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Senate to Reinstate Obama-Era Controls on Climate-Warming Methane
Senate Democrats on Wednesday will use a once-obscure law to resurrect Obama-era regulations on methane that the Trump administration had wiped away.
A gas flare near Coyanosa, Texas, in August. Credit.Jessica Lutz for The New York Times
April 28, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON The Senate is expected to vote Wednesday to effectively reinstate an Obama-era regulation that sought to clamp down on the release of methane, a powerful, climate-warming pollutant that will have to be controlled to meet President Biden’s ambitious climate change promises.
Taking a page from congressional Republicans who in 2017 made liberal use of a once-obscure law to roll back Obama-era regulations, Democrats will invoke the law to turn back a Trump methane rule enacted late last summer. That rule had eliminated Obama-era controls on leaks of methane, which seeps from oil and gas wells.
2 in the 20-year near term. It accounts for a quarter of anthropogenic global warming we’re experiencing today, and it’s rising alarmingly fast. This month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new data showing methane emissions surged in 2020 by the largest jump since measurements began in 1983.
The Biden administration has a strong early track record on methane, including a pending announcement on methane emissions reduction targets for the fossil fuel industry, 90 percent proposed methane emissions reduction by 2030 for oil and gas in the CLEAN Future Act, $16 billion in the infrastructure bill for capping old oil and gas wells and cleaning up abandoned coal mines, and $35 million to develop new technologies to reduce fugitive methane leakage from fossil fuel operations in the Department of Energy’s ARPA-e program.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) joined a project that would develop special satellites that could identify air pollution “super emitters.” NASA said in a statement on April 15 that its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California would be providing an instrument that would be built into the satellites.
Carbon Mapper, the nonprofit leading the project, aims to use the satellites to provide a more targeted approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“What we’ve learned is that decision support systems that focus just at the level of nation states, or countries, are necessary but not sufficient,” Riley Duren, CEO of Carbon Mapper and a