Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Virtually all of these papers and the FAO’s figure of 14.5 percent are flawed because they employ a formula for equating the climate impact of methane emissions with that of carbon dioxide— through the unit known as “CO2 equivalent “— which is highly misleading.
Though the flashing sign is meant to celebrate the fracking boom, Sharon Wilson, Texas coordinator of Earthworks, sees it as a warning sign of the urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change.
As a result of increasing human-caused emissions, atmospheric methane levels today are two-and-a-half times higher than in 1800.
I can see big advantages, both environmental and ethical in reducing the production and consumption of grain-fed meat, be it chicken, pork or beef. But there is an overwhelmingly important case why we should continue to produce and eat meat from animals predominantly reared on grass, especially when it is species-rich and not fertilised with nitrogen out of a bag.
A team led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the oil and gas industry is responsible for the largest share of the world’s rising methane emissions, which are a major factor in climate change — and in the process the researchers resolved one of the mysteries that has plagued climate scientists over the past several years.
When B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission identified significant methane leaks from hundreds of gas wells in 2013, the energy regulator withheld that information from BC Liberal politicians. Members of the former Christy Clark government wrongly claimed that B.C. wells didn’t leak and that the province’s shale gas industry was “clean.”
The evidence is overwhelming that natural gas has no net climate benefit in any timescale that matters to humanity. In fact, a shocking new study concludes that just the methane emissions escaping from New Mexico’s gas and oil industry are “equivalent to the climate impact of approximately 12 coal-fired power plants.” If the goal is to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, a recent report by U.K. climate researchers finds “categorically no role” to play for new natural gas production.
Because of the difference in nature between methane and carbon dioxide we should cease expressing the climate effect of methane in carbon dioxide equivalents. This has important implications for policy as well as for the assessment of different strategies for minimizing the climate effect of production or lifestyles. Culling all cows may sound like a great proposition if we use the conventional metrics but is actually a rather futile effort to curb climate change.
Abandoned offshore oil and gas wells in the North Sea may be a source of significant methane emissions finds a new study, which claims to be the first to measure the amount of methane leaking from offshore wells. According to the study published recently in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, about one third of the region’s wells could be releasing between 3 and 17 thousand tonnes of methane into the North Sea each year. “
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently added to the string of struck federal executive actions when it overruled an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to delay Obama-era methane regulations, rejecting claims by the EPA that the oil and gas industry wasn’t allowed to comment on the rules.
The Trump administration’s anti-regulatory environmental agenda suffered a major blow this week, with a federal court ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could not suspend an Obama-era methane rule. The rule limits methane emissions from new oil and gas operations and requires operators to submit to either semi-annual or quarterly emissions monitoring. It also requires operators report and fix any methane leaks in their equipment.
Here’s what the Trudeau government definitely knows about the science of methane. The gas accounts for more than one-quarter of all global warming, and reliable data from satellite and airplane surveys show that emissions are increasing, largely from the oil and gas industry.
