fossil fuel industry, whichcalculated historic emissions from individual companies and then assigned responsibility to those companies.
“Essentially what we’re trying to do is build out the climate responsibility of meat and dairy producers,” Jacquet said.
A spokeswoman for Fonterra said its carbon footprint was “46% lower than other major milk producers” and that the company was “actively working on tools and technologies to reduce emissions and help New Zealand reach its climate change commitments.”
Filling a Research Gap
The next goal of the study, Jacquet said, was to examine how these companies and their lobbying groups have fought climate regulation in Congress and before the Environmental Protection Agency, and to analyze how they’ve shaped a narrative around animal agriculture’s role in climate change.
The authors calculated that U.S. agribusiness, which includes meat and dairy companies and also other agricultural companies, spent $750 million on national political candidates from 2000 to 2020. The U.S. energy sector, by comparison, spent $1 billion.
The same agribusinesses spent $2.5 billion on lobbying from 2000 and 2019, compared to $6.2 billion by energy and natural resource companies.
The authors said these companies also spent their lobbying money on issues beyond climate change, including the Farm Bill and farm subsidies. But, they wrote, “it is often difficult to disentangle the two as policy decisions on crop incentives, land-use, and animal production methods have large implications for the extent and intensity of the animal agriculture sector’s emissions.”
The report also looked at the contributions of individual companies. Exxon spent roughly $17 million on political campaigns and more than $240 million on lobbying during the 20 years studied. In the same time frame, Tyson gave $3.2 million to political campaigns. But relative to each company’s revenue, Tyson spent double what Exxon spent on political campaigns and 33 percent more on lobbying.
Industry lobby groups—the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the International Dairy Foods Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, along with its state members—spent nearly $200 million, much of it lobbying against climate and environmental regulations, from 2000 to 2019, the authors found.
A spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council said the organization voted against a cap-and-trade bill specifically because it “would have converted massive amounts of cropland to forest” at a time when pork producers were already struggling to gain access to feed.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), the new study said, published or funded research downplaying the emissions from livestock production, often pointing to the low percentage relative to overall U.S. emissions.
Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for NAMI, said the report referenced outdated documents. “NAMI members are at the forefront of research and innovation to strengthen meat’s contributions and ambitious commitments to healthy diets and protecting our environment. The U.S. meat sector has dramatically reduced its impact on the environment in recent decades, including by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions…. This study was already outdated the day it was researched.”
The nine U.S.-based companies covered in the report emitted 6 percent of overall U.S. emissions, the study found, but emitted about 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s on the same scale as Brazil, which has the highest carbon footprint from animal agriculture and where the top four livestock companies emitted about 380 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas annually. But that amounts to about 28 percent of that country’s emissions.
“The US industry really leans on Brazil’s terrible carbon footprint to compare to its own,” Jacquet said, but domestic agriculture is “high in terms of absolute emissions.”
The report also notes that the U.S. companies’ emissions totals presented in the study don’t include those connected to production outside of the U.S.
The authors pointed out in an interview that there’s been ample academic research into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to influence public discourse, but that a similar body of research into the agriculture industry’s efforts has not yet emerged. That could largely be attributed, they said, to the fact that very little agricultural research is done outside of industry-influenced universities or by independent researchers.
“It’s not surprising that they’re this active in shaping climate discourse,” Lazarus said, referring to the livestock companies. “What we’re trying to do is show the extent to which that has largely been ignored.”
https://theintercept.com/**2020/09**/19/wildfires-trump-election-epa-environment/
sharon lerner
as WILDFIRES DESTROY millions of acres in California, Oregon, and Washington, and an unprecedented series of hurricanes cause historic flooding in the South, leaving parts of the region uninhabitable, the Trump administration has been racing to reverse rules designed to prevent exactly these kinds of climate disasters.
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has presided over the rollback of more environmental rules and regulations than any other president. The result has been that, even as climate change is on track to soon force millions of Americans from their homes and eventually heat the Earth to temperatures not seen for 34 million years, the leader of the country that bears more responsibility for the climate change than any other has doubled down on the decimation of efforts meant to combat both pollution and the climate crisis.
“The Trump administration is the first in the history of the agency to devote itself so relentlessly to a rollback agenda without even a pretense of meaningfully reducing environmental pollution,” said John Walke, an attorney and senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund.
starting with his choice of Scott Pruitt, a climate denier whose rise through Oklahoma politics was fueled by the oil and gas industry, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump has has signaled his disregard for the climate and public health throughout his time in office. While Trump has called climate change a “Chinese hoax” and a “con,” federal agencies under him have taken countless actions — from the removal of information about climate change on the EPA website to the decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement;the retooling of models used by the U.S. Geological Survey; and the **cancellation**of NASA’s carbon monitoring program — that set back the effort to address the climate crisis, and ultimately endanger the environment.
In recent months, the pace of these assaults has quickened. The frenzied efforts of federal agencies during the last months before a presidential election are often referred to as “midnight regulation.” But the work the Trump administration has recently been hurrying to complete would be more accurately described as “midnight deregulation.”
A sign with the words “Trump Digs Coal” can be seen on a factory building in a coal mining area in Hazleton, Penn., on Feb. 2, 2017.
Photo: Maren Hennemuth/Picture Alliance/Getty Images
Protections Obliterated
As soon as he entered office, Trump began the environmental reversals that will likely be the most enduring legacy of his administration. In March 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency signaled that it would not complete the planned ban of a neurotoxic pesticide called chlorpyrifos. The decision came after consulting closely with industry groups and after the Dow Chemical Company, which makes the pesticide, donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee. The Trump EPA has since completed dozens of other environmental rollbacks, including gutting the Clean Water Act; weakening restrictions on facilities that emit toxic air pollution; scrapping a rule that required mining companies to set aside money to cover the costs of cleaning up pollution; rewriting the National Environmental Policy Act so that it no longer requires government to consider the cumulative environmental impacts of major federal projects on communities; and ensuring that the coal industry is now able to dump mining waste in streams.
Among the recently finalized actions that will have devastating and long-lasting climate consequences are the rescinding of limits on methane emissions during oil and gas production and processing. Methane is a climate pollutant that traps over 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in a 20-year period, and the U.S. is already releasing way too much of it. The rollback of methane rules, which was finalized in August — and opposed by many of the major oil companies that will be affected by it — is specifically designed to ignore climate considerations and is expected to increase the amount of the greenhouse gas released each year by 4.5 million metric tons. The additional pollution released will have the same impact as 100 coal-fired power plants each year, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, which is suing the administration over the rule.
The EPA’s weakening of fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks, which was finalized in March while most people were focused on the coronavirus pandemic, will also speed climate change and lead to more catastrophic weather events and wildfires. The change, which reduces fuel efficiency for these vehicles by 27 percent, is expected to result in at least 867 million metric tons of additional carbon dioxide pollution, the equivalent of the annual emissions from 216 coal plants.
The EPA has also reversed its policy of requiring businesses to inspect for leaks from refrigerators and air conditioners. The revision to the regulations, which was finalized in February, affects the release of hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals that can cause hundreds of times more warming than carbon dioxide and often leak from cooling equipment. According to the agency’s own science, the new rulewill result in an increase of greenhouse gas emissions that has the same warming potential as 2.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Meanwhile, the Department of Interior finalized its plan to open up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, a move that environmentalists expect to not only be devastating to the 700 species of plants and animals that live there but also greatly increase carbon emissions. In 2018, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission limited its consideration of greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas projects. And, through an executive order, Trump weakened regulations that were put in place to mitigate flooding from sea-level rise.
Perhaps most devastating is the loss of the Clean Power Plan. That Obama-era plan was designed to reduce climate pollution by more than 400 million tons by 2030. Instead, Trump replaced it with the far weaker Affordable Clean Energy Rule in 2019.
Deadly Consequences
In many cases, this deregulation will have a measurable human toll. Changes to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which the EPA made in April, undermined limits on mercury and other toxic air pollution coming from coal-fired power plants that were put in place in 2011. Those regulations had prevented between 4,000 and 11,000 premature deaths each year, according to the agency’s own calculations. But under Trump, the EPA has decided that it is no longer necessary to regulate this pollutant, which causes brain damage in developing fetuses and increases heart attacks in adults.
If it stands, the methane rollback, which is being challenged by environmentalists, will also result in illness and death. In addition to hastening climate change,methane turns into ozone, which causes chronic diseases, including respiratory damage, cancer, asthma, and heart disease. Fence-line communities, which are disproportionately made up of people of color, including the more than 1 million African Americans who livewithin a half-mile of an oil and gas facility, will be among the hardest hit by the pollution. And the replacement of the Clean Power Plan is expected to lead to thousands of deaths.
With less than seven weeks until the election, and the wildfires and flooding continuing to spread along with the recognition that they are part of a larger climate apocalypse, the Trump administration is still scrambling to finish the deadly destruction of some of the rules and processes that were put in place to protect human health.
Among other hugely consequential rules still hanging in the balance are the standards for particulate matter and ozone, both of which stem from power plants. Since 1977, the law has required that a Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, orCASAC, made up of independent scientists help set the standards. While the committee still exists, the Trump EPA has gutted it, removing many of the independent scientists from it and all of the epidemiologists, and instead stacked it with industry-friendly experts. CASAC is now headed byLouis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., an industry consultant who disputes well-established science showing that particulate matter kills by increasing rates of heart and lung disease. He has worked for Exxon Mobil, the American Chemistry Council, and the American Petroleum Institute.
EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler fired a panel of scientists that historically advised CASAC on particulate matter — which includes dust, dirt, soot, and smoke — and dispensed with a panel of ozone experts in what he claimed was an effort to “streamline” the standard-setting process. The result is that the EPA is now trying to finalize the current standards for both particulate matter and ozone, which independent scientists say are not protective of health. Although weather affects ozone levels, the proposed standard doesn’t consider the effects of climate change.
Maintaining the standards for the air pollutants, both of which result from power plant emissions, is a “sop to the oil and gas industry” that will prove deadly, according to Bernie Goldstein, a physician who served as chair of CASAC and a Reagan-appointed EPA assistant administrator who is now a member of the Environmental Protection Network.Already more than 100,000 people in the U.S. die because of air pollution, including particulate matter and ozone. “More people will die because the pollutant standards aren’t high enough,” said Goldstein.
Goldstein is particularly concerned about the increased vulnerability to these air pollutants during the coronavirus pandemic — something the EPA did not factor into its standard-setting process, even though it issued its proposal after the pandemic began. “The idea that something that violently attacks the heart and lungs the way Covid-19 does will interact with air pollutants that also attack the heart and lungs is a no-brainer,” he said.
Trump is working with the Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to expand logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, removing decades-old protections from the 10 million acres that absorb more carbon than any other national forest. And the administration is attempting, through the Department of the Interior, to fast-track the environmental reviews of oil and gas drilling projects, including the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline and a natural gas terminal in Oregon.
Also among the unfinished business at EPA is the rollback of 2015 protections that protect farm workers and agricultural communities from pesticide exposure. If the Trump administration succeeds with its change, farm workers — who are overwhelmingly Latino and already dozens of times more likely to be poisoned by pesticides than non-farm workers — will face even greater exposure.
And the EPA is taking the last steps to finalize its “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule, which would limit the use of independent science in the agency’s decision-making by employing a strategy first devised by tobacco companies. The proposal was sent to the White House regulatory review office earlier this week, and Wheeler said he hopes to finalize it by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the administration is still at work on two proposed rules affecting the Endangered Species Act: One will open up designation of critical habitat to challenges by industry, and the other will institute changes in the interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, pushed by the oil and gas industry, that “will result in the deaths of many birds,” according to Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
The Trump administration has already been “devastating for endangered species,” according to Greenwald. “It’s been a terrible waste of four years at a time when we don’t have four years,” he said. “While scientists around the world have been raising alarms about the extinction crisis, they’re rushing to finalize these rules.”
:{
A melted pro-Trump sign remains at a burned residence during the Bear fire, in the Berry Creek area of unincorporated Butte County, Calif., on Sept. 14, 2020.
]]}:
Reversing the Damage
The Center for Biological Diversity is just one of the environmental organizations that have been using the courts to challenge the Trump rollbacks.Overwhelmingly, these suits have succeeded. Only 12 out of 81 lawsuits related to environment, energy, and natural resources deregulation were decided in the Trump administration’s favoras of August 31, according to the Institute of Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.
If Trump loses the election, a Democratic administration could fairly easily resolve many of the suits that are still pending. “Biden could quickly signal that he won’t defend Trump rollbacks in court,”said William Buzbee, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. “Administrative law is flexible and always gives a future president the ability to reverse the damage of his predecessor.” A Biden administration could also simply reverse the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — a move that won’t be finalized until a day after the election and will take a new president 30 days to reenter.
Depending on the date of the rollback, if Biden is elected and there is also a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate, some of the changes could be reversed through a law called the Congressional Review Act.
But other damage inflicted by the Trump administration on environmental protections will take longer to reverse. Some finalized rules will require years of formal rule-making to change. And there will be no way to revive the Clean Power Plan. “It is pretty close to dead,” Thomas McGarity, professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, said of the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s climate initiative. “If the next administration wants to do something on climate change and they try to do it administratively they’re going to have to start over.”
Some of the harm that Trump has inflicted by disputing established climate science and rolling back desperately needed climate protections is irreparable. “It will be impossible make up for the four years spent ignoring and worsening the climate crisis,” said Buzbee. “The amount of additional CO2 and methane in the atmosphere will linger for decades if not centuries. That loading into the Earth’s atmosphere cannot be recovered and that time cannot be recovered.”
The climate reversals have irrevocably undercut the international effort to address the most pressing issue of our time. “Climate change is in the end a trust game,” said Buzbee. “Nations constraining their own polluters have to trust that others will step up and also do their part. But by stepping back, the U.S. has lost credibility.”
Buzbee, who judges Trump as already “the worst president for the environment in U.S history,” predicts that the environmental impact of a second Trump term would be immeasurably more destructive. “They’d have the time to finish and defend all the first-term rollbacks,” he said. “I’m not sure the EPA and the major environmental statutes could withstand the onslaught.”
While the administration is racing to complete its rollbacks, the Sunrise Movement has sent its members door-to-door to convey the stakes of the election to voters. “Our movement is talking to hundreds of thousands of young people in swing states across the country to communicate the opportunity we have to organize and mobilize under a Biden admin,” said Stephen O’Hanlon, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement. “Biden wasn’t the first choice of many young people, but he is the clear choice.”
Activist and writer Bill McKibben has put a finer point on the environmental consequences of unseating Trump. “This is going to be the most important election for the next few million years,” McKibben tweeted on Tuesday, sending out a video of the president once again denying climate science even while being briefed on the fires that have killed dozens of people and destroyed millions of acres of land.
EPA Spokesperson James Hewittprovided the following comment in response to an inquiry from The Intercept:
This story is pushing a false narrative that isn’t rooted in fact. Under this EPA, air pollution in this country has fallen 7 percent, we’ve delisted 61 Superfund sites, invested $40 billion in water infrastructure, collected more in criminal and civil penalties than the Obama Administration did in their first term, and are finalizing a final Lead & Copper rule. All regulatory decisions are grounded in science and our legal statutes unlike the last administration.
Environmental experts took issue with all of the claims in the EPA’s response. Asked about the air pollution reductions, Elena Craft, senior director of climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund, said she was unclear of any measure by which air pollution has fallen by 7 percent and added that “I can’t think of a single action that this administration has done that would result in a reduction of emissions.”
While the EPA has delisted many Superfund sites, it also has the largest backlog of unfunded construction projects at Superfund sites in 15 years. According to Betsy Southerland, who retired after 30 years of working for the EPA, the agency is trying to take credit for work done under previous administrations. “Delisting is just a paperwork exercise documenting that a project was completed in previous years,” she said. “This administration has the worst record of any previous in terms of the number of projects that were ready for construction that they did not fund. Rather than request the funding needed for these sites, they actually asked for cuts in the Superfund budget every year.”
Southerland also said that the agency’s touting of the lead and copper rule was disingenuous: “The proposed lead rule did not lower the concentration that would trigger lead pipe replacement. And they slowed the required rate of replacing lead pipes.”
As for the penalties, EPA’s own data shows that in fiscal 2019, the agency conducted the smallest number of inspections of polluters in at least 18 years,with about half the number of inspections conducted a decade earlier.A 2019 report from The Environmental Integrity Project documents these trends and shows that the number of criminal environmental cases opened and polluters charged fell sharply under Trump.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-epa-plan-to-gut-emission-rules-for-oil-and-gas-industry-denounced-as-beyond-comprehension/
no lnx twt
trump EPA plan to gut emission rules for oil and gas industry denounced as ‘beyond comprehension’
Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 12, 2020
In a move one green group said shows the Trump EPA’s approach is “manifestly inconsistent with the agency’s legal obligations” and with science, the agency is under fire for preparations to roll back methane rules for U.S. oil and gas producers.
Before Friday, the New York Times reported, the EPA is expected to unveil two new rules regarding methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first two decades after emission.
One would eliminate federal regulation of methane emissions from oil and gas wells across the country and would prevent future regulation at sites built before 2015, and another would weaken remaining requirements for companies, including one directing them to locate and fix leaks in wells.
With the new rules in place, meteorologist and climate reporter Eric Holthaus said, voting Trump out of office in November will be imperative to protect communities across the country from methane emissions, which the EPA itself has said are linked to premature death, stroke, chronic bronchitis, and low birth weight as well as the warming of the planet.
“If Trump is reelected and this rule sticks, it is probably the single most consequential near-term climate decision of his presidency,” wrote Holthaus on social media. “A U.S. oil and gas industry unconcerned with methane would produce a surge in global warming with essentially irreversible consequences.”
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding denounced the expected rules as “sickening.”
About 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are made up of methane, and according to the Environmental Defense Fund, the EPA’s new rules could result in an additional five million metric tons of methane pollution to the atmosphere per year.
The expected rollback follows other significant EPA decisions to weaken environmental protections, including ones targeting the release of toxins from coal plants and tailpipe emissions.
“Our federal methane safeguards have been in place since 2016, protecting Americans from unhealthy and climate-damaging pollution. The Trump administration’s decision to reverse course is deeply and fundamentally flawed,” said Peter Zalzal, lead attorney for EDF, in a statement. “Eliminating these safeguards would ignore the overwhelming body of scientific evidence documenting the urgent need to reduce methane pollution.”
With public support for coal extraction waning significantly, the fossil fuel industry has in recent years promoted natural gas as a “cleaner” alternative and is concerned that methane leaks from gas wells will “undermine that marketing message and hurt demand,” the Times reported.
Meanwhile, advocates for climate action are focused on promoting solar, wind, and other sustainable energy sources that don’t involve fossil fuel extraction at all.
Minneapolis-based meteorologist Sven Sundgaard called the planned rollback “yet another destructive and stupid act of this administration.”
“Rather than trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect this planet for our children and grandchildren, this administration is now easing regulations on polluters,” tweeted Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). “Let’s call this what it is: environmental sabotage.”
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-methane-emissions-regulations-2646947182.html
820
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/new-methane-leak-found-in-antarctica-raises-alarm-as-planet-edges-closer-to-climate-tipping-points/
Scientists have for the first time identified an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica, increasing the possibility that the planet is close to one of the “tipping points” that would put the impacts of global heating out of humans’ control.
According to The Guardian,GUK researchers led by Andrew Thurber at Oregon State University foundguk the methane leak in a region known as Cinder Cones in McMurdo Sound, within the Ross Sea. The site is 30 feet below the surface of the ocean.
In addition to finding methane dissolved in the water there, the scientists found that microbes which usually consume the gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only formed in small numbers five years after they first began to study the site.
Thurber called the findings “incredibly concerning.”
“It is not good news. It took more than five years for the microbes to begin to show up and even then there was still methane rapidly escaping from the sea floor,” he told The Guardian. “The methane cycle is absolutely something that we as a society need to be concerned about.”
Scientists have warned for years that the climate crisis could lead to the “tipping point” of methane leaks in the sea floor and the thawing of permafrost regions.
“At some point in a warming world, greenhouse gas emissions from nature will go way beyond anything we can control,” tweeted Australian immunologist Peter Doherty.[twt guk]
the Ross Sea has not yet warmed significantly from the climate crisis, so the research did not directly link the methane leak to global heating.
But climate models have not yet accounted for significant delays in the development of microbes, which help to keep methane from leaking into the atmosphere.
“The big question is: how large is the lag [in microbe development] compared with the speed at which new leaks of methane might potentially form in the wake of retreating ice?” Prof. Jemma Wadham of the University of Bristol in the UK, who reviewed the study, told The Guardian.
Thurber called the discovery of the methane leak and the delayed microbe growth “a significant discovery that can help fill a large hole in our understanding of the methane cycle.”
“Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere and the Antarctic has vast reservoirs that are likely to open up as ice sheets retreat due to climate change,” he said in astatement.
Other tipping points identified by climate scientists include the disintegration of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, “dieback” in the Amazon which would transform the rainforest into a dry ecosystem, and the dying off of the coral reefs.
Scientists raised alarm earlier this year aboutunusually warm water beneath a massive glacier in West Antarctica, and researcherswarned in February that the third major bleaching event in five years at the Great Barrier Reef would put the reef “on a knife edge.”
===
===
ew 720 methane
How COVID-19 Creates Food Waste Mountains That Threaten the Environment
Emma Charlton
Gluts of food left to rot as a consequence of coronavirus aren't just wasteful – they're also likely to damage the environment.
Mountains of produce, including eggs, milk and onions, are going to waste as the COVID-19 pandemic shutters restaurants, restricts transport, limits what workers are able to do and disrupts supply chains. And as that food decays, it releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Fresh milk and eggs have been dumped, and some ripe crops reploughed back into fields, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. While consumer demand for some supermarket items has risen as a result of lockdowns, it's unlikely to offset steep declines elsewhere, such in restaurants and school and workplace canteens.
Methane on the Rise
Not only is this a tragic waste of food at a time when many are going hungry, it is also an environmental hazard and could contribute to global warming. Landfill gas – roughly half methane and half carbon dioxide (CO2) – is a natural byproduct of the decomposition of organic material.
[Food decay leads to production of greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide. EPA
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 28 to 36 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"Many export-oriented producers produce volumes far too large for output to be absorbed in local markets, and thus organic waste levels have mounted substantially," says Robert Hamwey, Economic Affairs Officer at UN agency UNCTAD. "Because this waste is left to decay, levels of methane emissions, a greenhouse gas, from decaying produce are expected to rise sharply in the crisis and immediate post-crisis months."
[Food supply chains are easily disrupted. UN FAO
Dumping food was already a problem before the crisis. In America alone, $218 billion is spent growing, processing, transporting and disposing of food that is never eaten, estimates ReFED, a collection of business, non-profit and government leaders committed to reducing food waste. That's equivalent to around 1.3% of GDP.
Since the pandemic took hold, farmers are dumping 14 million liters of milk each day because of disrupted supply routes, estimates Dairy Farmers of America. A chicken processor was forced to destroy 750,000 unhatched eggs a week, according to the New York Times, which also cited an onion farmer letting most of his harvest decompose because he couldn't distribute or store them.
Food Prices Collapsing
The excess has also seen prices collapse. The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 162.5 points in May 2020, down 3.1 points from April and reaching the lowest monthly average since December 2018. The gauge has dropped for four consecutive months, and the latest decline reflects falling values of all the food commodities – dairy, meat, cereal, vegetable – except sugar, which rose for the first time in three months.
All this while the pandemic is exacerbating other global food trends.
"This year, some 49 million extra people may fall into extreme poverty due to the COVID-19 crisis," said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN. "The number of people who are acutely food or nutrition insecure will rapidly expand.
."
[twt] World Economic Forum has launched its Great Reset initiative, which urgently calls for global stakeholders to cooperate in managing the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. It calls on policymakers to put the environment at the heart of plans to rebuild as we emerge from the pandemic.
Reposted with permission from World Economic Forum.
- Food Waste Set to Increase by 33 Percent Within 10 Years - EcoWatch ›
- Reducing Food Waste Is Good for Economy and Climate, Report Says ›
- 23 Organizations Eliminating Food Waste During COVID-19 ... ›
- Reducing Wasted Food At Home | Reduce, Reuse, Recycle | US EPA ›
- Food Waste Is a Massive Problem—Here's Why | FoodPrint ›
food waste food covid-19 pandemic coronavirus greenhouse gases methane environment
==
==
icn 420
super-Polluting Methane Emissions Twice Federal Estimates in Permian Basin, Study Finds BY: PHIL MCKENNA The methane is a byproduct of fracking for oil, often burned off at well heads or emitted into the atmosphere instead of being captured for use as fuel. |
| Read More |
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/16/exxon-write-rules-regulating-methane-emissions
no lnx many
exxon Now Wants to Write the Rules for Regulating Methane Emissions
By Justin Mikulka • Monday, March 16, 2020 - 12:13
ExxonMobil is a company capable of contradictions. It has been lobbying against government efforts to address climate change while running ads touting its own efforts to do so.
And while the oil giant has been responsible for massive methane releases, Exxon has now proposed a new regulatory framework for cutting emissions of this powerful greenhouse gas that it hopes regulators and industry will adopt. As Exxon put it, the goal is to achieve “cost-effective and reasonable methane-emission regulations.”
So, why is Exxon asking to be regulated?
The answer may be simply that Exxon is very good at public relations. As industry publication Natural Gas Intelligence reported, this announcement “comes as energy operators face increasing pressure from lenders and shareholders to engage in decarbonization by following environmental, social, and governance standards.”
Exxon's proposed regulations have three main objectives: finding and detecting leaks, minimizing the direct venting of methane as part of oil and gas operations, and record keeping and reporting.
Casey Norton, Exxon's Corporate Media Relations Manager, explained to DeSmog that Exxon's proposal was not expected to be adopted as-is by regulatory agencies. “This is a starting point for conversations with policy makers and other regulators,” he said. “For example, New Mexico, Argentina, the EU, who are all considering new regulations for methane emissions.”
Under President Trump, the federal government last year rolled back Obama-era rules for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions and for restricting these emissions during drilling on public lands.
This isn’t Exxon’s first foray into voluntary regulations of methane.The corporation's natural gas subsidiary XTO started a voluntary methane emissions program in 2017. In June 2018, XTO noted that the voluntary program, which was mostly about replacing leaking valves, had reduced methane emissions by 7,200 metric tons since 2016.
However, leaking valves are not the biggest source of methane emissions. In February 2018, four months before XTO was touting the success of its methane reduction program, the company experienced the second largest methane leak in U.S. history. A gas well it operated in Ohio suffered a blowout, releasing huge amounts of the heat-trapping gas.
Did XTO’s voluntary program accurately report this? As The New York Times reported, “XTO Energy said it could not immediately determine how much gas had leaked.”
But a group of scientists using satellite data eventually did pin down the amount released — 120 metric tons an hour for 20 days. That adds up to roughly 50,000 metric tons more released than the 7,200 metric tons in reductions XTO was claiming months later. That one leak was estimated to be more than the methane emissions of the total oil and gas industry of countries like Norway.
As DeSmog reported, XTO is also flaring the most natural gas of any company in the Permian oil field (natural gas is almost 90 percent methane). While flaring isn't as bad for the climate as directly venting the methane into the atmosphere, it is increasing the levels of carbon dioxide and toxic air pollutants and is another problem the industry is saying it will address even as the practice continues on a large scale.
And now the same company is recommending that the rest of the industry and regulators adopt their approach to regulating methane emissions.
“It is not target-based, it is not volume-based,” Exxon's Norton said. “Again, it's starting a conversation, saying these are things that you can look at.”
Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist at Cornell University whose work focuses on methane emmissions in the oil and gas industry, drew attention to areas of Exxon's framework he thought were lacking. For starters, he pointed out that the proposed framework does not mention emissions from “imperfect well casings and from abandoned wells,” which Howarth says “can be significant.” He also noted that the proposal does not describe “a methodology for characterizing any of these emissions; there are techniques for doing so, but there is not much demonstrated use of these techniques by industry.”
Finally — and this is the real danger with any sort of industry self-regulation — Howarth said there must be some type of independent oversight to assess actual emissions instead of relying on the industry to self-report. XTO's well blowout in Ohio is an excellent example of why this third-party verification is critical. Without oversight, the “system is ripe for abuse,” according to Howarth.
Sharon Wilson of environmental advocacy group Earthworks documents the oil and gas industry's current widespread practices of flaring and venting methane. Sharing her concerns about Exxon's methane emissions proposal, she told DeSmog,”Exxon’s recent announcement is too little too late when it comes to the climate crisis they’ve help cause and are still making worse. Reducing methane emissions by any percentage is not enough when Exxon continues to expand sources of the same climate pollution.”
Wilson called for the company to support federal and state rules to cut methane.
Trump Administration Reversed Existing Methane Regulations
Methane emissions have become a much bigger issue in the last decade since the U.S. boom in shale oil and gas produced by fracking. Despite overseeing a huge rise in oil and gas production, the Obama administration acknowledged the methane problem and proposed and adopted new methane emissions regulations, which the Trump administration has since repealed.
The Trump administration has staffed regulatory agencies with former industry executives and lobbyists who have been quite successful at rolling back environmental, health, and safety rules.
Last August former coal lobbyist and current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Andrew Wheeler explained the reasoning for removing the Obama methane rules.
“EPA’s proposal delivers on President Trump’s executive order and removes unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry,” Wheeler said. “The Trump administration recognizes that methane is valuable, and the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use.”
The problem with this free-market assumption is that Wheeler is wrong about the industry's financial incentive to limit methane emissions.
There is too much natural gas, aka methane, flooding world energy markets right now.Current prices to buy it are lower than the costs to produce it. The methane currently produced in Texas' Permian Basin spent a good portion of last year at negative prices. There is no financial incentive for producers in the Permian to voluntarily cut methane emissions in the current market environment.
That is why Permian producers are flaring (openly burning) it at record levels as well as directly releasing (venting) methane into the rapidly warming atmosphere. So much for letting the free market address the issue.
Even the Remaining Regulations Are Controlled by Industry
While the Trump administration has rolled back many regulations for the oil and gas industry, the regulatory system in the U.S. was already designed to protect industry profits — not the public or environment. When the federal government creates regulations, the process can be heavily influenced by industry lobbyists, and if they don’t agree with the regulations, there are many ways they can get them revised to favor their companies.
While Exxon did publicly say in 2018 that it didn't support repealing the existing methane regulations, the company also wrote to the EPA voicing support for certain aspects of the American Petroleum Institute's (API) comments on the issue, and the API approved removing the regulations. In that letter Exxon used the same language it is now using with its propsed regulations, saying any rules need to be “cost-effective” and “reasonable.” But if the regulations are cost-effective, will they actually be effective in reducing methane emissions in a meaningful way?
Excerpt from Exxon letter to EPA about methane regulations. Source: ExxonMobil
The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted the influence that the oil and gas industry and its major U.S. trade group the American Petroleum Institute can have over regulations. After the deadly 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal government put into place new safeguards known as the “well control rule” in order to prevent another disaster during deepwater offshore drilling.
In 2019, the Trump administration revised the rule, weakening it, even though, as the Journal reported, federal regulatory staff did not agree “that an industry-crafted protocol for managing well pressure was sufficient in all situations, the records show.” The staff was ignored. (And the move is undergoing a legal challenge.)
Industry crafted protocol. Just the thing Exxon is now proposing.
This type of industry control over the regulatory process was also brought to light after two Boeing 737 MAX planes crashed and killed 346 people. Boeing had fought to make sure that pilots weren’t required to undergo expensive and lengthy training to navigate the new plane.
Reuters reported on internal communications at Boeing which revealed the airplane maker simply would not let simulator training be required by regulators:
“I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to MAX,” Boeing’s 737 chief technical pilot said in a March 2017 email.
“Boeing will not allow that to happen. We’ll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement.”
Boeing got its way. And 346 people died.
For the past six years, I have reported on the failed regulatory process governing the moving of dangerous crude oil by rail (and even wrote a book about it). The only meaningful safety regulation that resulted from a multi-year process was requiring oil trains to have modern electronically controlled pneumatic brakes.
As I reported, shortly after this regulation was enacted, Matthew Rose, CEO of the largest oil-by-rail company BNSF, told an industry conference that “the only thing we don’t like about [the new regulation] is the electronic braking” and “this rule will have to be changed in the future.” As per the wishes of Matthew Rose, that rule was repealed despite the substantial evidence clearly showing this modern braking system greatly increases train safety.
A recent op-ed from an editor at the trade publication Railway Age referred to these oil trains as a “clear and present danger.” Nevertheless, these trains hauling volatile oil through North American communities are still operating with braking systems engineered in the late 1800s.
Exxon Touts 'Sound Science' Despite Its History
Exxon’s methane proposal states that any regulations should be based on “sound science.” This statement is coming from a company whose scientists accurately predicted the impacts of burning fossil fuels on the climate decades ago and yet has spent the time since then misleading the public about that science.
The current regulatory system in America does not protect the public interest. Letting Exxon take the lead in the place of regulators doesn't seem like it's going to help.
Megan Milliken Biven is a former federal analyst for the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal agency that regulates the oil industry’s offshore activity. Milliken Biven explained to DeSmog what she saw as the root cause of the regulatory process's failure.
“Regulatory capture isn't really the problem,” Milliken Biven said. “The system was designed to work for industry so regulatory capture isn't even required.”
==
icn 220
two New Studies Add Fuel to the Debate Over Methane
:{BY: GEORGINA GUSTIN
One finds that current methane emissions may be greater than was thought, the other that methane from melting permafrost may be less than scientists believed. Read More}:
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/02/09/food-water-watch-attacks-natural-gas-climate-pr-problem
no lnx twt
Report Attacks Industry Campaign to Fix Natural Gas’s Climate PR Problem
By Dana Drugmand • Sunday, February 9, 2020 - 04:00
From the cover of Food and Water Watch's report, Fracking's Bridge to Climate Chaos.
A new report from advocacy group Food and Water Watch argues that fracking and continued reliance on natural gas is detrimental to addressing climate change. The report, which calls out the fossil fuel industry’s misleading narratives around natural gas, comes at a time when progressive members of Congress like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are introducing a bill to ban fracking and when the industry is ramping up its public relations push around gas.
According to Food and Water Watch’s (FWW) report, greenhouse gas emissions reductions from the power sector over the past decade are not as great as the gas industry claims. FWW researchers found that combined emissions from coal and gas power plants declined 10.4 percent over the last decade. If emissions continue to decline at this roughly 10 percent pace, the report says, they will not reach zero until 2100.
The report examines data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an academic emissions inventory, and a recent Cornell University study. FWW developed a model that evaluates life-cycle emissions of power production, including methane emissions from coal and natural gas production, processing, transportation, and end use. The organization’s analysis is also based on a comprehensive synthesis of methane leak research.
The methane emissions from natural gas, the data shows, are significant and have a greater climate impact than the carbon dioxide emitted at gas power plants.While natural gas burns cleaner than coal in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, a key problem with gas is that it is composed almost entirely of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years in the atmosphere.
And all too often before it’s ever burned, methane leaks out of oil and gas operations. According to the report, methane leaks are inevitable and occur throughout every stage of the supply chain. That finding has been backed up by research including a 2018 study in the journal Science that found oil and gas operations leaking 60 percent more methane than previously estimated by the EPA.
“Even if every coal plant was decommissioned by 2030 and replaced by gas-powered electricity, greenhouse gas emissions would still continue to rise,” Food and Water Watch states. “And if natural gas remains the dominant energy source through 2050, annual greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector will be higher in the coming decades than they are today.” Electricity generation accounts for only about one-third of natural gas consumption, according to the report, with the remaining 65 percent going into plastics production and providing heat in buildings. Methane emissions from these uses, Food and Water Watch says, are obscured by the industry’s touting of gas’s role in reducing power-sector emissions as coal declines.
The report also argues that replacing coal with gas plants locks in a system reliant on fossil fuels. “Supporting infrastructure like refineries and pipelines creates a fossil-oriented inertia that delays climate action,” the report states. This view that gas perpetuates fossil fuel dependence is contrary to the idea that gas is a “bridge” to a renewable energy future.
Origins of the Bridge Fuel Narrative
“The bridge fuel sales pitch was invented by the American Gas Association [AGA] in 1988 and has had a lasting impact on the gas narrative,” the Food and Water Watch report states. The report cites a 2017 paper by sociology scholar Dr. Anthony Ladd, who writes, “First crafted by the American Gas Association in 1988 to help ‘green’ the public image of the natural gas industry — just as the first scientific warnings about global warming were emerging — the clean energy bridge fuel discourse has been innovatively used to champion the use of natural gas, as well as nuclear power, based on their lower CO2 emissions than coal or oil.”
Ladd’s historical accounting of AGA originating the bridge fuel claim is confirmed by Washington Post archives from 1988: “Michael German, vice president of planning and analysis for the American Gas Association, refers to natural gas as a bridge fuel — the least harmful alternative while the world looks for other, longer-lasting solutions to the ‘greenhouse’ effect.”
A natural gas vehicle fueling station labeled "clean energy."]
In 1992, former Enron chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay wrote to President Bush, referencing gas’s role in reducing CO2 emissions: “Natural gas is our cleanest fossil fuel and through its increased use in electric power generation could play a major role in reducing CO2 emissions and delivering lower electricity prices to consumers.”
Stanford research and science historian Ben Franta, who studies the history of climate science denial and fossil fuel disinformation campaigns, told DeSmog that the industry’s promotion of gas as “clean” is rooted in efforts to avoid regulations restraining fossil fuel use.
“I do recall from my archival research that by the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, fossil fuel interests were discussing the promotion of natural gas as an industry-friendly alternative to reductions in fossil fuel use,” Franta said. “It was, in a sense, part of the industry's counterproposal to discussions of reducing fossil fuel production and use. That counterproposal basically said: instead of binding agreements to reduce emissions, let's switch to natural gas, focus on efficiency, and carry out more research. The industry was successful in promoting these terms, which in practice have yielded expanded fossil fuel production, increased emissions, and ever-worsening damages.”
Gas Is Not A Bridge Fuel
Despite the familiar framing of gas as a transition or bridge to a renewable energy future, both the fossil fuel industry and environmental activists say that framing is no longer relevant. Activists argue that renewables plus battery storage are already cost-competitive with gas, and say that increasing gas supply impedes rather than bridges the transition to carbon-free energy. “Increasing natural gas production simply continues a never-ending ‘bridge,’ displaces clean, renewable energy, and locks in dirty fossil fuel infrastructure for decades,” FWW argues in its report.
The industry, on the polar opposite end of the spectrum, now claims that gas is not a bridge but the “destination,” positioned to supply energy demand far into the future. A spokesman for the AGA said the industry does not view gas as a “bridge” and hasn’t for the past decade. Former AGA president Dave McCurdy and American Petroleum Institute’s Marty Durbin both referred to natural gas a “foundation fuel.”
In its recent “Energy and Carbon Summary” report, ExxonMobil cited “expanding the supply of cleaner-burning natural gas” as a “near-term action” it plans to undertake. Exxon’s report mentioned that although renewable energy sources are expected to grow, “natural gas is expected to grow the most of any energy type.”
The industry is clearly championing gas as the answer: to emissions reductions (which the FWW report challenges), to economic prosperity, and to energy security. A new organization, The Empowerment Alliance (TEA), emerged last year to promote exactly this message. TEA does not reveal its funding, though its talking points are basically the same ones used by groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the Independent Petroleum Association of America, both of which have been heavily promoting gas in social media and communications materials.
Momentum Builds for Fracking Bans, Leaving Gas Industry on Defensive
With the petroleum industry banking on gas playing a substantial role in the world’s energy mix, it has already come out against calls to ban fracking from some Democratic lawmakers. Current U.S. Senators and Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both said they would ban fracking if they are elected.
Sanders, along with Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Darren Soto (D-FL), recently introduced legislation that would ban fracking and the infrastructure enabling it everywhere in America.The “Fracking Ban Act” cites numerous concerns with the processes that have enabled a huge boom in U.S. oil and gas, including that “fracked natural gas is not a bridge fuel, as previously understood.”
The oil and gas industry appears to be mounting a defense. Last November, the American Petroleum Institute (API) released a new video expressly opposing a fracking ban, part of a broader strategic campaign to dampen public support for a national ban and to brand the industry as the “natural gas and oil” industry, now putting gas front and center. API is also promoting an “energy for progress” campaign to counter the scientifically backed understanding that fossil fuels are the cause — not the solution — to the climate crisis.
This “energy for progress” branding, as climate reporter and HEATED publisher Emily Atkin recently pointed out, is curiously similar in wording to the names of liberal think tanks like Data for Progress and Center for American Progress. But the branding to resemble progressive groups or ideals doesn’t stop there. At an industry conference in Houston on February 5, the CEO of Parsley Energy acknowledged that petroleum producers have a “massive perception problem,” particularly among younger generations, and pitched the idea of a “shale new deal.”
“We need a shale new deal,” Parsley’s Matt Gallagher said. “We need to highlight the benefits of America producing oil and gas and we’re doing it with as little impact as possible.” This phrasing presumably plays off of the Green New Deal, a popular policy framework among the left and younger generations for comprehensively addressing the climate crisis along with other social and economic injustices.
And fracking has no place in the Green New Deal framework. Senator Sanders, one of the leading advocates of the Green New Deal, pointed to the dangers associated with fracking, which the industry always omits in its promotional communications. “Fracking is a danger to our water supply. It’s a danger to the air we breathe, it has resulted in more earthquakes, and it’s highly explosive. To top it all off, it’s contributing to climate change,” Sanders said in a statement responding to the Food and Water Watch report. “This should be a no-brainer. If we are serious about clean air and drinking water, if we are serious about combating climate change, the only safe and sane way to move forward is to ban fracking nationwide.”
Momentum is already building at local and state levels, with communities like Berkeley, California, and Brookline, Massachusetts, advancing with bans on gas in new buildings. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has just announced that the state’s fracking ban, first imposed in 2014, will become permanent. New York City announced on February 6 that it plans to ban all new fossil fuel projects and infrastructure and end the use of fossil fuels in large buildings by 2040.
“The science is clear: fracking is a leading contributor to our climate emergency,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry and its methane emissions.”
==
==
ew 220
Current estimates of carbon emissions from melting Arctic permafrost rely on a model of a gradual melt. New research has found abrupt thawing of permafrost which means carbon emissions estimates should be doubled. The rate at which permafrost is thawing in the Arctic is gouging holes in the landscape, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not considered the phenomenon of thermokarst — the degraded land ravaged by an abrupt thaw. When the permafrost that supports the soil disappears, then hillsides collapse and enormous sinkholes suddenly appear, as Wired reported. The effect runs through meters of permafrost and takes a matter of months or a few years. That upends the traditional models of permafrost thawing, which look at a few centimeters of permafrost melt over several decades. The rapid change to the permafrost shocks the landscape, causing an enormous release of carbon.
"The amount of carbon coming off that very narrow amount of abrupt thaw in the landscape, that small area, is still large enough to double the climate consequences and the permafrost carbon feedback," said study lead author Merritt Turetsky, of the University of Guelph and University of Colorado Boulder, as Wired reported.
The researchers found that abrupt thawing will happen in less than 20 percent of the permafrost zone, "but could affect half of permafrost carbon through collapsing ground, rapid erosion and landslides," the authors wrote in the study.
Not only does an abrupt thaw release carbon, but it also releases a tremendous amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So, while only 5 percent of the permafrost may experience abrupt thaw at one time, the emissions will be equal to a much larger area going through a gradual thaw. This can rapidly change the landscape drastically.
"Forests can become lakes in the course of a month, landslides occur with no warning, and invisible methane seep holes can swallow snowmobiles whole," Turetsky said in a statement from the University of Colorado Boulder. "Systems that you could walk on with regular hiking boots and that were dry enough to support tree growth when frozen can thaw, and now all of a sudden these ecosystems turn into a soupy mess," Turetsky added.
The most worrisome permafrost is the type that holds a lot of water because frozen water takes up more space than water. When it thaws it loses a lot of volume. "Where permafrost tends to be lake sediment or organic soils, the type of earth material that can hold a lot of water, these are like sponges on the landscape," Turetsky said, as Wired reported. "When you have thaw, we see really dynamic and rapid changes."
Turetsky has witnessed the rapid change in the course of the study. She has seen the melting submerge equipment she has placed to check temperature and methane.
"When you come back in, it's a lake and there's three meters of water at the surface. You have to probably say goodbye to your equipment," she told Wired. "Essentially, we're taking terra firma and making it terra soupy."
The researchers realized that the thermokarst they observed was absent in climate emissions models and tried to account for its output.
"The impacts from abrupt thaw are not represented in any existing global model and our findings indicate that this could amplify the permafrost climate-carbon feedback by up to a factor of two, thereby exacerbating the problem of permissible emissions to stay below specific climate change targets," said David Lawrence, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a coauthor of the study in a press release.
The paper shows the sudden need to include permafrost thaw in all climate models.
"We can definitely stave off the worst consequences of climate change if we act in the next decade," Turetsky said in a press release. "We have clear evidence that policy is going to help the north and thus it's going to help dictate our future climate."
==
desmog 120
February 15, 2018, a fracked natural gas well owned by ExxonMobil's XTO Energy and located in southeast Ohio experienced a well blowout, causing it to gush the potent greenhouse gas methane for nearly three weeks. The obscure accident ultimately resulted in one of the biggest methane leaks in U.S. history. The New York Times reported in December that new satellite data revealed that this single gas well leaked more methane in 20 days than an entire year's worth of methane released by the oil and gas industries in countries like Norway and France.
The cause of this massive leak was a failure of the gas well's casing, or internal lining. Well casing failures represent yet another significant but not widely discussed technical problem for an unprofitable fracking industry.
==
120 ew
An international team of scientists says a new way of extracting methane gas trapped in permafrost has the potential to harvest more gas while burning fewer fossil fuels in the extraction process, as Newsweek reported.
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/satellite-methane-leak-2641613644.html
In February 2018, a blowout at a fracked natural gas well in Belmont County, Ohio forced around 100 nearby residents to flee their homes, as The New York Times reported. Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday has revealed that the local incident had major implications for the global climate crisis.
Researchers used satellite data to determine that the blowout caused one of the largest methane leaks in U.S. history. It released more methane in around 20 days than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands do in a year, Bloomberg News reported. The results raise questions about the ability of the oil and gas industry to control methane leaks.
"When I started working on methane, now about a decade ago, the standard line was: 'We've got it under control. We're managing it,'" study coauthor and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) scientist Dr. Steven Hamburg told The New York Times. "But in fact, they didn't have the data. They didn't have it under control, because they didn't understand what was actually happening. And you can't manage what you don't measure."
The research is one example of how satellites can help accurately measure the problem. The paper's Holland and U.S.-based authors used data from the spaceborne Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) to determine that the well leaked methane at a rate of about 120 metric tons per hour, double the rate of leakage from the largest ever methane leak in U.S. history, which took place in 2015 at a California oil and gas storage facility. The satellite measurements also estimated that the leak spewed 60 kilotons of methane in total into the atmosphere, Stuff.co.nz reported. That's five times the amount estimated by ExxonMobil, whose subsidiary XTO Energy owns the well.
"We deeply regret this incident occurred and are committed to identifying and managing risks associated with our activities to prevent recurrence," ExxonMobil spokeswoman Julie King told Stuff.co.nz in an email. "We are eager to learn more about their study. ExxonMobil is working with government laboratories, universities, NGOs and other industry participants to identify the most cost-effective and best-performing technology, including satellites, that can be adopted by all producers to detect, repair and accurately measure methane."
The study also raises questions about the climate safety of fracking and natural gas. While burning natural gas only emits half the greenhouse gases that burning coaldoes, methane is as much as 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks can therefore undermine the relative advantage of gas when it comes to lowering emissions.
The study's authors wrote that satellite measurements can help keep track of methane leaks that might otherwise be missed in calculating greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups are also increasingly embracing satellites as a tool. The EDF is even partnering with an aerospace company to build and launch a satellite dedicated to finding and monitoring methane leaks.
"We're entering a new era. With a single observation, a single overpass, we're able to see plumes of methane coming from large emission sources," satellite expert and study coauthor Ilse Aben told The New York Times. "That's something totally new that we were previously not able to do from space."...===
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/12/14/1905639/-Methane-super-emitters-releasing-massive-plumes-after-Trump-rolled-back-environmental-regulations#read-more
Methane is many times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. It’s not mentioned as often when considering the greenhouse effect behind the climate crisis because it’s released in comparatively low volumes and will gradually degrade over time. But methane’s potency means that even at low volumes it definitely makes a significant contribution to global warming. That was a big part of the reason that, under President Obama, regulations were set in place to limit the amount of methane that oil and gas companies were allowed to emit, especially by venting wells in areas where capturing all the methane doesn’t happen to be convenient.
But those regulations were some of the first to be rolled back under Donald Trump.Trump proudly took all caps off the ability of fossil fuel producers to vent methane into the atmosphere. Producers and their supporters in Congress have tried to wave away any potential impact from venting — after all, methane is natural gas, and natural gas has value, so how much could companies really be spilling? The answer, as revealed in a report from The New York Times, is absolutely staggering.
In just a few hours of flying over Texas sites with a small plane, the Times identified hundreds of sites whose level of methane production puts them in the category of “super emitters.” The leaks came not just from wells, but from storage facilities, pipelines, and every stage of natural gas production. Since fracking generated a surprise boom in natural gas production two decades ago, the level of methane in the atmosphere has been increasing. Even though that change corresponded almost exactly with increased production, oil and gas companies have pretended to ignorance over the source of the methane. But it’s clear that methane is leaking in massive amounts.
In fact, so much methane is being leaked at such rates that it could be argued that the move from coal to natural gas as the largest source of electricity in the United States has actually created more damage to the climate. But it’s hard to be sure, because so little of this loss is actually measured. And if Trump gets his way, companies will not longer be required to even monitor for methane loss.
While scientists can easily detect that overall methane levels are rising, tracking that methane back to sources can be very difficult. Even when satellite data or information from aircraft helps to identify a methane “plume” on the surface, the source of that gas can be any one of thousands of wells, hundreds of storage facilities, or anywhere in miles of pipeline. Tracking the methane to a specific source can be all but impossible, especially in areas of high production.
Producers are supposed to seek permission and obtain permits before releasing significant quantities of methane. But, safe in the knowledge that tracking back a massive one-time release is almost impossible, many companies simply skip that step.They know they can release a blast that’s equivalent to the environmental impact of running a city, and feign ignorance if anyone comes knocking. That’s why the critical factor is forcing companies to measure the methane themselves by requiring monitors on wells, takes, and other facilities. Only by having those monitors on site, and having them regularly inspected, can there be any hope of identifying both accidental leaks and intentional venting.
Naturally, that’s exactly the requirement that Trump has already weakened, and is seeking to remove completely.Lobbyists for oil and gas were some of the biggest contributors to Trump’s campaign, his inaugural slush fund, and his 2020 PAC. It was no coincidence that his first Secretary of State came straight from the offices of Exxon.
But gas companies aren’t all like Gordon Sondland. They don’t care of their contributions earn them keen ambassadorships. They just want to be left to make maximum money … by doing maximum damage.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/boiling-with-methane-scientists-reveal-truly-terrifying-sign-of-climate-change-under-the-arctic-ocean
no lnx
‘Boiling with methane’: Scientists reveal ‘truly terrifying’ sign of climate change under the Arctic Ocean
A spectacular image of methane bubbles rising above a cold seep site. Methane bubbles flow in a small stream out of the sediment on an area of seafloor offshore Virginia north of Washington Canyon. Quill worms, anemones, patches of bacterial mat, pandalid shrimp, and a large red crab (Chaceon quinquedens) can be seen in and along the periphery of the seepage area.
Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams October 9, 2019
Scientists studying the consequences of methane emissions from underwater permafrost in the Arctic Ocean announced this week that they found a 50-square-foot area of the East Siberian Sea “boiling with methane bubbles.”
“This is the most powerful seep I have ever been able to observe,” lead scientist Igor Semiletov said Monday, using a term for methane gas bubbling up from the seafloor to the surface. “No one has ever recorded anything similar.”
Semiletov, a Russian researcher who has participated in 45 Arctic expeditions, set out on the Academic Mstislav Keldysh last month, accompanied by scientists from the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Their discovery was announced in a statement from Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University, where Semiletov is a professor. The researchers’ findings from the expedition and Semiletov’s remarks were translated and reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph.
Russian scientists find ‘most powerful’ ever methane seep in Arctic Ocean https://t.co/v6HrbjPlXv
— Telegraph World News (@TelegraphWorld) October 8, 2019
Permafrost is a mix of soil, rocks, and sand bound together by ice that stays frozen for two or more years straight. As human activity causes global temperatures to rise, the world’s permafrost is thawing—releasing ancient bacteria and viruses as well as greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that further heat the planet.
Compared with carbon dioxide, methane has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere but is better at trapping radiation, so methane’s impact is more than 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Experts are increasingly concerned about the consequences of thawing permafrost that is located both beneath land and water in the planet’s coldest regions. Last week, the Washington Post reported on “stunning and dramatic” scenes from a region of Eastern Siberia where “sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground—rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth,” and “rivers are rising and running faster,” sweeping away entire neighborhoods.
The Academic Mstislav Keldysh expedition’s research team, led by Semiletov, traveled to an area of the Arctic Ocean known for methane “fountains” to study the effects of permafrost thawing. Around the “powerful” fountain they found east of Bennett Island, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was more than nine times higher than the global average.
Describing the researchers’ discovery of the fountain based on the univeristy’s statement, The Telegraph reported:
When researchers drew near to the “emerald-colored” water of the methane fountain, they “could see how gas was rising to the surface from the black depths of the sea in thousands of bubbly strands,” according to expedition member Sergei Nikiforov.
They took samples of bottom sediments, water, and gas, scooping up the extraordinarily large methane bubbles in buckets rather than small plastic capsules and filling several pressurized canisters.
The next day, the expedition stumbled upon another giant seep of roughly the same size, even though discovering seeps among rough ocean waves is usually “harder than finding a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Nikiforov said.
The expedition’s findings, also reported on Tuesday by Newsweek, elicited alarmed reactions from readers and climate activists the world over:
Our seas are starting to ‘boil’ — with methane. This is not normal. #ClimateCrisis #ArcticMatters #UniteBehindTheScience https://t.co/ATk7IzFuSi
— Callum Grieve (@callumgrieve) October 9, 2019
Oh, fuck. https://t.co/OnwCW2rL2c
— Ray Monk (@Raymodraco) October 8, 2019
A New Zealand chapter of the Extinction Rebellion movement—which launched a fresh wave of peaceful acts of civil disobedience around the world on Monday to demand bolder climate policies—tweeted in response to the expedition’s discovery, “This is why the disruption we caused is very minor in comparison to what’s coming.”
==
UCS 1019
...exxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell have all signed on to a set of guiding principles designed to curb methane emissions, pledging to advocate for sound policy and regulations on methane. We need your help to hold them to their word.
Hold Big Oil companies to their word: urge them to support regulation of harmful methane emissions.
Big Oil's biggest industry group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), has supported methane regulation rollbacks since the beginning. Last year when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed plans to repeal laws requiring companies to monitor and repair methane leaks, API was in full support. Major fossil fuel companies are hiding behind API's anti-climate lobbying while claiming to support solutions.
ExxonMobil, one of API's largest members, recently voiced strong support for the direct regulation of methane emissions, noting that "voluntary efforts" by fossil fuel companies "only capture a fraction" of the industry's emissions. BP and Shell have also reaffirmed their support for the EPA's existing rules. As leaders in API, these companies should use their power to remove the group as barrier to safe methane rules—not bankroll lobbyists to do the opposite. It's time we hold them to their word....
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-moves-to-accelerate-climate-change-and-its-even-more-evil-than-it-first-appears/
no lnx
Trump moves to accelerate climate change — and it’s even more evil than it first appears
Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly August 29, 2019
Methane levels in the environment have been rising sharply since 2008, and there is probably more than one contributing factor. A lot of methane is trapped under ice sheets which are melting at a rapid pace. But some researchers see the new popularity of fracking as a prime culprit.
The boom in the US shale gas and oil may have ignited a significant global spike in methane emissions blamed for accelerating the pace of the climate crisis, according to research.
Scientists at Cornell University have found the “chemical fingerprints” of the rising global methane levels point to shale oil and shale gas as the probable source…
…Robert Howarth, the author of the paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, said the proportion of methane with a “carbon signature” linked to traditional fossil fuels was falling relative to the rise of methane with a slightly different carbon make-up…
…“This recent increase in methane is massive,” Howarth said. “It’s globally significant. It’s contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”
Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it exists in smaller quantities and dissipates more quickly in the atmosphere. It’s actually easier to make headway against climate change by reducing methane rather than carbon dioxide emissions, but that requires strict regulation of the shale gas fields where methane is released both intentionally and unintentionally during the hydraulic fracturing process. In 2016, the Obama administration sought to do this by announcing new rules.
The new rules are part of the Obama administration’s goal to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by up to 45 percent by 2025. They affect newly-drilled hydraulically fractured oil wells, which studies show are significant sources of leaking methane. At least one-third of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S. come from the oil and gas industry.
The regulations require companies to find and contain leaks with the goal of reducing methane pollution by the equivalent of 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2025, or roughly the same as the emissions from 2.34 million passenger cars.
The EPA is beginning work on regulating methane leaks from existing oil and gas wells by requiring energy companies to provide data to the agency under an “information collection request.” The request will require the companies to inform the EPA about their emissions and technology they could use to stop methane leaks.
Since 2016, climate scientists have been revising their estimates of the pace and severity of climate change, and the problem today looks more severe than their worst-case scenarios from three years ago. This would support revisiting the Obama administration’s rules on methane and fracking to see if they should be strengthened. But that’s not what the Trump administration is doing:
Oil and gas companies would face looser controls on emissions of potent climate-changing methane gas under a proposal expected from the Trump administration as soon as Thursday, oil industry and environmental groups say.
The government’s plan would ease requirements on oil and gas sites to monitor for methane leaks and plug them.
This plan is actually even more evil than it might first appear, as the Washington Post reports:
Just as important, according to an EPA document obtained by The Washington Post, the proposal will challenge the agency’s earlier position that the federal government has the authority to regulate methane without first making a determination that it qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Trump administration has taken several steps to limit the government’s ability to regulate climate pollutants in the future, including in a recently-finalized rule curbing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
They want to free up frackers to release as much methane into the environment as they want, but they also want to make it harder for any future administration to reverse their decision. To get an idea of how truly egregious this step is, consider that the oil and gas industry isn’t uniformly behind it.
The [EPA] estimates the proposed changes, which will be subject to public comment for 60 days after they are published, would save the oil and natural gas industry between $17 million and $19 million a year.
But several of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell and BP, have opposed the rollback and urged the Trump administration to keep the current standards in place. Collectively, these firms account for 11 percent of America’s natural gas output.
Since the industry has already adapted to the Obama Era rules, there’s really no reason to eviscerate them. But it seems that this administration will pursue almost anything if it’s a bad enough idea.
==
:{4.:(style="background:transparent;border:0px;margin:0px;outline:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;position:absolute;left:-2.5em;width:2.25em;text-align:right;display:block"):}:EPA
Here's how emissions could rise under the methane rule
Climatewire: Thursday, August 15, 2019
:{5.:(style="background:transparent;border:0px;margin:0px;outline:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;position:absolute;left:-2.5em;width:2.25em;text-align:right;display:block"):}:OIL AND GAS
EPA may roll back methane rules. Will states fill the gap?
Energywire: Thursday, August 15, 2019
Chart: How Renewable Energy Costs Are Falling
"We are embarking on coal's new era, but we have to face reality," said J.P. Richardson, chairman of the Virginia Coal and Energy Alliance, a mining industry group.
Part of that reality is that four of the energy board's states and territories—Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Puerto Rico—are led by governors who are members of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors who have committed to work toward achieving the goals of the Paris climate agreement, despite Trump's moves to pull the U.S. out of that international accord.
"We are seeing more and more cities, states and utilities, in particular, that are moving toward clean energy," said Julie Cerqueira, the executive director of the alliance, who was not at the meeting. "Economically, it just makes sense. Coal is increasingly expensive" and "the clean energy sector produces a lot of jobs."
Dominion's View of the Future Is Low-Carbon
One of those utilities is Virginia-based Dominion Energy, which operates in 18 states and was one of the conference sponsors.
Instead of dwelling on coal, one of Dominion's top lobbyists, James Beamer, said the utility plans to cut its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.
He highlighted plans for new offshore wind power, forconverting factory-scale farm hog waste to methane,and for new solar power. He also said the company is developing a new hydroelectric pump storage facility that will work like a large battery and be powered in part by renewable energy.
James Beamer, one of Dominion Energy’s top lobbyists, told the conference about the utility's goal to cut its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050 with plans including more offshore wind power, solar power and pumped hydropower storage. Credit: James Bruggers
Other speakers touted what they considered time-tested attributes of coal as an energy source—its reliability and price, though analysts have found new wind and solar power, bolstered by battery storage, is cheaper than coal in much of the U.S. now.
Wind and solar? It's too intermittent, the coal supporters say, omitting any mention of the growing use of energy storage. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, they said.
Natural gas? It's a national security threat because natural gas plants rely on just-in-time delivery of fuel that could be disrupted by terrorists and doesn't perform as well in the extreme cold, they argued.
A speaker from the grid operator PJM, which serves 13 eastern and Midwestern states, acknowledged fuel security is important but said a stress test had found no threats to its grid reliability through at least 2023 as it shifts to more renewable energy and gas and less coal.
Kenneth Nemeth, executive director of the energy board, argued that coal-related jobs, security and reliability aren't being factored into decision electric utilities and regulators are making when they allow coal plants to close or approve new power sources. That needs to change, he said.
The Trump administration has tried to use those same arguments to bail out coal by suggesting that grid operators be required to buy power from uneconomical coal power plants in the name of national security. So far, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has rejected that idea.
Mini Coal Plants and Carbon Capture?
https://grist.org/article/the-arctics-ticking-carbon-bomb-could-blow-up-the-paris-agreement/
yoder 3/19
Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by U.N. Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.
The report, released at the U.N. Environment conference in Kenya on Wednesday, says that theArctic is warming twice as fast as the planetary average, and models show that it’s on track to become ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.
That’s the bad news. So here’s even worse news. The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases. Estimates vary, but the report says1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year, and double the amount of the gas in the atmosphere today.
If that permafrost stayed permanently frozen, as the word itself suggests it should, we could continue worrying about other stuff. But researchers expect Arctic permafrost to shrink 45 percent compared to today. Unleashing that stored-up carbon dioxide and methane would obviously “derail efforts” to limit warming to 2 degrees C (3.6CK degrees F) as outlined in the Paris Agreement, the report says. But then again, it would derail pretty much everything.
“New evidence suggests that permafrost is thawing much faster than previously thought, withconsequences not just for Arctic peoples and ecosystems, but for the planet as a whole because of feedback loops,” the report states.
This is one of the runaway warming scenarios, often called the “carbon bomb” or “methane bomb.” (Permafrost holds both greenhouse gases.) Unlike a real bomb, however, it wouldn’t explode all at once. And at least one recent study suggests that we still have time to defuse it.
Within the Arctic, the soil formerly known as permafrost — let’s call it “meltafrost” — could pose a danger to 70 percent of current infrastructure by 2050, as well as the region’s 4 million inhabitants, 10 percent of whom areindigenous. Recent studies have shown that permafrost thaw could cause houses to collapse, lead to uneven roads, and threaten important cultural and archaeological sites.
The North Pole runs warmer than the rest of the planet because of a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification” — basically a region-specific term for feedback loops. “[W]hen sea ice melts in the summer, it opens up dark areas of water that absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice,” the report explains.
These rapid changes in the Arctic might seem far away, but you will feel them, too. For those of you on the coasts, keep in mind that the melting of Arctic glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet makes up a third of sea-level rise around the globe. Rising seas will wreak havoc in coastal regions as they deal with flooding, damaged buildings, and the saltwater contamination of drinking water sources.
And for those further inland, there’s the wild weather. The melting of the Arctic causes changes in the jet stream and disrupts weather patterns much further south. It’s been linked to worsening drought across the western United States, stalled hurricanes in the East, and the polar vortex that occasionally dips down over North America to turn us all into popsicles.
As many are fond of saying, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”
==
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/29/fracking-industry-gas-flaring-problem
In 2018, the oil and gas industry operating in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale burned off record amounts of natural gas, largely obtained via hydraulic fracturing (fracking). This process, known as flaring, costs the industry money — it literally burns one of the products being pumped out of the ground — but more importantly, the resulting release of globe-warming emissions of carbon dioxide and methane spells disaster for the climate.
And a new analysis of satellite evidence indicates the industry is likely underreporting how much gas it is actually flaring in the Permian Shale, with implications for other oil fields.
According to the Bismarck Tribune, the amount of gas flared in North Dakota in October was enough to heat 4.25 million homes in America. And while the fracking industry in North Dakota is flaring the most gas in the nation, it's not the only place this is a growing issue. Flaring reportedly also doubled in 2018 in the booming Permian Shale in Texas and New Mexico, with an estimated $1 million a day of gas burned off.
In addition, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) recently analyzed satellite data and concluded that the industry is likely underreporting the actual volumes of gas flared in the Permian. EDF says that the real numbers are closer to double what the industry reports.
Differences in reported versus unreported gas flaring in the Permian Basin in Texas. Credit: Environmental Defense Fund
This increase in flaring is just one more example of how the oil and gas industry has recklessly pushed forward with the so-called “shale revolution,” producing record amounts of oil while losing money and showing blatant disregard for the environment and climate along the way. It is also an excellent example of how federal and state regulators are allowing this to happen.
Fracking Oil in America Means Flaring Gas
Flaring has alway been a part of oil production, conventional or otherwise. Natural gas often is found with oil reservoirs and when adequate infrastructure doesn't exist to capture both the oil and gas, the gas is flared, or burned, while the oil is captured and sold. (Natural gas is primarily methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and burning it transforms the methane to water and carbon dioxide, which is perhaps the best-known greenhouse gas.)
Flaring did not begin with fracking's modern introduction to oil and gas fields, but the rush to develop shale fields via fracking seems to have encouraged the practice in recent years. For comparison, let's look at Iraq.
In Iraq, where the oil industry has been rebuilding after the damages of the Iraq War, production currently falls between 4 and 5 million barrels of oil per day, using conventional drilling methods. Compare that with the approximately 4 million barrels per day of oil producedvia fracking in the Permian Basin.
Iraq's industry has been flaring billions of dollarsof gas because there is no infrastructure to capture it, a situation companies there are moving to remedy but one which will require large investments in gas processing facilities. Iraq is working with several foreign corporations to construct the infrastructure and aims to end flaring by 2021, a move projected to save over $5 billion in the next four years.
Original image: Gas flaring in southern Iraq in 2014. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory, public domain wow]
However, the companies fracking for oil in America’s major shale plays appear less interested in building adequate capacity, which hasn't been built in the first place, to capture the gas they currently flare. This isn't a technological problem.
A new report from the Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota suggests that North Dakota should capture the gas and store it underground, a common method of storing gas. But as the Aliso Canyon disastermade clear when an uncontrolled leak spewed methane from a gas storage facility in southern California for several months, the approach is not without its risks. However, it is the cheapest option.
John Harju, vice president for strategic partnerships at the EERC, told the Associated Press that capturing the gas and using pipelines to move it to processing facilities is always the ideal way to handle it. However, the best option is often the most expensive option.
“The economics aren't great, but it is economic under the right circumstance,” Lynn Helms, the director of North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources, said of the proposed underground gas storage plan, according to the trade publication Natural Gas Intel.
If the industry can make money capturing the gas, it will. If not, it will continue flaring.
North Dakota's Flaring Guidelines Do Little to Reduce Flaring
In April 2018, North Dakota updated its flaring regulations based on changes “submitted by an industry group” that were supposed to result in reduced flaring. The state's main oil and gas industry lobbying group is the North Dakota Petroleum Council (NDPC), which is supported by the American Petroleum Institute.
According to The Associated Press, Kari Cutting, NDPC vice president, reportedly told the newspaper that the “oil industry is committed to meeting the flaring targets, even if it means cutting back on crude production.”
“We’ll do what we have to do,” Cutting said.
However, the language in the new guidelines actually gave the oil companies more options to flare. For example, according to the guidelines: “The initial horizontal well drilled … should be allowed to produce at its maximum efficient rate, regardless if the well is connected to a gas gathering system.” [Emphasis added.]
Predictably, North Dakota set records for oil production and flaringin 2018, after the new flaring guidelines were announced. So much for the oil industry's commitment to reducing flaring even if it requires reducing oil production.
North Dakota oil production may decline in 2019 but that would be tied more to the drop in oil prices in late 2018.
[img]
And with an estimated $10 billionmore in infrastructure needed to address the North Dakota flaring issues, the fracking industry, which continues to lose money, especially with current low oil prices, appears unlikely to address flaring on a significant scale any time soon.
Ron Ness, president of the NDPC, confirmed this in remarks to the Bismarck Tribune, saying the necessary investment wasn’t going to come “right away” because “[o]ur productivity has just outpaced the expectations on gas so much.”
And so flaring will continue on the Great Plains.
Federal Regulations on Flaring and Venting Natural Gas Repealed
At the end of the Obama administration in 2016, the Bureau of Land Management released new regulations “to reduce waste of natural gas from venting, flaring, and leaks during oil and natural gas production activities on onshore Federal and Indian leases.”
After Trump took over, however, the agency decided to review this new rule and in October 2018 released a revised, relaxed form of those regulations.
At the time of the release, David Bernhardt, now the acting Secretary of the Interior, explained the purpose of the changes: “We’re fulfilling a commitment to a policy vision the president established to promote clean development of our resources without regulation that encumbers business, restrains growth, and prevents job creation.”
Satellite image of U.S. flaring in 2018. Credit: SkyTruth wow]
The Midland Reporter-Telegram, a newspaper in the heart of the Permian, summarized the gutting of the Obama-era regulations, which included the removal of “requirements pertaining to waste minimization plans, gas-capture percentages, well drilling, well completion and related operations, pneumatic controllers, pneumatic diaphragm pumps, storage vessels, and leak detection and repair.”
Or as Matt Watson of the Environmental Defense Fund explained to The New York Times: “This is a complete dismantling of federal methane regulation in the United States.”
One of the main arguments for weakening these natural gas and methane regulations was that implementing them would have been cost prohibitive for some small oil and gas producers and would have caused them to stop operations.
Fracking's Many Climate Impacts
“Drilling Towards Disaster,” a new report by Oil Change International, outlines how fracking is driving oil and gas production in America (and being exported to the rest of the world) and the dangers this poses by driving future climate impacts at a time when rapid decarbonization of the global economy is required.
By essentially providing no real limitations on flaring, state and federal regulators are allowing the oil and gas industry to produce record amounts of oil, which accelerates climate change when the oil is burned. However, the situation also releases additional carbon dioxide when the gas is flared, without providing any economic benefit, such as powering millions of American homes.
Additionally, the methane that is leaked in the supply chain, and in some cases intentionally vented into the atmosphere, adds to global warming. Methane traps more heat than carbon dioxide in the short term.
And even with the Trump administration rolling back a number of environmental regulations like the rules for methane flaring and venting, the oil and gas industry is looking for still more deregulation from the federal government.
With the federal government now open after a 35-day-long shutdown, it's back to business as usual.
==
==
Tim Radford
As the global temperature steadily rises, it ensures that levels of one of the most potent greenhouse gases are increasing in a way new to science: the planet will have to reckon with more methane than expected.
Researchers who monitored one bog for three years in the Alaskan permafrost have identified yet another instance of what engineers call positive feedback. They found that global warming meant earlier springs and with that, earlier spring rains.
And as a consequence, the influx of warm water on what had previously been frozen ground triggered a biological frenzy that sent methane emissions soaring.
One stretch of wetland in a forest of black spruce in the Alaskan interior stepped up its emissions of natural gas (another name for methane) by 30 percent. Methane is a greenhouse gas at least 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
As a consequence, climate scientists may have to return yet again to the vexed question of the carbon budget, in their calculations of how fast the world will warm as humans burn more fossil fuels, to set up ever more rapid global warming and climate change, which will in turn accelerate the thawing of the permafrost.
The evidence so far comes from a detailed study of water, energy and carbon traffic from just one wetland. But other teams of scientists have repeatedly expressed concern about the integrity of the northern hemisphere permafrost and the vast stores of carbon preserved in the frozen soils, beneath the shallow layer that comes to life with each Arctic spring.
"We saw the plants going crazy and methane emissions going bonkers," said Rebecca Neumann, an environmental engineer at the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study. "2016 had above average rainfall, but so did 2014. So what was different about this year?"
What mattered was when the rain fell: it fell earlier, when the ground was still colder than the air. The warmer water saturated the frozen forest, flowed into the bog, and created a local permafrost thaw in anoxic conditions: the subterranean microbial communities responded by converting the once-frozen organic matter into a highly effective greenhouse gas.
Alarm Rises
"It'd be the bottom of the barrel in terms of energy production for them," Neumann said. "The microbes in this bog on some level are like 'Oh man, we're stuck making methane because that's all this bog is allowing us to do'."
As global average temperature levels creep up, so does alarm about the state of the vast tracts of permafrost, home to huge stores of frozen carbon in the form of semi-decayed plant material that could be released into the atmosphere to fuel further global warming, with devastating consequences.
Spring has been arriving earlier everywhere in the northern hemisphere, including the Arctic, with unpredictable impacts on high latitude ecosystems.
The permafrost itself has been identified as a vulnerable region, change in which could tip the planet into a new and unpredictable climate regime, and geographers only this year have started to assess the direct hazard to the communities that live in the high latitudes as once-solid ground turns to slush under their feet.
More Evaporation
Much more difficult to assess is how the steady attrition of the permafrost plays out in terms of the traffic of carbon between rocks, ocean, atmosphere and living things: researchers are still teasing out the roles of all the agencies at work, including subterranean microbes.
In a warmer world, evaporation will increase. Warmer air has a greater capacity for water vapor. In the end, it means more rain will fall. If it falls in spring or early summer, the research from one marshland in Alaska seems to suggest, more methane will escape into the atmosphere.
Right now, the rewards of the study are academic. They throw just a little more light on the subtle machinery of weather and climate. The test is whether what happens in one instance is likely to happen in other, similar terrain around the high latitudes.
"The ability of rain to transport thermal energy into soils has been under-appreciated," Neumann said. "Our study shows that by affecting soil temperature and methane emissions, rain can increase the ability of thawing permafrost to warm the climate."
==
When it comes to the heat-trapping effects of global warming emissions, methane is 86 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. That's why it was promising to seefossil fuel companies commit to "advocate sound policy and regulations on methane" when they signed on to a set of guiding principles designed to curb methane emissions.
But have they lived up to their promise to work with governments on effective methane regulation? You guessed it—ExxonMobil, BP, and other Big Oil companies haven't just dropped the ball on methane; they're trying to roll it back.
Tell Big Oil to keep their promise and keep us safe from methane pollution!
Big Oil's biggest industry group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), met with the White House to lobby against strong methane inspection standards. So it wasn't surprising that, a few weeks later, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed new methane standards that would significantly cut back requirements for fossil fuel companies to monitor and repair methane leaks.
Methane is emitted in large quantities during oil and gas production. Leaks and emissions from natural gas facilities pose a serious threat to our climate and our health. The new proposal would allow hundreds of thousands of tons of additional methane pollution by 2025.
The same companies that pledged to tackle methane emissions hand-in-hand with our government are paying lobbyists to do the opposite. As funders of API, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron should use their power to remove the lobbying group as barrier to safe methane rules. It's time to hold them to their word.
==
Trump Lets Fracking Companies Release More Climate-Warming Methane
As expected, the U.S. Department of the Interior on Tuesday released a final rule that reverses Obama-era restrictions on methane emissions from oil and gas operations.
President Obama's 2016 methane waste rule, which never went into effect, required fossil fuel companies on tribal and public lands to reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that's about 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. It called on drilling operators to capture leaking and vented methane and to update their leak-detection equipment.
Keep reading...
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/methane-leak-lawsuit-california-2594248435.html
major California utility has agreed to pay nearly $120 million in a civil settlement over a huge methane leak that forced thousands to flee their homes in 2015.
The settlement between Southern California Gas Co. and the city of Los Angeles will pay for emissions mitigation, a long-term health study, and increased safety measures from the 2015 leak at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field, the largest single release of methane in U.S. history.
More than 100,000 metric tons of methane were released into the air over a nearly four-month period during the disaster, prompting complaints of headaches, nosebleeds and nausea from residents in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch near the storage facility.
As reported by the Sacramento Bee:
Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the tentative deal, which will be open to public comment and requires court approval, addressed violations of health and safety codes, the illegal discharge of air contaminants and failure to report the release of hazardous materials.
"There is no excuse for what happened," Becerra said in a statement. "For over four months, this leak exposed our communities to natural gas emissions that resulted in adverse health impacts and disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of Californians."
...
==
==
Study Finds New Reason to Ban Plastic: It Emits Methane in the Sun
https://theconversation.com/the-us-natural-gas-industry-is-leaking-way-more-methane-than-previously-thought-heres-why-that-matters-98918
==
Oil and Gas Fields Leak Far More Methane than EPA Reports, Study Finds
:{
}:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21062018/methane-leaks-oil-gas-climate-change-risks-natural-gas-slcp-global-warming-pollution-science-edf-study
:{
}:
==
Court Orders Trump Administration to Enforce Obama-Era Methane Rule
A federal judge reinstated a widely supported methane waste rule that President Trump's administration has repeatedly tried to stop.
Judge William Orrick of the U.S. District Court for Northern California ruled Thursday that Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) decision to suspend core provisions of the 2016 Methane and Waste Prevention Rule was "untethered to evidence."
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/nasa-study-methane-spike-2526089909.html
New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas
By Sharon Kelly
Over the past few years, natural gas has become the primary fuel that America uses to generate electricity, displacing the long-time king of fossil fuels, coal. In 2019, more than a third of America's electrical supply will come from natural gas, with coal falling to a second-ranked 28 percent, the Energy Information Administration predicted this month, marking the growing ascendency of gas in the American power market.
But new peer-reviewed research adds to the growing evidence that the shift from coal to gas isn't necessarily good news for the climate.
A team led by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the oil and gas industry is responsible for the largest share of the world's rising methane emissions—which are a major factor in climate change—and in the process the researchers resolved one of the mysteries that has plagued climate scientists over the past several years.
Missing Methane
That mystery? Since 2006, methane emissions have been rising by about 25 teragrams (a unit of weight so large that NASA notes you'd need more than 200,000 elephants to equal one teragram) every year. But when different researchers sought to pinpoint the sources of that methane, they ran into a problem.
If you added the growing amounts of methane pollution from oil and gas to the rising amount of methane measured from other sources, like microbes in wetlands and marshes, the totals came out too high—exceeding the levels actually measured in the atmosphere. The numbers didn't add up.
It turns out, there was a third factor at play, one whose role was underestimated, NASA's new paper concludes, after reviewing satellite data, ground-level measurements and chemical analyses of the emissions from different sources.
A drop in the acreage burned in fires worldwide between 2006 and 2014 meant that methane from those fires went down far more than scientists had realized. Fire-related methane pollution dropped twice as much as previously believed, the new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, reports....
https://www.ecowatch.com/methane-action-2519141186.html
headsup
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/african-americans-air-pollution-2509714660.html
African Americans Disproportionately Suffer Health Effects of Oil and Gas Facilities
African American communities face a disproportionate risk of health issues caused by gas and oil pollution, according to a report issued Tuesday by two advocacy groups.
The report from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Clean Air Task Force noted the importance of Obama-era U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that finalized standard for methane and ozone smog-forming volatile organic compound (VOCs). The report states that if the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations continues, the situation for African Americans will worsen.
The study found oil and natural gas facilities were built or currently exist within a half-mile of more than one million African Americans, exposing these communities to higher risks of cancer due to toxic emissions. "African-Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than Caucasian Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live in fence-line communities than the average American," the report said, referring to neighborhoods near to gas and oil facilities.
Counties located in the Gulf Coast Basin are home to the most counties with oil refineries and higher percentages of African Americans. Michigan, Louisiana and Tennessee, the report found, have the highest percentage of African American residents living in oil refinery counties. Texas and Louisiana, both in the Gulf Coast Basin, were home to the largest African American individuals at risk for cancer, with nearly 900,000 living in areas above the EPA's level of concern.
"The effects of oil and gas pollution are disproportionately afflicting African Americans, particularly cancer and respiratory issues, and the trend is only increasing," said Dr. Doris Browne, the National Medical Association President.
The report also found that oil and natural gas industries violate the EPA's air quality standards from natural gas emissions-related ozone smog in numerous African communities, causing more than 130,000 asthma attacks among school children. This results in more than 100,000 missed school days each year.
Defending the environmental protections finalized during the Obama administration and advocating for additional protections against pollution from the oil and gas industry will help improve the health of many African American communities, the study noted.
But the Trump administration has already begun to dismantle Obama-era EPA steps taken in 2016 that aimed to clean up toxic air pollutants such as benzene, formaldehyde and sulfur dioxide. It is also taking aim at 2016 EPA actions that address the 1.2 million existing sources of methane pollution and other airborne pollution. The White House claims these regulations are unnecessary industry burdens. The Trump administration's moves are being challenged in courts around the country.
"What this administration is discovering as it attempts to undo vital health and environmental protections is that these sensible standards cannot simply be wished away, only to the benefit of the oil and gas industry," said Sarah Uhl, program director of short-lived climate pollutants for Clean Air Task Force.
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/10/senates-poised-to-repeal-a-final-obama-era-rule-as-soon-as-wednesday/
no link many
Senate unexpectedly rejects bid to repeal a key Obama-era environmental regulation
By Chelsea Harvey and Juliet Eilperin May 10 at 12:10 PM
Oil pumps and natural gas burn off in Watford City, N.D. Methane emissions will likely be the next big environmental issue to face North Dakota’s booming oil industry according to a top official at the state’s Department of Health. (AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)
This story has been updated.
The U.S. Senate narrowly voted down a resolution on Wednesday to repeal an Obama-era rule restricting methane emissions from drilling on public lands — with three Republicans joining every Democrat to preserve the rule.
The 51 to 49 vote marked the first time since Trump’s election that Republicans have failed in their attempt to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn Obama-era rules.
Thirteen earlier resolutions, based on the 1996 law that allows Congress to overturn rules within 60 days of their adoption, all succeeded. But the deadline for repealing such regulations through the Congressional Review Act is on Thursday.
The methane emissions rule, issued by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management in November, addresses a potent greenhouse gas that is accelerating climate change.
[Earth could break through a major climate threshold in the next 15 years, scientists warn]
The rule would force oil and gas companies to capture methane that had been previously burned off or “flared” at drilling sites.
The previous administration estimated the rule would prevent roughly 180,000 tons a year of methane from escaping into the atmosphere and would boost federal revenue because firms pay only royalties on the federal resources they capture and contain.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) unexpectedly voted no against a motion to proceed with consideration of the resolution, along with GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.). Two Democrats who had considered backing the rule’s elimination — Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — voted against the motion as well.
In a floor speech after the vote, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), said “the very first victory” lawmakers have had in beating back a Congressional Review Act bill this year came from a combination of Democratic unity and a few Republicans’ willingness to buck their leadership. “Thank you so much for coming forward and seeing the common sense nature of this issue,” Udall said, referring to Collins, Graham and McCain.
Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society, praised the lawmakers who supported the rule. “In recent months, thousands of Americans asked the Senate to stand up for clean air and against the oil lobby, and their efforts were successful today,” he said.
Republicans and industry officials said they would now switch their focus to getting the Interior Department to rewrite the rule.
Barry Russell, president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said his group “looks forward to working with the Interior Department on a targeted, meaningful solution that will achieve the common goal of ensuring the American taxpayers receive a fair and equitable return in the form of royalties while developing a workable regulation, instead of this one-size-fits-all approach.”
[EPA dismisses half of key board’s scientific advisers; Interior suspends more than 200 advisory panels]
And Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in a statement that Interior should withdraw the regulation outright. “If left in place, this regulation will only discourage energy production, job creation, and economic opportunity across the West.”
Before this year, Congress had only nullified one rule, a regulation on ergonomics Bill Clinton enacted during his final year in office. In less than four months Republicans have wiped away rules covering everything from limits on the dumping of waste from surface mining operations to enlarging states’ power to offer retirement accounts to private-sector workers.
But the move to strike a rule requiring companies to limit the practice of flaring, or leaking, methane from oil and gas operations on federal and tribal land had given some Republicans–who control 52 seats in the Senate–pause.
Senate Press Gallery ? @SenatePress
#senate vote on HJ Res 36, the CRA on the methane rule was NOT agreed to 49-51. Collins, Graham and McCain joined all Dems/IND against.
7:27 AM - 10 May 2017
236 236 Retweets 516 516 likes
:{
}:
Many Republicans and fossil fuel producers criticized the regulation after it was finalized last year, and a resolution to repeal it passed quickly in the House of Representatives at the end of January. But despite Trump’s support, the repeal measure had been sitting in the Senate for months. It had to pass by Thursday to be eligibleto be signed into law.
:{
}:
Democrats, as well as environmental and public health groups, ran a months-long campaign to persuade Heitkamp and Manchin not to disclose their position publicly while arguing to centrist Republicans that abolishing the rule would cost taxpayers money as well as harm the environment.
[Trump undertakes the most ambitious regulatory rollback since Reagan]
:{
}:
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) also remained on the fence until Monday, when he announced in a statement that he would vote to overturn the BLM regulation. Two other wavering Republicans, Cory Gardner (Colo.) and Dean Heller (Nev.), ultimately joined Portman in voting to proceed with the bill’s consideration.
“Unfortunately, the previous administration’s methane rule was not a balanced approach,” Portman said. “As written, it would have hurt our economy and cost jobs in Ohio by forcing small independent operators to close existing wells and slowing responsible energy production on federal lands. There’s a better way.”
He added that he believes the Interior Department should still work to reduce venting and flaring on public lands. Last week, Portman wrote to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, calling for a commitment that the department would continue to work to reduce methane waste if the Obama rule were reversed. On May 4, Zinke responded, affirming that “the Department is committed to reducing methane waste, and under my leadership, we will take important steps to accomplish this goal.”
Environmentalists urged Portman to reconsider. In a statement on Tuesday, Environmental Defense Action Fund Executive Director Fred Krupp said Zinke’s assurances were “unfounded” and argued that the strategies for reducing methane waste outlined in his letter would have little impact.
A coalition of industry groups have argued they are taking steps to reduce fugitive methane emissions, because they recognize capturing them can yield additional profits. The American Petroleum Institute noted that the Environmental Protection Agency data, released in March, shows about an 8 percent drop in methane emissions from petroleum production since 2014, largely because of improved gas venting and flaring techniques.
The legislative window for Congressional Review Act resolutions to be considered ends on Thursday, though a handful of conservative analysts believe that agencies’ failure to submit a 2-page report on previous rules to Congress could open the door to reconsideration of dozens of much older rules.
Curtis Copeland, a regulatory expert who specialized in American government at the Congressional Research Service, said in an email that regardless of how many rules this Congress ultimately overturns, “The CRA can no longer be described as ‘obscure’ or ‘little known.’ It now has to be viewed as a substantive tool of congressional oversight regarding an outgoing President’s rules, and it is likely be used again in the future.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03032017/scott-pruitt-environmental-protection-agency-methane-greenhouse-gas-climate-change
==
intercept
Text Describing Federal Fracking Rule Disappears From Interior Department Website
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/15/text-describing-federal-fracking-rule-disappears-from-interior-department-website/
Alleen Brown — Feb. 15
Text describing two rules regulating the oil and gas industry was removed from the Interior Department website.
===
==
revised EPA study more legit than earlier?
years of living dangerously
==
http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-staggering-social-and-environmental-costs-of-food-waste/
==
park fdn?
=
http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/10/epa-fracking-methane-emissions/
whistleblower
...
An environmental watchdog alleges that the answer may be a years-long, systematic cover-up of the true data surrounding these toxic emissions. That cover-up, the group says, was at the hands of at least one EPA researcher who accepted payments from the oil and gas industry.
In an incendiary federal complaint filed on Wednesday with the EPA’s Inspector General, the 28-year-old North Carolina-based group NC WARN wrote that “there has been a persistent and deliberate cover-up that has prevented the agency from requiring the natural gas industry to make widespread, urgently needed and achievable reductions in methane venting and leakage (’emissions’) across the nation’s expanding natural gas infrastructure.”
“Studies relied upon by EPA to develop policy and regulations were scientifically invalid,” the organization charged.
Specifically, wrote NC WARN in a press statement,“Dr. David Allen, then-head of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, has led an ongoing, three-year effort to cover up underreporting of the primary device, the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler and a second device used to measure gas releases from equipment across the natural gas industry. Allen is also on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been funded by the oil and gas industries for years.”
“The EPA’s failure to order feasible reductions of methane leaks and venting has robbed humanity of crucial years to slow the climate crisis,” said Jim Warren, director of NC WARN. “The cover-up by Allen’s team has allowed the industry to dig in for years of delay in cutting emissions—at the worst possible time.”
The cover-up was discovered by NC WARN, the group wrote in its complaint, when it became aware that the very inventor of the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler, an engineer named Touché Howard, had been attempting to blow the whistle for years on the crucial instrument’s malfunctioning. The critical failure causes the instrument to under-report methane emissions “up to 100-fold,” the organization wrote.
Studies have shown the EPA underestimating methane leaks from fracked gas production for years and Howard’s own research found that the agency has been “hugely underestimating” methane emissions specifically as a result of the faulty instrument, asCommon Dreams reported.
“In the extreme, that kind of failure could lead to catastrophic explosions,” Howard told the Los Angeles Times.
The complaint describes Howard’s repeated attempts to warn the EPA and Allen about the instrument and the silence he received in response.
“It appears that the goal of the [University of Texas] team was not to critically examine the problems but to convince [Environmental Defense Fund, who co-authored the study] and its production committee members that no problems existed,” NC WARN added.
“We believe Mr. Howard was specifically prevented from providing input because the [University of Texas] team knew that he would be able to show that their counterarguments were faulty and the resulting studies scientifically invalid,” the group concluded.
Howard’s concerns and the specific mechanical problems of the measurement instrument he has repeatedly pointed out have to this date never been addressed, “resulting in the failure of the EPA to accurately report methane emissions for more than two years, much less require reductions,” the complaint noted. “Meanwhile, the faulty data and measuring equipment are still being used extensively throughout the natural gas industry worldwide.”
Indeed, a graphic included in the complaint demonstrates that the malfunctioning Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler is relied upon to measure methane emissions at nearly every point in the fracked gas production process:
==
==
http://www.alternet.org/environment/global-warmings-terrifying-new-chemistry
Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.
There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet methane, otherwise known as CH4.
In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere.
To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2. Partly as a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that burn natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2. But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000.
These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread.
The Obama administration, to its credit, seems to be waking up to the problem. Over the winter, the EPA began to revise its methane calculations, and in early March, the United States reached an agreement with Canada to begin the arduous task of stanching some of the leaks from all that new gas infrastructure. But none of this gets to the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking. Carbon dioxide is driving the great warming of the planet, but CO2 isn’t doing it alone. It’s time to take methane seriously.
* * *
To understand how we got here, it’s necessary to remember what a savior fracked natural gas looked like to many people, environmentalists included. As George W. Bush took hold of power in Washington, coal was ascendant, here and around the globe. Cheap and plentiful, it was most visibly underwriting the stunning growth of the economy in China, where, by some estimates, a new coal-fired power plant was opening every week. The coal boom didn’t just mean smoggy skies over Beijing; it meant the planet’s invisible cloud of carbon dioxide was growing faster than ever, and with it the certainty of dramatic global warming.
So lots of people thought it was great news when natural-gas wildcatters began rapidly expanding fracking in the last decade. Fracking involves exploding the sub-surface geology so that gas can leak out through newly opened pores; its refinement brought online new shale deposits across the continent—most notably the Marcellus Shale, stretching from West Virginia up into Pennsylvania and New York. The quantities of gas that geologists said might be available were so vast that they were measured in trillions of cubic feet and in centuries of supply.
The apparently happy fact was that when you burn natural gas, it releases half as much carbon dioxide as coal. A power plant that burned natural gas would therefore, or so the reasoning went, be half as bad for global warming as a power plant that burned coal. Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win situation. You could appease the environmentalists with their incessant yammering about climate change without having to run up the cost of electricity. It would be painless environmentalism, the equivalent of losing weight by cutting your hair.
It’s possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years.
And it appeared even better than that. If you were President Obama and had inherited a dead-in-the-water economy, the fracking boom offered one of the few economic bright spots. Not only did it employ lots of people, but cheap natural gas had also begun to alter the country’s economic equation: Manufacturing jobs were actually returning from overseas, attracted by newly abundant energy. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama declared that new natural-gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but would create 600,000 new jobs by decade’s end. In his 2014 address, he announced that “businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in factories that use natural gas,” and pledged to “cut red tape” to get it all done. In fact, the natural-gas revolution has been a constant theme of his energy policy, the tool that made his restrictions on coal palatable. And Obama was never shy about taking credit for at least part of the boom. Public research dollars, he said in 2012, “helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”
Obama had plenty of help selling natural gas—from the fossil-fuel industry, but also from environmentalists, at least for a while. Robert Kennedy Jr., who had enormous credibility as the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote a paean in 2009 to the “revolution…over the past two years [that] has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.” Meanwhile, the longtime executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, had not only taken $25 million from one of the nation’s biggest frackers, Chesapeake Energy, to fund his organization, but was also making appearances with the company’s CEO to tout the advantages of gas, “an excellent example of a fuel that can be produced in quite a clean way, and shouldn’t be wasted.” (That CEO, Aubrey McClendon, apparently killed himself earlier this month, crashing his car into a bridge embankment days after being indicted for bid-rigging.) Exxon was in apparent agreement as well: It purchased XTO Energy, becoming the biggest fracker in the world overnight and allowing the company to make the claim that it was helping to drive emissions down.
For a brief shining moment, you couldn’t have asked for more. As Obama told a joint session of Congress, “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”
* * *
Unless, of course, you happened to live in the fracking zone, where nightmares were starting to unfold. In recent decades, most American oil and gas exploration had been concentrated in the western United States, often far from population centers. When there were problems, politicians and media in these states paid little attention.
The Marcellus Shale, though, underlies densely populated eastern states. It wasn’t long before stories about the pollution of farm fields and contamination of drinking water from fracking chemicals began to make their way into the national media. In the Delaware Valley, after a fracking company tried to lease his family’s farm, a young filmmaker named Josh Fox produced one of the classic environmental documentaries of all time, Gasland, which became instantly famous for its shot of a man lighting on fire the methane flowing from his water faucet.
This reporting helped galvanize a movement—at first town by town, then state by state, and soon across whole regions. The activism was most feverish in New York, where residents could look across the Pennsylvania line and see the ecological havoc that fracking caused. Scores of groups kept up unrelenting pressure that eventually convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban it. Long before that happened, the big environmental groups recanted much of their own support for fracking: The Sierra Club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, not only turned down $30 million in potential donations from fracking companies but came out swinging against the practice. “The club needs to…advocate more fiercely to use as little gas as possible,” he said. “We’re not going to mute our voice on this.” As for Robert Kennnedy Jr., by 2013 he was calling natural gas a “catastrophe.”
In the end, one of the most important outcomes of the antifracking movement may have been that it attracted the attention of a couple of Cornell scientists. Living on the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea got interested in the outcry. While everyone else was focused on essentially local issues—would fracking chemicals get in the water supply?—they decided to look more closely at a question that had never gotten much attention: How much methane was invisibly being leaked by these fracking operations?
Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win situation.
Because here’s the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don’t—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked—maybe as little as 3 percent—then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.
To say that no one in power wanted to hear this would be an understatement. The two scientists were roundly attacked by the industry; one trade group called their study the “Ivory Tower’s latest fact-free assault on shale gas exploration.” Most of the energy establishment joined in. An MIT team, for instance, had just finished an industry-funded report that found “the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable”; one of its lead authors, the ur-establishment energy expert Henry Jacoby, described the Cornell research as “very weak.” One of its other authors, Ernest Moniz, would soon become the US secretary of energy; in his nomination hearings in 2013, he lauded the “stunning increase” in natural gas as a “revolution” and pledged to increase its use domestically....
==
http://www.alternet.org/environment/epa-announces-plan-cut-methane-emissions-oil-and-gas-industry
We would like to alert you to InsideClimate News's latest special report, publishing today: EDF Sparks Mistrust, and Admiration, With its Methane Research. The story, with an accompanying sidebar and a graphic on EDF's funding, is the result of a three-month reporting project led by our reporters Lisa Song and Katherine Bagley. It highlights the unique role—critics call it an ill-fitting one—that the Environmental Defense Fund has carved for itself as both an environmental group and a partner with the oil and gas industry in its research into methane emissions. EDF is one of the country's oldest and most venerable environmental groups, but when it launched the project to study emissions from the fracking industry, it decided to collaborate with—and accept funding from—industry. While even EDF's critics say the work fills a critical void, many environmentalists are calling for a ban on fracking while the risks to public health are fully explored and believe EDF's research will only encourage its spread. |
:{ }: |
EDF Sparks Mistrust, and Admiration, With its Methane Research The Environmental Defense Fund is one of the nation's most venerable environmental organizations, and many consider it one of the most effective. But its industry-collaborative approach to the study of methane leaks in natural gas drilling has drawn scrutiny from other environmental groups, who worry EDF has strayed into a gray area where science and the fossil fuel industry collide. |
:{ }: |
| Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, in his Manhattan office in February 2015. Credit: Lisa Song/InsideClimate News |
:{ }: |
EDF Recruits Sprawling Network to Fund Methane Leaks Research :{:{To fund its $18 million, 16-study investigation into methane emissions from the natural gas industry, the Environmental Defense Fund assembled a sprawling network of private donors, foundations, utilities, fossil fuel companies and others. The project attracted backers with a range of sometimes-conflicting stances on fracking.}: Read more.}: |
:{ }: |