I’m incensed by yet another Obama dictate regarding the fake issue of anthropogenic “climate change”….hey, wait, I actually kinda agree with this
(Mother Jones) This morning the White House announced a new plan to crack down on the oil and gas industry’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The move is the last major piece of President Obama’s domestic climate agenda, following in the footsteps of tougher standards for vehicle emissions and a sweeping plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
Like the power plant plan, the methane standards will rely on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act. The new rules will regulate the amount of methane that oil and gas producers are allow vent or leak from their wells, pipelines, and other equipment. Ultimately, according to the White House, the rules will slash methane emissions 40 to 45 percent by 2025. The proposal announced today is intended to be finalized before Obama leaves office, but it’s certain to take a battering along the way from congressional Republicans and fossil fuel interest groups.
Methane makes up a much smaller slice of America’s greenhouse gas footprint than carbon dioxide—the volume of methane released in a year is roughly 10 times smaller than the volume of CO2—so the proposal might seem like small potatoes. But it’s actually a pretty huge deal, for a few reasons.
One of those reasons is that methane is a considerably more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Mother Jones notes it is roughly 20 times more potent. Other measures have it as high as 65 times more potent a greenhouse gas over 100 years. In the short term, it can trap 100 times the “heat” over CO2 over 5 years. Even though it has a shorter time span where it stays in the atmosphere, it still has a much greater power to influence the greenhouse effect. Nor does it seem to have the limitations of the doubling effect, as in the case of CO2.
Methane is one of the reasons I have never said that Mankind has no effect on the greenhouse effect (along with a few other issues), and put Mankind’s effect to around 15-20%. Methane is the reason early IPCC reports and others mentioned agriculture and landfills as two of the worst violators, without mentioning methane, of course.
Of course, this push to regulate methane will primarily effect fossil fuels, including the explosion of the use of natural gas. Surprise! Fossil fuels hatred by people who refuse to give up using them themselves.
That said, it would be worth it to consider reducing methane output where we can.
