Energy Exchange

By Mark Brownstein and Steven Hamburg

Washington Post science writer Chris Mooney weighs in today with a deep-dive on rising methane emissions from America’s surging natural gas production, calling it “most important mystery about U.S. climate change policy.” This story is just the latest to highlight the need to address this urgent climate threat. It follows Bill McKibben’s compelling piece in the Nation exploring the same question and suggesting methane has overwhelmed the benefits of carbon dioxide reductions.

McKibben raises a crucial question, one we’ve spent a lot of time looking at ourselves. He’s right that methane is one of the most pressing fronts in the fight against disastrous warming, and one of the many reasons we need to speed the transition to clean energy. But we are more hopeful than Bill is about prospects for effectively addressing the methane problem in the meantime.

Big Problem, Critical Opportunity

Oil and gas methane emissions are a huge threat. But the very same properties that make methane such a danger to the climate also mean it’s an opportunity — a chance to reduce the rate of temperature increase in the next two decades while we simultaneously do the hard work of reducing CO2 emissions. Tackling methane is the single most impactful move we can make to alter the trajectory of climate change we experience now, even as we continue to accelerate the shift to low- and zero-carbon energy. Read More »