‘If people could see this with their bare eyes, none of this would be happening.’
Methane makes up a small portion of greenhouse gas emissions in terms of quantity, but it is one of the most important drivers of climate change, as it’s over 80 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. A significant amount of the extreme warming that we will experience in our lifetimes, and the planetary tipping points that we breach, will be propelled by methane—and emissions are rising faster than ever.
Faced with this emergency, the Trump administration and the 119th Congress have systematically abolished federal controls on its cause. Their assault on climate policy is more thoroughly destructive than any previous Republican government, upending scientific research, industry self-reporting, and data collection while simultaneously dismantling the rules themselves and their enforcement.
The administration also wants to gut the information ecosystem that enables us to monitor the climate crisis. President Trump wants to burn the satellites that observe climate pollution from space and shut down the Mauna Loa Observatory, the source of the famous graph tracking the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To cap it off, Trump’s EPA is aiming to revoke the scientific finding that greenhouse gas pollution poses a risk to the public’s health and well-being, the bedrock of climate policy in the United States.
The U.S. oil and gas industry is one of the top culprits responsible for rising methane pollution worldwide, and we have more data than ever to prove it. As the Trump administration does everything it can to help the industry evade accountability, it’s worth acknowledging that the scope and severity of the methane problem far outstripped the Biden administration’s attempts to constrain it. Yet if the previous administration brought financial incentives to a gunfight against gangsters, this current administration is providing reinforcements to the bad guys.
Continue reading for free in The American Prospect.
Image: Methane plume in New Mexico by Marit Jentoft-Nilsen with NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio is in the public domain.
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