Posted on 01/19/2015 8:58:15 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced major new regulations on the emissions of methane into the air from oil and gas production. It calls methane a “potent” pollutant and its new rules would require a 45 percent reduction by 2025 from 2012 levels. Most Americans support these new rules, according to polling from environmental groups. This isn’t surprising. Methane sounds like a dirty and dangerous pollutant and even deadly if leaked into water or the air.
However, methane is just another term for the main component of natural gas. Drillers have a powerful motive to stop leakage on their own, because they want to sell it, not spill it.
How much of a menace is methane from the oil and gas industry? The amount of leakage into the atmosphere is minuscule, says Dan Kish of the Energy Research Institute. “Cows emit more methane when they pass gas than the natural gas industry,” he notes. Look for the EPA to start regulating cattle.
Green groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund warn that emissions will increase through 2018 and have been claiming that drillers spew more methane into the atmosphere than ever before, that it is “84 times more potent” a pollutant than carbon dioxide, and new regulations are overdue.
Actually, these claims are blatantly false. Not only is methane nontoxic (propaganda notwithstanding), but methane emissions are way down over the last seven years without these new regulations. Furthermore, the reductions correspond with a major increase in oil and gas drilling and increased use of fracking technologies.
The EPA’s own data confirm this. From 2005 to 2012, methane emissions from natural gas systems have fallen by 15 percent while natural gas marketed production from drilling is up by more than 33 percent. (See chart.)
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
This is the crisis de jour
the real problems that need to be totally eliminated are moonbat activists. collectively they are America’s greatest economic problem. If they were gone, their economic braking actions gone, we could all be rich
The EPA rules and regs are designed to help environmentalists regulate the economy to death. How do you fix that without a GOP sweep of all branches?
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>> “What’s next, ‘catalytic converters’ for livestock?” <<
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How about cognitive converters for liberals!
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Your GOP sweep would just give us more GOPe drones to vote for Boner.
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We need a department of Inconvenient Facts to sweep this data under the rug.
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“How about cognitive converters for liberals!”
But that would imply that there is some basis for cognition.
“Or catalytic converters for humans...”
Interim solution: Eliminate team sports on TV. No beer, no pizza, no chilli dogs; ergo reduced “emissions.”
For conservatives to succeed and thrive politically, we’ll need to learn to work with the army with have. You don’t get to play, if you don’t win.
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Putting more GOPe shills in office is not “winning.”
Mystery Babylon is not going to help us; they are who we are fighting.
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A new set of regulations on the oil and natural-gas industries, targeting emissions of methane are based on shoddy climate science.
Letters, S. Fred Singer, WSJ, Jan 15, 2015
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-rethink-new-methane-policy-letters-to-the-editor-1421363688
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/19/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-164/
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