November, 20 2014, 08:45am EDT

EPA Can Quickly Cut Dangerous Methane Pollution from Oil and Gas Industry in Half, According to New Report
Study Shows EPA Has Clear Path to Curb Major Climate Pollutant and Other Harmful Emissions with Common Sense, Low-Cost Measures
WASHINGTON
A new report from leading climate advocates today shows how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can cut climate warming methane pollution in half, while dramatically reducing harmful, wasteful air pollution from the oil and gas industry at the same time, by issuing federal standards for methane pollution based on available, low-cost technologies and practices.
The oil and gas sector is the largest U.S. industrial emitter of methane, which is the primary constituent of natural gas and the second-biggest driver of climate change after carbon dioxide. Smog-forming and toxic chemicals that leak from oil and gas sites along with methane also harm air quality, endangering the health of people in neighboring communities.
"Waste Not: Common Sense Measures to Reduce Methane Emissions from the Oil and Natural Gas Industry, " shows how EPA can fulfill its responsibility under the Clean Air Act to cut methane pollution from the entire oil and gas industry by issuing performance standards for methane emissions. Standards based on the technology and practices reviewed in this report could cut methane pollution from the sector by half -- saving enough gas to heat at least 3 million homes.
A Report Summary encapsulating the report's findings was released today by co-authors Clean Air Task Force, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. Earthjustice, Earthworks and Environmental Defense Fund have also reviewed the report and support its recommendations for EPA standards for methane emissions. The full report with technical recommendations will be available later this fall.
Under the Obama Administration's Climate Action Plan, the "Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions" specifically directs EPA to assess methane emissions from the oil and gas industry and determine whether to set federal standards under the Clean Air Act to reduce these emissions. After the release of several technical "white papers" this spring assessing methane control measures, EPA is expected to decide on whether to issue methane standards this fall.
Most of the industry's methane pollution comes from leaks and intentional venting that can be identified and curbed with existing, low-cost technology and better maintenance practices. This report zeroes in on the biggest sources of methane emissions in the sector and identifies the readily available control measures: finding and fixing leaks, controlling emissions from compressors and other equipment, and stopping the venting of methane from wells.
The methane standards recommended in the report would cut up to 10 times more methane and up to four times more smog-forming pollutants than alternative approaches, because methane standards would apply to oil and gas infrastructure across the country, not just to equipment located in selected areas.
"This is the most significant, most cost-effective thing the administration can do to tackle climate change pollution that it hasn't already committed to do," said David Doniger, Director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Curbing the dangerous methane pollution leaking from the oil and gas industry is critical to meeting the nation's climate protection targets. Along with cutting carbon pollution from power plants and vehicles, these practical steps are the one-two punch we need to stave off the worst effects of a disrupted climate."
Methane warms the climate at least 80 times more than an equal amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. While the nation emits fewer tons of methane than of carbon dioxide, the potency of methane makes its impact on the climate huge. About 25 percent of the warming we are experiencing today is attributable to methane emissions. Taking steps to address methane, in addition to carbon pollution, is critical to combating climate change.
"The most effective way to solve the climate crisis is to keep all dirty fossil fuels, like fracked gas, in the ground, because even the most rigorous methane controls will fail to do what is needed to fight climate disruption," said Deb Nardone, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Natural Gas campaign. "Fracking threatens to transform our most beautiful wild places, our communities, and our backyards into dirty fuel industrial sites, so in the short term the EPA must work quickly to control methane from existing fracking operations, close the exemptions that allow the oil and gas industries to benefit at the cost of our health, prevent future leasing of our public lands, and advance truly clean energy like wind, solar, and energy efficiency."
The report also shows how the same measures that cut methane pollution in half can reduce cancer-causing and smog-forming air pollutants that are released from the sector alongside methane by approximately 14 to 22 percent, respectively.
"This report makes clear that it's time for EPA to take common-sense steps to protect people and the environment from methane pollution caused by oil and gas operations," said Earthjustice attorney Tim Ballo. "Ending wasteful leaks is an important step towards solving the pollution problems that the oil and gas industry is creating for communities nationwide."
"Issuing an oil and gas methane rule gives the Obama Administration the opportunity to meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target," said Conrad Schneider, Advocacy Director for Clean Air Task Force. "This rule will provide more than 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gas reductions, every ton of which will be necessary to meet this commitment. Doing so can help confirm the U.S.'s credibility that we fulfill our climate promises."
"Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas pollutant but you don't have to be an environmentalist to know that methane leaks are simply a waste of a valuable national energy resource," said Mark Brownstein, Associate Vice President for U.S. Climate and Energy, Environmental Defense Fund. "The good news is that there are simple technologies and practices that the oil and industry can use to substantially reduce this waste, creating new opportunities for American companies and new jobs for American workers."
The Report Summary can be found here.
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.
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At Least 95 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks Including Massacres at Beach Café, Aid Points
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
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Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
Medical sources said at least 33 civilians were killed and nearly 50 others wounded in the massacre, including footballer Mustafa Abu Amira, photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab—who survived an earlier Israeli airstrike and is reportedly the 227th journalists killed by Israel since October 2023—and prominent artist Frans Al-Salmi, whose final painting depicting a young Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces resembles photographs of its slain creator posted on social media after her killing.
Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
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"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
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Gaza officials have reported that hundreds of Palestinians—including at least 66 children—have died in Gaza from malnutrition and lack of medicine since Israel ratcheted up its siege in early March. Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund warned that childhood malnutrition was "rising at an alarming rate," with 5,119 children under the age of 5 treated for the life-threatening condition in May alone. Of those treated children, 636 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of the condition.
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Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
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Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
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After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
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"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
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