Earlier this month the EPA issued another edict regulating methane emissions and not only does it stink – it’s total nonsense ~ EPA jacks up methane regulations in defiance of science ~
Because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency believes methane – the main component of natural gas – can be 25 times worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, officials Thursday mandated that drillers, processors and pipeliners curb emissions of it by 45 percent.
Why? Because the EPA is run by a bunch of crazed, power-hungry science-deniers.
As Kevin Whitson writes in this article at Western Journalism ~
Unable to enact legislation to support the Paris agreement, the Obama administration is using the EPA to issue sweeping new rules to the oil and gas industry to mitigate their methane leakage from new and existing gas wells […]
The new rules are the latest from the Obama administration’s EPA. Agency administrator Gina McCarthy said the new rules “will help combat climate change and reduce air pollution that immediately harms public health.”
It’s a phony justification; a strawman argument. First, because the industry is already self-policing when it comes to methane leakage. Gas leaks mean profit evaporation, so oil and gas producers have been regulating themselves – without any help from Gina McCarthy. So successfully in fact that they’ve been reducing methane emissions.
Which is the other reason this new regulation is bogus. The oil and gas industry is only one source of methane; it produces thermogenic methane. But there’s another source which accounts for nearly twice as much of the methane in the atmosphere: biogenic methane ~
Thermogenic methane is released from industrial, energy extraction activity. Biogenic methane occurs naturally and is released due to agricultural activity and the melting of typically frozen ground, widely across eastern Europe and western Asia. Thermogenic methane emissions stopped going up in the 90s and haven’t resumed since. It’s the biogenic methane that’s been on the rise.
In fact the very same federal government – in this case the climate experts at NOAA – has already reported that…
… methane emissions from drilling and other human activity are actually declining, not rising, and account for only a fraction of total methane in the atmosphere.
In addition ~
(S)tudy after study has found that methane emissions from the entire natural gas system are already very low – well below the threshold at which scientists say natural gas may lose its greenhouse gas advantage. Further, a new study in the journal Science found that oil and gas production is not to blame for the global spike in emissions.
Source: EnergyinDepth
So again – why? Because they can. Because they can count on a compliant media that refuses to call them out on egregious prosperity-killing regulations like this. Their war on traditional energy sources goes on…
And by extension, the “war” on developing nations ~
But of course the Left is so very caring aren’t they?
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Related:
Methane mendacity – and madness
Humans did affect the atmosphere – even before industrialisation ~ Oops! So maybe it we just rid the planet of humans… Oh never mind, the radicals are already working on it!
