Forced precision no help to leasing decision accuracy

March 22, 2019
Confusion about precision and accuracy works deviously in the politics of climate.  

Confusion about precision and accuracy works deviously in the politics of climate.

It glows, for example, in a Mar. 20 judicial finding that the Bureau of Land Management fell short in its assessment of climate effects when it issued oil and gas leases in Wyoming during 2015-16.

“BLM did not adequately quantify the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing,” decreed Judge Rudolph Contreras of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

In other words, the bureau was not precise enough in its environmental assessments.

“BLM summarized the potential on-the-ground impacts of climate change in the state, the region, and across the country,” the ruling said. “It failed, however, to provide the information necessary for the public and agency decision-makers to understand the degree to which the leasing decisions at issue would contribute to those impacts.”

Indeed, the agency might have projected the number of wells drilled on prospective leases, the resulting oil and gas production, and the end uses of produced hydrocarbons—whether as fuel, say, or as petrochemical feedstock.

From those and other assumptions it could have estimated emissions of greenhouse gases and predicted the effect on globally averaged temperature, needing to assert, from among the many available, an estimate for temperature sensitivity to change in greenhouse-gas concentration.

This process, as the judge suggests, would have given public and agency decision-makers data with which to balance the benefits of leasing against the contribution to global warming.

Judgments, however, would have been specious.

Assessments produced this way cannot reasonably approximate reality. Especially before leasing, they reflect many assumptions involving multiple variables with wide ranges of possible values.

Quantification requires that those values be averaged. While results might seem precise, inherent variability means they cannot be accurate. They cannot help decision-making.

Groups like plaintiffs in the Wyoming leasing case care little about decision quality, of course. They just want to block leasing.

In the Contreras ruling, essentially a requirement for impossibility, they have a new weapon.

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Mar. 22, 2019. To comment, join the Commentary channel at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity.)