https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-methane-rule-climate-crisis-878427/?fbclid=IwAR0Sxl1kTRgTYFBAJnIkqx_46qe0QchEIS54V9Gu7kXinqO-eoeLYkeQBH4
"The EPA is proposing to deregulate the oil and gas industry, to no longer require that new natural gas wells, pipelines and storage facilities include technology to detect and limit leaks of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas, with 28 times the heat trapping effect of carbon dioxide. (Methane is the primary component of natural gas. Thanks to fracking, the United States is the global leader of natural gas production.) The Trump EPA is now governed by climate deniers. Anne Isdal, a former deputy to the Texas land commissioner, is acting administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation told the Wall Street Journal that the purpose of the proposed rule “is to get to the fundamental basis of whether [methane] should have been regulated in the first place,” telling the paper, “I don’t see that there’s going to be some big climate concern here.” The proposed rule would undo methane limits finalized by the Obama administration in 2016. Since those leak monitoring rules were imposed, scientists have discovered that the U.S. oil and gas industry is leaking 60 percent more of the dangerous gas than previously understood — enough to “substantially erode the potential climate benefits” from substituting natural gas for coal. An analysis by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month found that the leaks create the greenhouse equivalent of 69 million cars — not nice. That figure relied on the EPA’s formulas for measuring methane’s climate impacts. Using metrics favored by the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the automobile-equivalent rises to 94 million — or nearly a third of the cars now on the road in the United States."
