To the US government’s finalization of rules governing methane from oil and gas operations, reactions were predictable. “It’s unfortunate that the Trump administration is once again ignoring facts and common sense only to put the interests of the nation’s worst-run oil and gas companies ahead of the health and welfare of all Americans,” complained an Environmental Defense Fund official about a Sept. 11 final rule by the Environmental Protection Agency. And a Sierra Club official called the Interior Department’s Sept. 18 rule leaving methane venting and flaring on federal and tribal land to state regulation “just a continuation of this administration’s ongoing assault on clean air, public lands, our health, and our climate.”
In 2016, Barack Obama’s last year as president, EPA and the Interior Department imposed burdensome monitoring and reporting requirements and controls either not necessary or best left to states, which in many cases have duplicative regulation. Their aggressive regulation addressed a shrinking problem. EPA’s 2018 inventory of US greenhouse gases (GHG) shows total emissions of methane in 2016 down 16% from their 1990 level and emissions from natural gas systems down by the same percentage. US production of natural gas increased during that period by 54%. These trends were evident when the Obama EPA tightened the regulatory squeeze.
Radiative potential
The superficial rationale for strict regulation of methane is, of course, the light hydrocarbon’s radiative potential, which is tens of times that of carbon dioxide, depending on time in the atmosphere. Supporters of strict controls eagerly cite the elevated warming potential in their arguments treating methane like poison. But they seldom point out that methane’s concentration in the atmosphere is hundreds of times lower than CO2’s. They furthermore ignore how methane emissions are falling even as natural gas production increases. That welcome trend results from a combination of simple economic behavior—release into the atmosphere of a salable substance costs money, after all—and voluntary programs to cut methane emissions at individual companies, coordinated, in many cases, by trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute.
Industry initiatives naturally receive short notice from critics. To them, reduction of methane emissions seems not to count unless it results from regulatory strangulation, a consistent result of the Obama administration’s approach to oil, natural gas, and coal. Methane regulation was just one element in a broad strategy—ranging from increased taxation to withdrawal of federal acreage from leasing—aimed at discouraging the production and use of hydrocarbons.
Perversely, a toughening of methane works against the overarching goal of Obama-era energy and environmental policy: mitigation of climate change. Worldwide, the most effective tactic for lowering CO2 so far has been substitution of coal by natural gas as a fuel for generating electricity. In the US, it’s the main reason CO2 emissions fell in 2015 and 2016, according to the EPA inventory, and were only 0.2% higher in 2016 than they were in 1990. The US gross domestic product between those years grew by 89%. The Obama administration’s myopic targeting of methane was not a sound way to resist warming of the planet. It instead represented political deference to environmental extremists pushing an economically hopeless campaign against hydrocarbon energy.
The Trump EPA and Interior Department are right to redress their predecessors’ costly and unnecessary excesses. The climate and people affected by it will benefit from the improvement.
American ingenuity
“The US has reduced greenhouse gases more than any country on Earth over the last decade,” said an EPA official when the agency released its latest GHG inventory. “American ingenuity and technology breakthroughs, not top-down government mandates, have made the US the world leader in achieving energy dominance while reducing emissions—one of the great environmental successes of our time.”
The official might not have made decisions about airline travel class, personal accommodations, and office remodeling with unrivaled political sensitivity, but former Administrator E. Scott Pruitt had the right idea about regulation of energy and the environment.
