Vice-President Kamala Harris attended the United Nations COP28 climate conference in Dubai on Saturday, and pledged that “the United States would spend billions more to help developing nations fight and adapt to climate change.” Separately, at home, the Biden administration made a big announcement.
Her remarks followed an announcement by U.S. officials at the summit the same day that the federal government would, for the first time, require oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane…
…Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that wafts into the atmosphere from pipelines, drill sites and storage facilities, and dangerously speeds the rate of global warming…Methane is not as widely discussed as the carbon dioxide that results from burning fossil fuels, but it has become a rare area of progress this week at the global talks.
It is the second-most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. Methane only lingers in the atmosphere about a decade after it is released, but it is about 80 times more powerful in the short term at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, which remains in the air for centuries.
Scientists say methane is responsible for more than a quarter of the warming that the planet has experienced since the preindustrial era. Cutting methane, they say, is essential to meeting the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal set in the Paris Agreement to avoid the worst effects of global warming, and acting now can help buy the planet time as nations grapple with the more contentious problem of slashing carbon dioxide emissions.
The new regulation would prevent 58 million tons of methane emissions by 2038, officials said. That’s about the equivalent of all the carbon dioxide emitted by American coal-fired power plants in a single year.
U.S. climate enjoy John Kerry noted that it’s relatively easy to prevent methane leaks since it’s basically a plumbing challenge. That might oversimplify things a bit, but it’s definitely an easier political lift. Leaked methane is a lost resource and isn’t really in anyone’s interests. But smaller outfits might not be able to continue their operations because the plumbing challenge can be quite expensive. That’s why we’re seeing Republican criticism of the new methane rule.
Republicans in Congress said the regulation would hurt the gas industry and raise energy prices for Americans at home.
“Federal overreach to advance a misguided climate agenda has become a staple of the Biden administration,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said in a statement. She called the final rule “just one more example of these harmful regulations.”
Runaway greenhouse heating turned Venus into a hellscape, but at least it didn’t inconvenience any West Virginian oil and gas executives. I’m not optimistic about climate issues, but am glad to see the Biden administration brought something useful to the table with this methane rule.
