On Tuesday, the Trump administration took the long-anticipated step of reversing an Obama-era rule that would’ve helped prevent leaking, venting, and flaring of methane from oil and gas operations. The rollback doesn’t just kill the final piece of Obama’s climate legacy—it could mean more air pollution entering…
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with an estimated pound-for-pound emissions impact 25 times greater than carbon dioxide over a century-long timescale. So it’s hardly a surprise that the climate-change-denying crew in the White House has decided we need plenty more of it in the Earth’s atmosphere.
An otherworldly cloud phenomena found high in Earth’s atmosphere is becoming more visible due to our greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters this month.
Methane comes from more than cows. As notorious a poster child cattle have become, a huge portion of our methane emissions are produced by the oil and gas industry. A study out Thursday explores how much worse these greenhouse gas emissions actually might be.
If President Donald Trump and his goonies want to go ahead and let methane run wild, they can try. They’ll just have to deal with all the many groups and states across the U.S. that’ll fight back.
The Bureau of Land Management knows what it wants the Methane Waste and Prevention Rule to look like, but the courts have something else in mind.
The Trump administration is still on track to keep regulations on methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon, on the back burner. After putting an Obama-era rule that restricted oil and gas industry methane emissions on hold, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has now begun to rewrite the rule—and its…
There’s been loads of media hype regarding the Arctic “methane bomb,” an idea that rising temperatures could cause a pulse of ancient methane, locked in permafrost and frozen hydrates on the ocean floor, to escape to the atmosphere, triggering catastrophic global warming. Well, we have some positive news for you: a…
PONCA CITY, OK—Sherry Walls should be able to turn on her gas heater to combat the stinging cold of winter without worrying that she might blow up her house. Her home, on a red brick road in Ponca City, Oklahoma, should be a place where her children can safely sleep.
The Trump administration really doesn’t want to impose rules curtailing the venting of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, during oil and gas operations. On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management will officially make its biggest gambit yet to keep the gas pouring into the atmosphere.
A new NASA-sponsored study shows that global methane emissions produced by livestock are 11 percent higher than estimates made last decade. Because methane is a particularly nasty greenhouse gas, the new finding means it’s going to be even tougher to combat climate change than we realized.
Researchers working in the Barents Sea have discovered hundreds of craters on the Arctic Sea floor, some measuring over a kilometer in width. These craters, which date back to the end of the last Ice Age, were formed when large reserves of methane exploded in the wake of retreating ice sheets. Because methane is a…
After years of being missing and presumably dead, the ole maverick McCain poked his head out today to give his fellow Republicans a big middle finger. A vote to kill Obama-era environmental regulations failed to pass the Senate because of McCain, and many believe he did it because his senator colleagues aren’t…
I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known. Don’t know where it goes, but it’s fucking littered with red Skittles that fell off of a truck en route to feed some cows.
Napoleon Dynamite takes a sip from a tall jar of milk, then sets it down next to two other jars. He points. “The defect in that one is bleach.” “That’s correct,” says a judge from FFA, the agricultural education organization. He sips another. “This tastes like the cow got into an onion patch.”
From British Columbia to Northern California, planet Earth’s got a case of the toots. A recent deep ocean mapping survey has learned that a geologically-active strip of seafloor called the Cascadia Subduction Zone is bubbling methane like mad. It could be one of the most active methane seeps on the planet.
When it comes to planet-warming gases we need to worry about, carbon dioxide is at the top of the list. But the runner-up in the climate hall of infamy—methane—is turning out to be a bigger problem than we realized. A study published in Nature today estimates that global methane emissions from the oil and gas…
File this under bad news for humanity’s climate ambitions: The dams and reservoirs we use to harness ‘clean’ hydroelectric power and irrigate our crops apparently emit carbon. A lot of it. All told, man-made reservoirs release roughly a gigaton of heat-trapping greenhouse gases each year. That’s more than the entire…
These soft patches of grass in Siberia look like a cool trampoline, but are actually concealing dangerous bubbles of methane. It’s probably a good thing the guy didn’t shoot the bubble at the end.
The natural gas leak at Aliso Canyon earlier this year was already one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. Several months later, however, it has now gained the additional distinction of being the first industrial methane point-source visible from outer space.
