UPDATE: Trump's EPA Repeals Methane Rule, Unleashes Climate Change

In August 2017, Smart Dissent had this post discussing Scott Pruitt and the EPA's attempt to suspend a rule that restricts methane emissions to fight climate change.   At that time, a court blocked the suspension of the rule, a legal setback for Pruitt, Zinke, and Trump, who are trying to roll back dozens of Obama-era environmental regulations.

In February 2018, Smart Dissent had this post explaining that Trump's swamp was doing an end around to completely repeal rule by gutting it from the inside.

Now.......

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.

The rollback of the last major Obama-era climate rule is a gift to many oil and gas companies.... 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.

Trump's assault on critical environmental protections continues. Why? Because Trump's donors hate them.

Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced at an event in Pittsburgh on Thursday [August 13, 2020] that he had completed the legal process of lifting the methane regulation.  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.... “It’s crazy to roll back this rule.  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.”

The planet is paying the price. We must reverse course.

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.

“Because methane is so powerful, this rise could offset a lot of the goals in the Paris agreement,” 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.   

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.

“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.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/climate/trump-methane.html