The Most Important Mystery about U.S. Climate Change Policy

by Chris Mooney (The Washington Post) ... Environmentalists have charged for some time that the fracking boom — the rise in unconventional natural gas that is the key driver of all of this — has a dark underbelly. Natural gas’s principal component is methane, which is also a greenhouse gas. And if it gets to the atmosphere unburned, it has a much larger warming effect than carbon dioxide does, over a period of about 10 years.

So if there are enough leaks from the new wave of unconventional oil and gas drilling operations, it is possible to substantially undermine the climate benefits that accrue from less burning of coal — and moreover, to do so over the crucial next few decades, when all the key changes have to be made if there’s any hope of averting the worst climate damage.

Recent events and recent science alike are now forcing this issue. The Aliso Canyon natural gas leak near Los Angeles was simply enormous, pouring nearly 100,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere. It was the “largest methane leak in U.S. history,” according to a recent report by the scientific advisory panel of the Climate & Clean Air Coalition, a group of countries and partners trying to reduce emissions of short-lived climate change pollutants, such as methane. Similarly, a recently released infrared camera survey, conducted by helicopter, of some 8,000 U.S. oil and gas well pads in a number of high producing regions found leaks at 327 pads, or 4 percent overall. It concluded that the EPA “may be underestimating” emissions caused by oil and gas tanks on these sites in particular.

Meanwhile, still more recent satellite research is suggesting that U.S. methane emissions are on a big upswing ...

“It would be very tempting to say it’s the rise in oil and gas production, the fracking, and so on,” says Daniel Jacob, a Harvard researcher who is one of the study’s authors. “But the pattern is not necessarily that. It could also be an underestimate of livestock emissions, those tend to be regionally overlapping.”

Faced with contradictory studies like this, it helps to turn to expert assessments of the weight of the evidence. One example comes in the form of a recent annual report by the scientific advisory panel of the Climate & Clean Air Coalition. That board is comprised of a star-studded, international group of 14 scientists and experts, led by Drew Shindell of Duke University.

And this group is unprepared to let U.S. oil and gas off the hook. Its report asserts that atmospheric methane levels are rising “rapidly” and that the cause “is likely due to a number of factors, including increased emissions from agriculture activities, large increases in natural gas extraction and associate leaks.”

Duke’s Drew Shindell, chair of the panel, further alluded to oil and gas in an interview. “I think what all these results are suggesting is that, to first order, their efforts to reduce emissions from the oil and gas industry are a good thing, and they should keep going with that,” he said. “But the next level is that they need to make more progress and prevent overall methane emissions from going up as we exploit natural gas resources more, which is what appears to have been happening in the US.”

The good news, suggests Jackson (Rob Jackson, a researcher at Stanford who contributed to the recent helicopter based infrared camera study), is that while it’s very hard to do anything about a global trend in agricultural emissions, it’s not so hard to clamp down on U.S. oil and gas leaks, which his latest study suggests are worse in some key areas — which means they can be targeted. READ MORE