Without context, the senseless can seem sensible.
"I think most people would agree that we should be using our nation's natural gas to power our economy-not wasting it by venting and flaring it into the atmosphere," said US Interior Sec. Sally Jewell while proposing to control methane emissions from natural gas work on federal land. Who can disagree? Who favors waste? Who would flare or vent natural gas that otherwise could be put to economic use?
If these were the only relevant considerations, toughened regulation might be in order. But, of course, they're not. Context is important.
A shrinking problem
In relation to all emissions of troublesome substances, the targeted problem is minor. Concern focuses on methane's potency as a greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times that of carbon dioxide over 100 years. Yet human activity puts much less methane than CO2 into the atmosphere, and amounts are falling. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, total methane emissions in the US fell by 15% during 1990-2013. Over that period, a drop in emissions associated with oil and gas more than offset increases from agricultural sources.
As the lightest hydrocarbon, moreover, methane offers balancing advantages as a combustion fuel. Indeed, the increasing replacement of coal by natural gas in power generation explains why US emissions of greenhouse gases have subsided. By discouraging the development gas supply, tough methane regulation thus would compromise progress toward a priority goal by focusing on a subordinate problem that happens to be shrinking.
The Interior Department's initiative precedes a proposal to regulate methane from new or modified facilities coming from EPA, which during the administration of Barack Obama has earned a reputation for regulatory zealousness. Last year, the agency demonstrated its lack of perspective by tightening ambient air standards for ozone-concentrations of which, like methane emissions, are falling-to levels certain to throw many areas out of compliance and to create enormous cost.
Most people would agree, as Jewell would say, that incremental progress on a fading problem doesn't warrant new and costly regulation. But EPA has clever ways of dealing with concerns like that. In estimates of the benefits promised by its initiatives, the agency habitually counts "cobenefits"-cuts in emissions of pollutants not directly targeted and subject to separate regulation. The practice results in double-counting and exaggeration of benefits.
EPA used this tactic to justify its Clean Power Plan rule, which blocks construction of coal-fired power plants. While the rule addresses emissions of CO2, much of the promised benefit relates to the health effects of lowering emissions of other regulated substances. EPA further skewed the rule's cost-benefit balance by presenting costs incurred only in the US against gains presumed to occur worldwide from trimming greenhouse-gas emissions.
That these deceptions erode EPA's credibility is bad enough. Even worse is the boost they give to suspicions that the agency cares more about implementing an extreme environmental program than it does about democratic governance. EPA needs chastening not likely to be delivered by a president who craves the adoration of environmentalists.
A broader threat
The Interior Department plays on this team. If the department really wanted to discourage flaring and venting of natural gas it would work to expedite permitting of pipelines and gathering systems. Most wasted gas is produced in association with oil where transport capacity hasn't yet reached new fields and well locations, of which there have been many in recent years. Increasingly, however, pipeline projects encounter resistance and delay. The opposition comes from groups seeking to block resource development in fanciful service to climate-change mitigation. Members of those groups draft EPA regulations. Alumni of those groups hold EPA jobs.
The Interior Department's methane proposal, like its companion due from EPA, has to do less with trimming waste than with truncating the production and use of hydrocarbon energy. Context makes this clear. The oil and gas industry should treat methane regulation as part of a broader threat.
