Methane rule weakened by administration

Coral Davenport

The Trump administration formally weakened a major climate change regulation 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 beleaguered oil and gas companies, which have seen profits collapse from the COVID19 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, which completed the legal process of lifting the methane regulation Thursday, has justified the move by citing EPA 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 EPA’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% of papers show that methane from oil and gas leaks is two to three times higher than the EPA’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 Howarth. “Twenty-five percent of the humancaused warming over the past 20 years is due to methane.”

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 Trump has withdrawn the United States from it. But environmentalists are hopeful that it could be restored if Joe Biden wins the presidential election this fall and the U.S. 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.