This reporting helped galvanize a movement -- at first town by town, then state by state, and soon across whole regions. The activism was most feverish in New York, where residents could look across the Pennsylvania line and see the ecological havoc that fracking caused. Scores of groups kept up unrelenting pressure that eventually convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban it. Long before that happened, the big environmental groups recanted much of their own support for fracking: The Sierra Club's new executive director, Michael Brune, not only turned down $30 million in potential donations from fracking companies but came out swinging against the practice. "The club needs to"advocate more fiercely to use as little gas as possible," he said. "We're not going to mute our voice on this." As for Robert Kennedy Jr., by 2013 he was calling natural gas a "catastrophe."
Because here's the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don't -- if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove -- then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked -- maybe as little as 3 percent -- then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.
To say that no one in power wanted to hear this would be an understatement. The two scientists were roundly attacked by the industry; one trade group called their study the "Ivory Tower's latest fact-free assault on shale gas exploration." Most of the energy establishment joined in. An MIT team, for instance, had just finished an industry-funded report that found "the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable"; one of its lead authors, the ur-establishment energy expert Henry Jacoby, described the Cornell research as "very weak." One of its other authors, Ernest Moniz, would soon become the US secretary of energy; in his nomination hearings in 2013, he lauded the "stunning increase" in natural gas as a "revolution" and pledged to increase its use domestically.
The trouble for the fracking establishment was that new research kept backing up Howarth and Ingraffea. In January 2013, for instance, aerial overflights of fracking basins in Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. "We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don't think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see," said the study's director. But such work was always piecemeal, one area at a time, while other studies--often conducted with industry-supplied data--came up with lower numbers.
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That's why last month's Harvard study came as such a shock. It used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a decade to demonstrate that US methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. The EPA had been insisting throughout that period that methane emissions were actually falling, but it was clearly wrong -- on a massive scale. In fact, emissions "are substantially higher than we've understood," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted in early March. The Harvard study wasn't designed to show why US methane emissions were growing -- in other parts of the world, as new research makes clear, cattle and wetlands seem to be causing emissions to accelerate. But the spike that the satellites recorded coincided almost perfectly with the era when fracking went big-time.
If you combine Howarth's estimates of leakage rates and the new standard values for the heat-trapping potential of methane, then the picture of America's total greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 15 years looks very different: Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years, Howarth says. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.
Since Howarth is an outspoken opponent of fracking, I ran the Harvard data past an impeccably moderate referee, the venerable climate-policy wonk Dan Lashof. A UC Berkeley PhD who has been in the inner circles of climate policy almost since it began, Lashof has helped write reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and craft the Obama administration's plan to cut coal-plant pollution. The longtime head of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he is now the chief operations officer of billionaire Tom Steyer's NextGen Climate America.
"The Harvard paper is important," Lashof said. "It's the most convincing new data I have seen showing that the EPA's estimates of the methane-leak rate are much too low. I think this paper shows that US greenhouse-gas emissions may have gone up over the last decade if you focus on the combined short-term-warming impact."
Under the worst-case scenario -- one that assumes that methane is extremely potent and extremely fast-acting -- the United States has actually slightly increased its greenhouse-gas emissions from 2005 to 2015. That's the chart below: the blue line shows what we've been telling ourselves and the world about our emissions -- that they are falling. The red line, the worst-case calculation from the new numbers, shows just the opposite.
Lashof argues for a more moderate reading of the numbers (calculating methane's impact over 50 years, for instance). But even this estimate -- one that attributes less of the methane release to fracking -- wipes out as much as three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming. This more modest reassessment is the yellow line in the chart below; it shows the country reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, but by nowhere near as much as we had thought.
The lines are doubtless not as smooth as the charts imply, and other studies will provide more detail and perhaps shift the calculations. But any reading of the new data offers a very different version of our recent history. Among other things, either case undercuts the statistics that America used to negotiate the Paris climate accord. It's more upsetting than the discovery last year that China had underestimated its coal use, because China now appears to be cutting back aggressively on coal. If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025.
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One obvious conclusion from the new data is that we need to move very aggressively to plug as many methane leaks as possible. "The biggest unfinished business for the Obama administration is to establish tight rules on methane emissions from existing [wells and drill sites]," Lashof says. That's the work that Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to tackle at their conclave in March -- although given the time it takes for the EPA to draft new rules, it will likely be long after Obama's departure before anything happens, and the fossil-fuel industry has vowed to fight new regulations.
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