Trump Eliminates Major Methane Rule, Even as Leaks Are Worsening
The weakening of Obama-era efforts to fight climate change amounts to a gift to many oil companies. Researchers warn that the decision ignores science.
The Trump administration formally weakened a major climate-change regulation on Thursday — effectively freeing oil and gas companies from the need to detect and repair methane leaks — even as new research shows that far more of the potent greenhouse gas is seeping into the atmosphere than previously known.
Mapping urban methane leaks.
The rollback of the last major Obama-era climate rule is a gift to many beleaguered oil and gas companies, which have seen profits collapse from the Covid-19 pandemic. But it comes as scientists say that the need to rein in methane leaks at fossil fuel wells nationwide has become far more urgent, and new studies indicate that the scale of methane pollution could be driving the planet toward a climate crisis faster than expected.
Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced at an event in Pittsburgh on Thursday that he had completed the legal process of lifting the methane regulation. He was speaking in a city at the heart of the nation’s natural-gas boom, and in a state that will be critical to winning this fall’s presidential election.
“E.P.A. has been working hard to fulfill President Trump’s promise to cut burdensome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy industry,” he said. “Regulatory burdens put into place by the Obama-Biden administration fell heavily on small and medium-sized energy businesses.”
The E.P.A. estimates that the rule changes will yield economic benefits of roughly $100 million a year through 2030, while leading to the release of about 850,000 tons of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere over the same period.
Arctic Methane Leaks Go Undetected Because Equipment Can’t Handle the Cold.
Mr. Wheeler has justified the move by citing E.P.A. data showing that leaks from domestic oil and gas wells have remained steady over the past decade, even as oil and gas production boomed.
However, numerous recent studies show the opposite: that methane emissions from drilling sites in the United States are far more extensive than the E.P.A.’s official numbers. Overall, methane levels are in fact climbing steadily nationwide, according to the research, and have reached record highs globally in part because of leaks from fossil fuel production.
“Over the past few years there has been an explosion of new research on this, and the literature has coalesced — 80 percent of papers show that methane from oil and gas leaks is two to three times higher than the E.P.A.’s estimates,” said Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University, who last year published a study estimating that North American gas production was responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade.
“It’s crazy to roll back this rule,” said Dr. Howarth. “Twenty-five percent of the human-caused warming over the past 20 years is due to methane. Methane is going up. We need it to go down.”
Scientists say that the new data on soaring levels of methane means that, even if the world’s governments were somehow able to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement — in which every nation agreed to lower their carbon dioxide pollution — those achievements could be wiped out by the heat-trapping power of all the previously uncounted methane in the atmosphere.
Already, the effectiveness of the Paris pact is imperiled, since Mr. Trump has withdrawn the United States from it. But environmentalists are hopeful that it could be restored if Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidential election this fall and the United States rejoins the agreement.
“The Paris Agreement was not taking into account the new increase in concentrations of methane,” said Peter Raymond, an ecologist at Yale who co-authored a study published in July concluding that global levels of methane have surged to record heights.
“Because methane is so powerful, this rise could offset a lot of the goals in the Paris agreement,” he said. That could intensify many of the already baked-in near-term effects of a warming planet, such as extended droughts, deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes and more devastating coastal flooding.
Methane comes from various sources in addition to energy production, including animal digestive tracts and landfills, and it lingers in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, which comes from burning fossil fuels. But methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
In recent years, the United States has cemented its place as one of the world’s biggest producers of oil and natural gas, a result of the fracking boom. However, a shortage of pipelines, combined with low prices for natural gas caused by the abundant supply, has meant there’s less of a financial incentive to prevent leaks at drill sites.
During his administration, President Barack Obama sought to use executive power to fight climate change with a suite of E.P.A. regulations that targeted three major sources of planet-warming pollution: carbon dioxide emissions from cars and from coal-burning power plants, and methane leaks from wells. At the time, the methane rule was seen as slightly less consequential than the other two rules, addressing cars and coal plants, in part because data showed significantly lower levels of methane in the atmosphere than of carbon dioxide.
President Trump last year rolled back the rule on coal-plant pollution, and this spring he significantly weakened the rule on auto pollution.
But now, as Mr. Trump rounds the final turn of his unraveling of Mr. Obama’s climate legacy, scientists say that the importance of reining in methane has become far greater as the data has piled up indicating the scale of the leaks.
