Biden Administration Announces Rule to Cut Millions of Tons of Methane Emissions
Biden Administration Announces Rule to Cut Millions of Tons of Methane Emissions
The measure, which requires oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of the greenhouse gas, came as the U.S. vice president spoke at the COP28 climate summit.
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.
Basically: oil firms didn't care about methane released into the atmosphere unless it reached concentrations high enough to cause fires and explosions. So there's a history of things like oilfield equipment powered by releasing compressed methane, as well unfixed leaks and unlit flares. The Inflation Reduction Act has a tax on large-scale methane release by the oil and gas industry, so now there's a lot of interest in finding and fixing leaks.
This is really good news. Methane release has been under the radar for far too long.
its crazy honestly that this has not been a requirement for decades previous to now.
But we're still going to subsidize livestock farming, right?
Changing that requires an act of Congress
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ms. Harris did not mention that new regulation in her remarks, which ran just under five minutes, and came before what was set to be an afternoon of sideline discussions with Middle Eastern leaders centered on the war between Israel and Hamas.
Some groups at the summit also noted the fragility of Ms. Harris’s promise that the United States would send $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which benefits poorer nations.
White House officials would not say on Saturday when or how the president would ask Congress to fund this new request, at a time when lawmakers are constrained by spending caps Mr. Biden negotiated with Republicans during a fight over the nation’s borrowing limit this year.
Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, called the policy “the most impactful climate rule that the United States has ever adopted in terms of addressing temperatures we would otherwise see.”
“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.
“The international community has a responsibility to support the emerging economies in their strategy to phase out coal,” Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said in a meeting about the effort with the leaders of Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.
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