Coal producers recoiled last month after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced rules that will dramatically reduce climate-warming carbon emissions over the next decade, and lower the nation’s dependence on coal for electricity. Now, the oil lobby is raising a fuss over the next critical component of the Obama Administration’s climate change strategy: a plan that will reduce methane emissions — a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon— from oil and gas producers.
If the fossil fuel lobbies have any viable alternative, they’ve yet to explain it. The rules won’t impose undue costs on oil producers, and would do the minimum required to abate the effects of climate change. If anything, they aren’t strict enough.
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Methane accounts for the second largest share of climate-warming emissions in the world after carbon, but has 25 times its potency. The new rules will reduce methane emissions by 20 to 30 percent by 2025, administration officials say, by requiring oil and natural gas producers to find and repair leaks from new or revamped wells.
These reductions will fit into the White House’s broader strategy of reducing methane pollution by 40 to 45 percent within the next decade. The rules won’t affect existing drilling infrastructure, which environmental advocates properly say don’t go far enough.
Oil and gas producers — including their lobbies in Ohio — have condemned the rules, claiming they’d be too costly, would kill jobs, and would inflate Americans’ energy costs. These objections are overstated: The EPA estimates making the changes will cost energy producers about $420 million over 10 years, but will generate up to $550 million in savings because of the reduction in methane losses.
The policies have particular salience in Ohio, where much of the nation’s fracking boom has been concentrated. They’re consistent with Ohio’s efforts to limit methane emissions. Last year, Ohio joined just two other states in requiring oil and gas producers to inspect wells for leaks and to seal the leaks promptly, but these rules don’t include reduction targets — critical to any effort to limit greenhouse pollution.
Energy producers claim there’s no need for regulation because they voluntarily have reduced methane emissions over the past two decades. If that’s the case, they should have no trouble meeting the targets set by the EPA.
As a policy, however, voluntary regulation won’t cut it — not while the nation is confronted with the life-threatening effects of climate change, which the United Nations projects will displace or kill millions of people unless the world ends its dependence on fossil fuels by the end of the century. Only specific, enforced reduction targets can meet these goals.
In the coming months, the methane rules, along with the EPA’s rules on power plant emissions, will be challenged in protracted legal battles. Energy lobbies’ short-term profit interest cannot come before America’s long-term economic and security interests. In that regard, the industry cannot be trusted to govern itself.
First Published September 5, 2015, 4:00 a.m.