Commentary: Even Big Oil sees no need to relax methane rules
By the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board
There’s an important set of numbers included in the Trump administration’s announcement Aug. 29 that it plans to kill Obama-era requirements that oil and gas companies prevent methane from leaking out of new wells, pipelines and storage facilities. The proposed rollback, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, would save the $280-billion industry from $17 million to $19 million a year. Economically speaking, that’s peanuts. So, clearly, this deregulatory push isn’t about removing an onerous financial burden on an industry.
Rather, it’s rooted in President Trump’s almost visceral dislike for regulations of just about any stripe, as well as his goal of making the United States the world’s dominant producer of oil and gas. Global warming? Air quality? Not his concern.
“The Trump administration recognizes that methane is valuable,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in announcing the move, and therefore that “the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use.” In other words, there’s no need for the government to tell the industry that it ought to do something because, well, it will do it anyway out of its own economic self-interest.
That’s not how the world works. And it fails to strike the right balance between the interests of the oil and gas industry — whose smaller players are agitating for the change even as some of the biggest ones oppose it — and the health and well-being of all the rest of us.
When released into the atmosphere, methane is by some estimates 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t linger as long. But because it has such a pronounced impact in the short term, it is vitally important that humankind minimize methane releases if we are to have any hope of limiting the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the goal set in the 2015 Paris climate accord. And, obviously, the proposed rule would make it even more difficult to hold that rise to 1.5 degrees, which many scientists believe is necessary to avoid some of the most devastating consequences of climate change.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/commentary-even-big-oil-sees-no-need-to-relax-methane-rules/