The Trump action that just might kill us
If you want to understand the long-term consequences of the Trump presidency, forget his Twitter feed. Instead, think about methane. Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas. When released into the atmosphere, it traps 80 times as much heat as its better-known greenhouse-gas cousin, carbon dioxide, over 20 years. Because of methane’s potent heat-trapping abilities, this “super-pollutant” is the sleeper issue of climate change.
Unfortunately, scientists don’t know precisely how much methane is being released because there hasn’t been adequate measurement. But recent studies suggest emissions are much greater than previously believed. In fact, recent research estimates that the fossil-fuel industry emits about 13 million metric tons of methane annually. That’s 80 percent higher than estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. In heat-trapping terms, it is roughly equivalent to total carbon dioxide emissions from all of the United States’ remaining coal-fired plants.
Considering that Death Valley in California on Sunday notched the hottest temperature (130 degrees) recorded on Earth since at least 1931, this is not exactly welcome news.
Much of the methane emitted into the atmosphere comes from undetected leaks in oil and gas operations. So, in 2016, the Obama administration finalized new regulations to detect and plug methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage tanks. These totally reasonable regs were supported by energy companies such as Shell, BP and Exxonmobil; they knew methane leaks were a black eye for the fracking industry, which has marketed natural gas as a more climatefriendly alternative to coal.
“We need to control methane emissions now to maximize the advantages of gas and secure a role for decarbonized gas in the future energy system,” BP wrote in a public comment last year. “Otherwise, we risk losing the confidence of investors, consumers, policymakers and other stakeholders.”
The Trump administration rolled back the rules anyway. In so doing, it provided a useful encapsulation of virtually every awful theme of this administration — and what’s at stake if President Donald Trump gets re-elected.
The new rules, first and foremost, are not merely anti-science, but anti-measurement. That is, the rollback’s primary initial impact is to keep Americans in the dark about a climate-damaging pollutant.
“How could we as an advanced society not want to measure these emissions?” asks Michael Greenstone, director of the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “This is such a concerted effort to stick our heads in the ground.”
Maybe so. But it would be of a piece with Trump’s musings about slowing coronavirus testing so Americans don’t learn how many cases there are; his administration’s decision to cease publishing economic forecasts so Americans can’t assess the problems facing the economy; and its actions to stop collecting or publishing inconvenient data on all sorts of other troubles.
Then, to the extent the administration did rely on data in justifying its methane deregulation, it cooked the books.
It did this by using accounting gimmicks in its official regulatory cost-benefit analysis. In technical documents, the administration said it was no longer taking into account harms that climate change might have outside U.S. borders and also that it was changing the “discount rate” — that is, reducing how much weight it placed upon future costs. It was Trump’s trademark isolationism and short-termism, made mathematically explicit.
The result? The Obama-era estimate of methane’s social costs were ratcheted down from about $1,400 per metric ton to just $55 under a Trump accounting scenario. Incidentally, the Trump administration was admonished for this same phony math in a court case blocking a related environmental rule last month.
But again, funny accounting is par for the course with this president — for environmental rules or otherwise.
So, too, alas, is deregulatory action that disproportionately harms low-income families and people of color. As is Trump’s claim that such harms are necessary to help businesses, even though major businesses themselves reject the “help.”
More broadly, the new methane rules are emblematic of this administration’s faulty assumption that there’s always a tradeoff between what’s good for the economy and what’s good for public health. In fact — whether we’re talking about controlling the novel coronavirus or curbing climate change — the twin goals are complementary. In the longrun, a healthy populace (and environment) are necessary for a healthy economy.