These charts from the Global Monitoring Laboratory show that fossil fuel producing regions have have failed to deal effectively with factors driving climate change.
Media Bias / Fact Check gives Rocky Mountain Institute HIGH ratings for factual reporting and credibility. RMI warns that LNG may be no cleaner than coal when all emissions are recognized. Fossil gas, or “natural gas” as the industry prefers, is typically more than 90 percent methane, As a climate pollutant, methane is over 80 times more potent than CO2 across a 20-year period.
RMI’s “Coal vs. Gas” analysis has shown that methane emissions from natural gas supply chains have been inaccurately calculated for decades — leaving out the climate risk resulting from equipment leaks and flaring. A rapidly advancing network of satellites and sensors has shown that methane leakage is far greater and more frequent than assumed, and that super-emitter events like major pipeline leaks releasing tons of methane per hour are not being accounted for in industry self-reporting on emissions.
Methane Tips the Climate Scales
A 2019 report by Global Energy Monitor also warned that instead of being an environment-friendly product that can alleviate climate problems, fossil gas is the new coal. While cleaner during final combustion, greenhouse gas emissions during production, transport, liquefaction, regasification and distribution cannot be ignored.
There is an open secret in the oil and gas industry and it is feeding the climate crisis.
Massive methane leaks, known as super-emitter events, have been taking place at oil and gas fields all over the world, from the United States to Turkmenistan. The releases, most of which can be traced to equipment failures, can last for weeks. One outside of a storage facility in Los Angeles in 2015 hemorrhaged almost 100,000 tonnes of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere over the course of four months.
How secretive methane leaks are driving climate change
A new peer-reviewed paper published by Environmental Research Letters finds that when even small amounts of methane escape from natural gas wells, production facilities and pipelines, it can drive up the industry’s emissions to equal the effects of coal…
“This analysis compares gas and coal at varying methane leakage rates. We find that very small methane leakage rates from gas systems rival coal’s greenhouse gas emissions,” said Deborah Gordon, co-author of the analysis and a senior principal at the environmental group RMI, formerly Rocky Mountain Institute. Scientists from NASA, Harvard University and Duke University also contributed to the paper.
NPR — Natural gas can rival coal’s climate-warming potential when leaks are counted
Eliminating methane emissions offers huge potential for quick, affordable climate action. Modern technology makes identification of leakage relatively simple, but industry and governments are dedicated to increased fossil fuel production. As a result, methane leakage is consciously underreported and methane abatement actions are not taken.
Categories: Climate Change
in-sights.ca 
From the Vancouver Sun, home delivered newspaper today (can’t find their online version for your readers): Beijing using Canadian think-tank to bolster its green image.
Charity’s China links under fire by Tom Blackwell.
“Proponents say it’s important to engage with the advisory organization given that China is key to combating climate change. It has the world’s highest output of carbon emissions, the numbers rising sharply since the 1990’s and not expected to plateau until 2030. But some analysts charge that the council uses foreign environmentalists and governments —- and their cash —-to bolster the country’s green image.”
What this the point of ‘our’ efforts if China, the worst polluter in the world, won’t plateau until 2030? Seven Years!
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Saying we should continue being destructive because someone else is being destructive is a way to accelerate disaster. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote:
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and the rest of Sanders quote: ” ….. unhealthy and uninhabitable. Tragically, the cooperation required to address this existential threat is being undermined by hawks in both the United States and China who are moving us toward a disastrous cold war.”
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Do they take us for fools? Rather than investing their massive resources in being a part of the solution, the fossil fuel industry is cynically fixated on sabotaging genuine initiatives, and the limited financial resources available to tackle the swiftly unfolding climate crisis.
How, you say? By pushing “solutions” (natural gas, carbon capture, geoengineering) which are non-solutions. With regard to LNG (natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane), the fossil fuel industry wants us to believe this is a bridge to a fossil-fuel-free future. Their bridge, however, is a bridge to nowhere.
Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) used to extract methane, leads to the escape of “fugitive methane” into the atmosphere. Recent research confirms that a spike in atmospheric methane in the past several decades is directly tied to natural gas extraction (fracking); which is responsible for as much as 25 percent of the recorded global heating during this time frame. As a greenhouse gas methane is almost 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a 20-year time frame.
The bottom line is that the fossil fuel methane (natural gas) cannot be the solution to a problem generated by fossil fuels. Meanwhile, time is running out.
See “A Bridge to Nowhere” (pp.148-150) in Michael E. Mann’s The New Climate War https://michaelmann.net/books/climate-war
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