Experts say the new administration can jumpstart climate protections by taking on rising methane emissions, but it won’t be easy or quick.
On his first day in office, President Biden signed a sweeping executive order that stops the Keystone XL pipeline and pauses oil lease sales in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But behind these headlines, the order also requires a thorough review of the Trump administration’s rollbacks on methane pollution. The action signals that the new president may agree with experts who say one of our biggest environmental challenges could also be one of our best opportunities to tackle climate change.
Methane — an invisible and odorless gas — makes up just a tiny trace of the Earth’s atmosphere and survives in the air for only about 10 years before degrading. Yet NASA scientists say this humble molecule has driven one-quarter of human-caused global warming to date.
“Methane is the second-most important heat-trapping pollutant after carbon dioxide, but it packs a bigger wallop in the near term,” says David Doniger, senior strategic director of Climate and Clean Energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a former member of White House Council on Environmental Quality.
The same qualities that make methane emissions so dangerous are also why experts say cutting them would be a promising opportunity for the Biden administration to attempt swift action on climate change.
It’s sorely needed: In January the International Energy Agency said the United States is now the world’s second greatest methane emitter after Russia. To get rid of that distinction and make headway against the climate crisis, experts say, the Biden administration will need a whole-of-government approach to the issue.
Shifting Policies
Scientists have long known of methane’s dangers — and that the energy sector is a top contributor to the global rise in emissions — but it took until late in the Obama administration for the federal government to enact its first broad methane regulations.
Unfortunately, many of them were short-lived.
In 2016 the Obama Environmental Protection Agency used its Clean Air Act authority to take two actions on methane. The first established emissions standards for new oil and gas developments, which the Trump administration overturned last year. The second slowly inched toward regulation of existing methane sources — a much bigger share of methane pollution — by requiring industry to submit data on its emissions. The Trump administration canceled that order within two months of taking office.
In a third action, Obama’s Bureau of Land Management also addressed existing sources by replacing outdated rules on venting, flaring and leaking from oil and gas facilities on federal lands. But in October 2020 the Trump administration unraveled this Methane and Waste Prevention Rule in court, after years of failing to undo it in Congress or through new federal rulemaking.
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