Also, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it's hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks. Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country -- especially the ones connected with fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider the cement seals around drill pipes, says Harvard's Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: "It sounds like it ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is 'an unresolved engineering challenge.' The technical problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak."
With that in mind, the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking.
And if we didn't frack, what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We've reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We've reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a "bridge fuel" to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that's precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).
Of course, if you're a cookie company, that's not what you want to hear. And the Exxons have a little more political juice than the Keeblers. To give just one tiny example, during his first term, Obama's then-deputy assistant for energy and climate change, Heather Zichal, headed up an inter-agency working group to promote the development of domestic natural gas. The working group had been formed after pressure from the American Petroleum Institute, the chief fossil-fuel lobbying group, and Zichal, in a talk to an API gathering, said: "It's hard to overstate how natural gas -- and our ability to access more of it than ever -- has become a game changer, and that's why it's been a fixture of the president's 'All of the Above' energy strategy." Zichal left her White House job in 2013; one year later, she took a new post on the board of Cheniere Energy, a leading exporter of fracked gas. In the $180,000-a-year job, she joined former CIA head John Deutch, who once led an Energy Department review of fracking safety during the Obama years, and Vicky Bailey, a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Bill Clinton. That's how it works.
* * *
There was one oddly reassuring number in the Harvard satellite data: The massive new surge of methane from the United States constituted somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the global growth in methane emissions this past decade. In other words, the relatively small percentage of the planet's surface known as the United States accounts for much (if not most) of the spike in atmospheric methane around the world. Another way of saying this is: We were the first to figure out how to frack. In this new century, we're leading the world into the natural-gas age, just as we poured far more carbon into the 20th-century atmosphere than any other nation. So, thank God, now that we know there's a problem, we could warn the rest of the planet before it goes down the same path.
To take just one example, an article in Mother Jones based on the WikiLeaks cables reveals what happened when fracking came to Bulgaria. In 2011, the country signed a $68 million deal with Chevron, granting the company millions of acres in shale-gas concessions. The Bulgarian public wasn't happy: Tens of thousands were in the streets of Sofia with banners reading Stop Fracking With Our Water. But when Clinton came for a state visit in 2012, she sided with Chevron (one of whose executives had bundled large sums for her presidential campaign in 2008). In fact, the leaked cables show that the main topic of her meetings with Bulgaria's leaders was fracking. Clinton offered to fly in the "best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people," and she dispatched her Eurasian energy envoy, Richard Morningstar, to lobby hard against a fracking ban in neighboring Romania. Eventually, they won those battles -- and today, the State Department provides "assistance" with fracking to dozens of countries around the world, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.
So if the United States has had a terrible time tracking down and fixing its methane leaks, ask yourself how it's going to go in Bulgaria. If Canada finds that sealing leaks is an "unresolved engineering challenge," ask yourself how Cambodia's going to make out. If the State Department has its way, then in a few years Harvard's satellites will be measuring gushers of methane from every direction.
* * *
Of course, we can -- and perhaps we should -- forgive all that past. The information about methane is relatively new; when Obama and Clinton and Zichal started backing fracking, they didn't really know. They could have turned around much earlier, like Kennedy or the Sierra Club. But what they do now will be decisive.
There are a few promising signs. Clinton has at least tempered her enthusiasm for fracking some in recent debates, listing a series of preconditions she'd insist on before new projects were approved; Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has called for a moratorium on new fracking. But Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions "reach their lowest level in 20 years." It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.
Indeed, just last month, Cheniere Energy shipped the first load of American gas overseas from its new export terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana. As the ship sailed, Cheniere's vice president of marketing, Meg Gentle, told industry and government officials that natural gas should be rebranded as renewable energy. "I'd challenge everyone here to reframe the debate and make sure natural gas is part of the category of clean energy, not a fossil-fuel category, which is viewed as dirty and not part of the solution," she said. A few days later, Exxon's PR chief, writing in the Los Angeles Times, boasted that the company had been "instrumental in America's shale gas revolution," and that as a result, "America's greenhouse gas emissions have declined to levels not seen since the 1990s."
The new data prove them entirely wrong. The global-warming fight can't just be about carbon dioxide any longer. Those local environmentalists, from New York State to Tasmania, who have managed to enforce fracking bans are doing as much for the climate as they are for their own clean water. That's because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming -- and fossil fuels don't come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
6
3
3
