Shell’s massive plastics plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, started operations in late 2022

From LIVING ON EARTH, National Public Radio, Air Date: Week of June 30, 2023

Shell’s massive new ethane cracker plant in western Pennsylvania is sending polluted air and strange smells into the surrounding community. But a $10 million fine pales in comparison to the roughly $100 million a day that the company made in profits in the first quarter of 2023. Reid Frazier of the Allegheny Front discusses with Host Paloma Beltran the concerns of residents and a promised economic boom that hasn’t materialized.

TRANSCRIPT ~ BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

Even before it came online last year, the huge plastics plant Shell built on the banks of the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania had problems with pollution. The plant is an “ethane cracker” that uses fracked gas to produce the common plastic called polyethylene, and it’s violated air quality rules and sent strange smells into the surrounding community. And although it has brought new jobs, a recent report from the nonprofit Ohio River Valley Institute suggests it hasn’t ushered in the economic boom that some anticipated. In May, Pennsylvania’s governor announced that Shell will pay a $10 million fine for its air quality violations. But that fine pales in comparison to the roughly $100 million a day that Shell made in profits in the first quarter of 2023. And the plant received a $1.65 billion tax credit over 25 years, the largest in Pennsylvania history.

BELTRAN: So, this Shell plant has been in the works for a long time. Can you describe it for us? How big is it, and how much plastic does it produce?

FRAZIER: It’s basically like a small city that they built to make plastic, there on the banks of the Ohio. At the top capacity, it will be able to make over three billion pounds of plastic every year. The greenhouse gas emissions from this facility are estimated to be the equivalent of 400 thousand cars on the road. So, it’s a pretty big greenhouse gas emitter, it’ll probably be, you know, one of the top few facilities in the state in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

BELTRAN: Wow. And in May, you reported that Shell agreed to pay a $10 million fine after emissions from the plant violated state air quality rules. What were the violations, and what will the money be used

FRAZIER: Right, so the violations were for exceeding their state permit-allowed air pollution, essentially. They were allowed to pollute about 500 tons a year of volatile organic compounds. They basically exceeded that in September of 2022, when they had a lot of flaring, there were sort of equipment malfunctions, and when those malfunctions take place, they basically flare the gas as a way to get rid of it. And so that the gas doesn’t accumulate and cause an explosion. But when you do that you get rid of a lot of the pollution, but not all of it. So, in one month, they essentially hit their 12-month quota, even before the plant had started. And they’ve exceeded similar limits for carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, in subsequent months. And they’ve had other problems with air pollution. There was a release that caused benzene and volatile organic compounds to spike a couple months ago, workers reported headaches and irritation in their eyes, according to the company. There have just been a lot of problems. So, the state rolled all of these violations together into a $10 million fine. About half of the money goes to the state and half goes to the local area municipalities and such presumably to be done in — used in a sort of environmentally friendly or civic-minded way, but we don’t actually know what the money is going to be used for.

BELTRAN: Reid, you’ve been covering this project for a long time, and you’ve spoken to lots of people in Beaver County. How have community members responded to the plant?

FRAZIER: Well, obviously, a lot of people are upset that there is this ongoing pollution problem. I think most people hope that the company will clean its act up. There is a sort of acknowledgement that when you open up a big plant like this, there’s bound to be problems as you start bringing equipment online. That having been said, I think people were surprised by how much pollution has come from this plant. Even people who were big supporters of Shell coming to Beaver County. I talked to Jack Manning, who’s a Beaver County commissioner, so it’s like the local governing board. He actually used to work in the petrochemical industry in Beaver County. He’s basically said he’s still going to be supporting Shell, but they simply have to clean their act up. And these are his words.

MANNING: Well, I’ve also told people, if you cross a line that shouldn’t be crossed, we’re going to have a different conversation. And I can’t, I can’t defend you. And right now, nobody’s crossed that

FRAZIER: Other people are more upset, parents who’ve taken their kids to school on days when there were high benzene levels, and were understandably freaked out by the smell of gasoline in their backyard. That’s what one person told me. Somebody else reported that it smelled like burning plastic. And I think more than anything, ‘Wait, is this how it’s going to be for the rest of my life, if I stay here?’ This is the thought that a lot of people are having. But if you live like five miles away, you probably don’t experience this. And, they’re glad to see that there’s a plant with 600 workers there, and maybe they have friends or relatives who are working there or worked to build it and made a lot of money in construction. During the five or six years when it was under construction, there were something like six-to-eight thousand people working on it. So, it’s a mixed bag. I think the closer you are to the plant, the more you’re, worried about it.

BELTRAN: Of course, I mean, who wants to be smelling chemicals every day in their backyard? Some fossil fuel companies are looking to increase their foothold in the plastics industry as the world moves towards cleaner sources of energy. Is that pivot happening at all in Beaver County, or in Pennsylvania more generally?

FRAZIER: That remains to be seen. I think the Shell plant itself is an example of that pivot that you just described, where oil and gas companies are trying to figure out what they’re going to do in the next few decades, if people largely give up, gas-driven cars and such. And petrochemicals are a growing business still. There were plans for more of these to be built in the greater Ohio Valley region. There was one project that was on the docket in eastern Ohio. To date, it hasn’t been built, it hasn’t been approved. We’ll see if that changes in the next few years. But it’s unclear. Five or six years ago, it was thought that there would be five or six of these plants at some point, and now we’re not sure that’s actually going to happen in this region.

BELTRAN: In some ways, the world seems to be moving away from plastics. U.N. negotiators recently held talks over a potential treaty to address plastic pollution. But this plant is built to produce 3.5 billion pounds of polyethylene per year. What might that mean for pollution in Beaver County and

FRAZIER: We don’t know where this plastic is going to end up. It could end up overseas, actually. It could end up in North America, as plastic bottles or medical equipment or parts that go into vehicles, even electric vehicles. But we don’t know, that kind of information is not something that Shell is required to tell local regulators and local communities. But we do know that it’s likely that this plastic will be sent on railcars around the country. They have a massive rail yard with hopper cars, where they can just dump the nurdles, which are the little plastic beads. That’s the form that they produce. And so it seems pretty certain that there will be some rail activity related to these nurdles, and that they’ll basically go elsewhere.

BELTRAN: And we should mention that this plant is located barely a half hour’s drive from East Palestine, Ohio, where a freight train derailed in February and caused a toxic chemical spill. Has this shaped the way Beaver County residents are thinking about this ethane cracker?

FRAZIER: Definitely. The Shell plant, every few weeks, would flare up, or there would be gases, or they would have an exceedance of their pollution limits. And at the same time, you have this national calamity going on about 15 miles away. And the communities around the plant are also in — downwind of that East Palestine fallout. So, it’s kind of hard to escape, if you’re living there, all of this pollution.

BELTRAN: Do regulators or environmental groups have plans to address the plant’s pollution moving forward?

FRAZIER: I think the state has set up some guideposts for Shell. They have to submit plans for how they’re going to do certain things at the plant to prevent continued releases of these pollutants. But there’s no guarantee that this kind of thing won’t keep happening, and that Shell won’t keep paying fines when it does. You know, there’s a lawsuit that has been launched from environmental groups to kind of get the plant to stop polluting, and we’ll see where that goes. These groups can push on the regulator, and the regulator can push on the company, but it’s really up to the company to perform, get its processes in line with environmental regulations. The best people can do now is hope that that happens.

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See Also: Pennsylvania is just the latest sacrifice zone for the plastics industry, Kristina Marusic, Sierra Club, September 15, 2022

Shell ranks in the top 10 among the 90 companies that are responsible for two-thirds of historic greenhouse gas emissions. Its Potter Township (BeaverCounty) cracker plant is expected to emit up to 2.25 million tons of climate-warming gases annually, equivalent to approximately 430,000 extra cars on the road.

On June 8, 2023, hundreds of frontline and Appalachian climate activists rallied at the White House against the Mountain Valley Pipeline

From the Article by Ivy Main, Power for the People VA, June 29, 2023

The folly of building the Mountain Valley Pipeline should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t already committed billions of dollars to the project!

This spring’s passage of federal legislation raising the debt ceiling came with one provision that clean energy advocates had fought hard against: it sweeps away several legal challenges to the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) that have stalled completion for more than four years. The pipeline is supposed to carry methane gas from the fracking fields of West Virginia into Virginia to connect to an existing interstate pipeline here, and getting it built has long been a priority of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.

Manchin surely believes he notched a victory with the inclusion of this provision in must-pass legislation. And in one respect, he’s right. Pipeline opponents aren’t conceding defeat, but stopping the MVP in court just got a heck of a lot harder.

Whether the pipeline’s developers should be celebrating is another matter. The wisdom of building a new methane gas pipeline was questionable nine years ago when the MVP was conceived. Today, with the U.S. transitioning away from fossil fuels, the folly of building new gas infrastructure should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t already committed billions of dollars to the project.

Dominion Energy figured this out three years ago when it dropped plans to develop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Dominion is a big energy conglomerate and had other projects to pursue. Canceling the Atlantic Coast Pipeline saved it billions of dollars that it is now investing in offshore wind and other renewable energy assets.

MVP’s two largest minority partners are also diversified companies with other options. NextEra Energy, which owns a 31% share in the partnership through its subsidiary Next Energy Resources, wrote off the value of its investment in MVP in 2021 and 2022, saying it planned to “reevaluate its investment in the Mountain Valley Pipeline.”

A NextEra spokesperson did not answer my question about what the company plans to do about MVP now. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at NextEra Energy Resources’ homepage. MVP isn’t mentioned anywhere on the website, which is largely a celebration of the company’s renewable energy assets.

The third-largest stakeholder in the MVP is Consolidated Edison, with an initial 12.5% stake. In 2019 it exercised an option to cap its investment in MVP, and in 2020 it wrote down the value of its investment by almost half. ConEd CEO John McAvoy told investors that year the company would no longer invest in gas transmission projects and “certainly would” consider selling its stake in MVP.

“We made those investments five to seven years ago,” he said, “and at that time we — and frankly many others — viewed natural gas as having a fairly large role in the transition to the clean energy economy. That view has largely changed, and natural gas, while it can provide emissions reductions, is no longer … part of the longer-term view.”

Unfortunately, these views aren’t shared by MVP’s majority owner and operator. Equitrans Midstream is solely a pipeline and gas storage company, having been spun off from a larger corporation, EQT, in 2018. MVP is its key to growth. The exit door may be wide open, but Equitrans doesn’t want to leave because it has nowhere to go.

That doesn’t mean it makes sense to stay, either. Many a gambler has learned the hard way that continuing to feed coins into a slot machine does not make it more likely to disgorge the jackpot.

And really, if there ever was a jackpot for MVP, it is gone by now. In 2015, EQT saw an opportunity to undercut the price charged by existing pipelines to ship gas to an energy-hungry Southeast. Today, though, demand for methane gas has cooled in the face of cheap wind and solar, while MVP’s costs have ballooned to $6.6 billion from the initial projection of $3.25 billion. Analysts say MVP’s competitive advantage has evaporated, and its prospects for profitability look grim.

Equitrans maintains that there is still a pressing need for its pipeline, but demand has always been hypothetical. From the very beginning, the partnership seemingly indulged in “build it and they will come” magical thinking.

Getting a permit to build from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requires that pipeline developers have their customers lined up ahead of time in order to demonstrate a “need” for the project. Even in 2015 there were not enough customers clamoring for MVP’s services, so the partners named themselves as the buyers for more than half of the pipeline’s capacity. FERC’s approach to permitting allows this self-dealing, though the commission has been heavily criticized for it.

Obviously, Equitrans was never going to be a customer; it isn’t in the business of generating power or selling gas at retail. Its field of dreams assumed demand for gas would grow, customers would be clamoring for pipeline capacity, and Equitrans would be able sell its share of the capacity and just reap the profits from owning the pipeline.

It’s hard to imagine that happening now. Economics had already started to favor wind and solar over fossil fuels when the MVP broke ground. Total natural gas consumption has been mostly flat nationwide since 2018, and the Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects it will decline steadily for the next decade. EIA also projects that more than half of all new electric generating capacity this year will be solar, with natural gas additions down to a mere 14%. Here in Virginia, methane gas burned by electric utilities has declined from a high in 2020.

The future will only get brighter for renewables and dimmer for gas. In 2020, Virginia committed to a zero-carbon energy future, and in 2022 Congress passed the strongest set of clean energy incentives in history. Betting on fossil fuels in today’s environment makes no sense.

Sure, Governor Youngkin is doing his level best to throw a wrench in the works, and Dominion Energy Virginia just proposed building a 1,000-megawatt gas combustion turbine, citing growing demand from data centers and electric vehicles. Misguided as that proposal is, it doesn’t signal good times ahead for the gas industry. Combustion turbines are not baseload plants; they run only when demand exceeds other sources of supply. Dominion has no plans to build new baseload gas plants.

MVP knows finding customers in Virginia will be hard. Before litigation and permit denials put construction on hold in 2018, the partnership had proposed an extension of the pipeline into North Carolina, perhaps hoping for better pickings in Duke Energy territory. Now that MVP has the congressional seal of approval, it is seeking to revive the proposed Southgate Extension, to the dismay of North Carolina activists. Yet economics don’t favor gas over solar there, either.

The liquefied natural gas export market has also been floated as a potential source of growth, but critics say the lack of liquefied natural gas terminal capacity prevents that from happening.

It’s time to stop this travesty. Equitrans claims MVP is 94% complete, but opponents say the true figure is more like 56%, with many of the most difficult segments (like stream crossings) still to be tackled. Those are also the most environmentally sensitive parts of the line. Pulling the plug on MVP now would avoid not only the cost of completing the pipeline, but also the cost of fixing leaks, erosion damage and other problems critics believe are inevitable given the terrain and geology.

That would be a much better result for everyone concerned than completing the pipeline to serve a market that doesn’t exist – a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.

>>> This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on June 28, 2023.

Oxidential Petroleum plans to build the world’s largest “direct air carbon” removal facility

From the Article by Ari Phillips, Oil and Gas Watch, January 24, 2023

A subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum is planning to build the world’s largest plant designed to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air in the oil and gas fields of West Texas, with a start-update sometime in 2024.

Once fully operational, the plant will capture up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, with the capability to scaleup to 1 million metric tons per year. Direct air capture is a nascent technology that extracts CO2 directly from the atmosphere and stores it underground (or uses it to make fizzy drinks or other products).

While many carbon sequestration experts see the technology as a promising, if expensive, process to remove climate-warming greenhouse gases from the air, major concerns remain about how much of the captured carbon will be pumped back down into the Permian Basin to help Occidental to extract more oil or gas from difficult-to-reach reserves. Critics also wonder how trustworthy the monitoring will be, and how communities and the environment might be impacted by its large-scale application.

For now, Occidental – one of the largest petroleum producers in the country – has a subsidiary, called 1PointFive, that is taking advantage of billions of federal decarbonization dollars up for grabs under new government subsidies to invest in climate tech solutions to global warming. Meanwhile, Occidental will still be pumping out oil and gas responsible for heating the atmosphere. It will be simultaneously profiting from fossil fuel extraction and carbon capture.

The oil and gas company is also attracting revenue from corporate partners. These partners claim that it is good for the climate that they will be paying Occidental to “offset”– or make up for – their greenhouse gas emissions through direct capture while the partners continue to pollute.

For example, the National Football League’s Houston Texans recently announced that they have selected Occidental’s subsidiary as a “preferred carbon removal partner” to offset their flight emissions. Occidental is marketing not only carbon credits but also what they call “net-zero oil” to NFL teams and airlines. According to Occidental, net-zero oil will be attained by removing, via direct air capture, enough emissions to offset all the emissions associated with the oil’s lifecycle from extraction to consumption.

In November, Occidental announced plans for an even bigger direct air capture site in Texas. Occidental has leased 106,000 acres of the 825,000-acre King Ranch, located in South Texas near the Eagle Ford Shale oil and gas field. The company says the land can support up to 30 direct air capture projects that could potentially remove up to 30 million metric tons of CO2 per year, storing up to up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 in the geologic reservoirs below the ranch.

This storage capacity would be orders of magnitude larger than that provided by the 18 existing direct air capture plants around the world, which capture just 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 each year.

While the latest United National Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate report calls carbon removal essential to meeting climate targets, it also warns of over-relying on notions like direct air capture, which may lull policymakers and perhaps the general public into a false sense of security as to the necessity of deep cuts to emissions now.

Anthony R. Kovscek, a professor of petroleum engineering at Stanford University who studies carbon sequestration, worries that the public might reach a different misunderstanding relating to direct air capture.

“My most substantial concern about direct air capture is that lack of public understanding of the capture process will lead to negative opinions and the withdrawal of government support before the technology is fully developed and evaluated,” said Kovscek.

Currently, initiatives taken through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions are providing the incentive to advance carbon sequestration projects and for businesses to seek out credits. Federal tax credits within the Inflation Reduction Act designate direct air capture projects a $180-per-metric-ton credit, far above the previous $50 allotment.

Kovcek believes Occidental’s efforts to be aimed at developing a technology that allows them to use their existing engineering and geosciences expertise as well as sequestration storage space that the company already has rights to use.

“If it’s successful, they will have a new business that potentially outlasts hydrocarbon production and performs a necessary service,” said Kovcek. “Because they are trying to develop a new business, I don’t think that what they are doing is greenwashing.”

Greenwashing or not, for the time being direct air capture and carbon sequestration overall face no shortage of obstacles on the road to contributing significantly to decarbonization. The process remains very expensive and energy intensive and could divert resources and attention from renewable energy projects with more clear-cut benefits. Furthermore, the geologic reserves capable of sequestration are often located far away from carbon emitters such as steel plants and might require substantial investment in new pipelines.

Kenneth B. Medlock III, Senior Director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said he believes even if Occidental is not generating truly “net-zero” oil, it is still resulting in a net CO2 reduction, which can buy time for other technologies.

“It is an intriguing step in the multitude of options being presented for reducing the net carbon footprint of energy,” Medlock said. “It also can leverage existing infrastructures and business models, which can bode well for its future as the technology develops.”

The Infrastructure Bill designated $3.5 billion towards the establishment of large-scale, regional direct air capture hubs across the U.S. In response to the announcement, the Climate Justice Alliance released a letter calling direct air capture, “an unproven technology that allows fossil fuel extraction and use to continue, resulting in ongoing harm to frontline communities.”

“To have any significant effect on global CO2 concentrations, DAC would have to be rolled out on a vast scale, demanding very large amounts of water and energy, and raising environmental justice concerns about the toxic impacts of the chemical absorbents used in the process,” the letter states.

Medlock believes that environmental justice (EJ) concerns about Occidental’s direct air capture are minimal, since the projects are set in remote locations, but that going forward they must be kept front-and-center in the discussion.

“As with all new energy infrastructure, EJ assessments are critical to siting and operation,” he said regarding Occidental’s plans. “So, it is incumbent on the industry to internalize EJ asit moves forward, which requires direct engagement with communities and a conscious effort to avoid injustices.”
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Erin Burns, Executive Director of Carbon180, a climate nonprofit organization focused on carbon removal solutions, said that direct air capture is “an effective means of removing emissions that drive climate impacts and injustice.” But she added that, more broadly: “carbon removal can’t slow efforts to rapidly decarbonize and can’t be an excuse to keep using fossil fuels in the US.”

Because of this, Burns believes that federal government should not fund enhanced oil recovery projects in which the sequestered CO2 is used to extract more fossil fuels , such as the Occidental Permian Basin project, and Carbon180 has advocated for its specific exclusion from key federal direct air capture projects.

Burns said trust underpins the success of this field and the ability to achieve gigaton scale carbon removal by 2050.

“But before we can build trust in direct air capture, robust monitoring, reporting, and verification – MRV – is a fundamental prerequisite,” Burns said. “MRV is the process of accounting for all the emissions, energy use, environmental and public health impacts associated with a carbon removal project to determine its net climate impact. It tells us if the work was done safely and effectively and provides receipts.”

According to Occidental’s agreement with the Houston Texans, the carbon credits purchased will not be linked to any new oil and gas extraction. Instead, the CO2 will be sequestered in reserves not associated with fossil fuel production. However, this agreement is specific to a carbon offset agreement with one NFL team. And it is not clear how much independent verification there will be, or if – in other business agreements or contexts — Occidental will use captured carbon to inject into shale formations to help extract oil and gas.

Aside from the two Texas direct air capture projects, Oil & Gas Watch is also tracking the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub, a proposed direct air capture project in Wyoming that would consist of modular carbon capture units capable of removing 12,000 tons of CO2 per year from the air.

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See Also: Direct Air Capture: 5 Things You Need to Know About This Climate Scam ~ Oakley Shelton-Thomas & Mia DiFelice, Food & Water Watch, January 25, 2023

You can have a role in the community solar program? Locally & Globaly!

From the Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Magazine, November 28, 2022

So far, average global temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius — two degrees Fahrenheit — and the budget for 1.5 Celsius is nearly gone. How hot will it get? Will temperatures climb two degrees Celsius? 2.5? Three?

A study published a few years ago, by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution, and Yangyang Xu, of Texas A&M, defined a temperature increase of 1.5 C degrees as “dangerous,” an increase of three C degrees as “catastrophic,” and an increase of five C degrees as “unknown, implying beyond catastrophic.”

A second study, by a group of American and European researchers, determined that, if we were to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, global temperatures could rise by as much as eleven degrees Celsius, or twenty degrees Fahrenheit. (How humanity could keep the oil flowing even as the world drowned and smoldered was a question the researchers did not address.)

There are good reasons to opt for optimism. (See “narratives.”) It could be argued that the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act this past summer was possible only because so many people believed in a better future.

At the same time, there are good reasons to wonder whether optimism lies at the heart of the problem. For the last thirty years — more if you go back to 1965 — we have lived as if someone, or some technology, were going to rescue us from ourselves. We are still living that way now.

“You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” Greta Thunberg observed in a speech scolding E.U. politicians. “Then you’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.”

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See Also: West Virginia Environmental Council

Fourier had no idea in 1824 of all the impacts of global warming

From an Article by Robin McKie, The Guardian News Service UK, July 30, 2022

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”

McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”

Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east London. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. “Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a wake-up call then surely that is it.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”

These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather.

“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.”

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says.

Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.”

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.

“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”

Now available ~ Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99

Five unexpected threats posed by the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

1. Under our feet ~ As vast, thick sheets of ice disappear from high mountains and from the poles, rock crusts that had previously been compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one,” says Bill McGuire.

2. New battlefields ~ As crops burn and hunger spreads, communities are coming into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who will promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace. Most worrying are the tensions over dwindling water supplies that are growing between India, Pakistan and China, all possessors of atomic weapons. “The last thing we need is a hot war over water between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” McGuire observes.

3. Methane bombs ~ Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane is 86 times more potent in its power to heat the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, though fortunately it hangs around for much less time. The problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in layers of Arctic permafrost. As these melt, more methane will be released and our world will get even hotter.

4. Losing the Gulf Stream ~ As the ice caps melt, the resulting cold water pouring from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf Stream, which carries a prodigious amount of heat from the tropics to the seas around Europe. Signs now suggest the Gulf Stream is already weakening and could shut down completely before end of the century, triggering powerful winter storms over Europe.

5. Calorie crunch ~ Four-fifths of all calories consumed across the world come from just 10 crop plants including wheat, maize and rice. Many of these staples will not grow well under the higher temperatures that will soon become the norm, pointing towards a massive cut in the availability of food, which will have a catastrophic impact across the planet, says McGuire.

New weather is resulting from multiple mechanisms due to GHG

From the Wikipedia Entry on William McGuire, Emeritus Professor, University College London, August 1, 2022

William J. McGuire (born 1954) is a volcanologist and Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London. His main interests include volcano instability and lateral collapse, the nature and impact of global geophysical events and the effect of climate change on geological hazards.

BACKGROUND ~ McGuire studied at UCL and Luton College of Higher Education, now the University of Bedfordshire and has a PhD in Geology from University College London (1980). He began lecturing in Geology at the West London Institute of Higher Education in the 1980s, former home of well known TV geologist Iain Stewart.

He was then appointed Reader at Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education (now the University of Gloucestershire), and made it into the university sector in the 1990s when he was appointed Professor of Geohazards and Director of the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London. The centre is funded by the insurance industry. He relinquished the Directorship in 2011.

He was a member of the UK Government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, established by Prime Minister Tony Blair following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2010 he was member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), to address problems following the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull. He contributed to the IPCC summary report on extreme weather and disasters (2011).

McGuire lives in a geologically inactive area, Brassington in the Peak District, with his wife and two sons after many years in Hampton, Surrey.

RESEARCH & PROJECTS ~ McGuire is regarded as a UK expert on geological disasters including supervolcanoes, impact events, tsunamis and earthquakes.

He described Tokyo as “the city waiting to die,” referring to its placement on a prominent geological fault that could result in a highly damaging earthquake. McGuire’s main research sites are the Canary Islands, Mount Etna, and the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano in Wyoming.

In his book, Waking the Giant, he argues temperature change brought about by global warming could release pressure from melting ice caps (through post-glacial rebound) and trigger earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as well as increased landslides resulting from heavier rainfall. See Physical impacts of climate change

McGuire is a Co-Director of the New Weather Institute, a co-op and think-tank “created to accelerate the rapid transition to a fair economy that thrives within planetary boundaries.” He blogs for the Extinction Rebellion.

MEDIA APPEARANCES ~ McGuire has appeared on many TV shows including Horizon, one of the BBCs most popular and successful “Science & Nature” programmes, Countdown to Doomsday on the Sci Fi Channel, and Decoding the Past (“Earth’s Black Hole”) on The History Channel.

PUBLICATIONS ~ McGuire has written several academic and popular books on geohazards, earth sciences and geology, including:

1. McGuire, W. (2022). Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide. Icon.
2. Simms, A. and W. McGuire (eds.). (2019). Knock Three Times: 28 modern folk tales for a world in trouble. New Weather Institute.
3. McGuire, W. (2012). Waking the Giant – How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes. [14]
4. McGuire, W. and M. Maslin. (eds.) (2012). Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards. Wiley.
5. McGuire, W. (2008). ‘Seven Years to Save the Planet: The Questions and Answers (2008)[15]
6. McGuire, W. (2006). Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
7. McGuire, W. (2005). Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a threatened planet. Oxford University Press.

Patricia Espinosa as UN climate chief says decisions now will determine our future

From an Article by Abigail Adams, People Magazine Online, June 06, 2022

Now is not the time to lose focus on climate change, United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa says.

During an address Monday at the opening ceremony of the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, the 63-year-old Mexican diplomat urged world leaders to remain focused on addressing the ongoing climate crisis despite other challenges facing populations across the globe — inducing “conflict, energy, food, and economic crises” as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

But according to Espinosa, who will complete her second term as head of the U.N. climate office at the end of 2022, there is no time to waste with addressing climate change. “I appeal to all of you, especially in these difficult and challenging times, not to lose hope, not to lose focus, but to use our united efforts against climate change as the ultimate act of unity between nations,” she said at the event. “We must never give in to despair,” the diplomat added. “We must continue to move forward. Look at what we have accomplished in the last six years. Look at what we’ve accomplished in the last 30.”

But Espinosa also pressed world leaders to take action, and fast. Earlier in her speech, the climate chief said decisions on how to address the ongoing climate crisis are needed “now,” and that “very difficult decisions” must be made to do so. “We must understand that climate change is moving exponentially. We can no longer afford to make just incremental progress,” she said. “We must move these negotiations along more quickly. The world expects it.”

The Earth is currently about 1.1°C warmer than it was during the 19th century, according to the U.N.’s website. At this pace, the U.N. believes countries are “not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target” of preventing the global temperature from exceeding 1.5°C, which “is considered the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change.”

Over the next 10 days, Espinosa and “diplomats from around the world will try to lay the foundations” for the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which will take place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt this November, according to the Associated Press.

At the opening press conference held later in the day, Espinosa said she believes the 10-day meeting “marks the start of a new face in the intergovernmental climate change process [and] the process of implementation.”

But “one thing is very clear” about the climate crisis, Espinosa noted: “We don’t have time” to waste. “We have a blueprint and we have a framework and we have the rules to ensure that it is transparent,” she said while addressing the media. “So I think it’s time to get on with the job.”

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See Also: Marine Life Could Experience ‘Mass Extinction’ if Humans Don’t Take ‘Rapid Action’ Against Climate Crisis

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See Also: Chevron CEO Warns Not to Count on New US Oil Refinery Even With Surging Gas Prices, Kevin Crowley & Alex Steel, Bloomberg News, June 3, 2022

(Bloomberg) — There may never be a new refinery built in the US despite surging gasoline prices, as policymakers move away from fossil fuels, according to Chevron Corp. “We haven’t had a refinery built in the United States since the 1970s, my personal view is there will never be another new refinery built in the United States,” Chief Executive Officer Mike Wirth said.

Refining margins have exploded to historically high levels in recent weeks amid lower supplies from Russia and China and surging demand for gasoline and diesel around the world. “You’re looking at committing capital 10 years out, that will need decades to offer a return for shareholders, in a policy environment where governments around the world are saying: we don’t want these products,” Wirth said. “We’re receiving mixed signals in these policy discussions.”

Young people seeking to reduce climate change effects

From an Article by Julia Conley, Common Dreams, May 16, 2022

After being sentenced to four to six months in a county jail and thousands of dollars in fines for participating in a coal train blockade in New Hampshire more than two years ago, four climate campaigners say they will be “undeterred by these sentences” and will continue to fight the use of fossil fuels by powerful profit-driven corporations.

The activists are members of the grassroots No Coal, No Gas campaign in New England, which organized a blockade of a train that was shipping 10,000 tons of coal to Merrimack Station power plant in Bow, New Hampshire in December 2019.

Convicted of criminal trespass and railroad trespass, Dana Dwinell-Yardley and Daniel Flynn were sentenced Friday to four months in a county jail while Johnny Sanchez and Jonathan O’Hara were sentenced to six months. They were also ordered to pay more than $6,200 to PanAm Railways in restitution and fines totaling $5,580.

The campaign halted the train at three different locations, delaying the shipment by several hours. Prosecutors focused largely on the fact that the No Coal, No Gas campaign is part of a larger climate justice movement, while Judge Andrew Schulman of the Merrimack County Superior Court did not allow the defense to present evidence explaining the campaign and the history and efficacy of other social movements.

“These defendants are part of a movement,” said defense attorney Logan Perkins at the sentencing, which followed a three-day jury trial in March. “[That fact] is significant and we would have welcomed the opportunity to tell you more about the significance of that in a competing harms hearing, or in a competing harms defense presentation in which we would have been permitted to discuss how the science of social change has clearly identified the power of nonviolent social movements to effect change where all other approaches fail. We asked permission to share this and were denied.” Also, “If a self-proclaimed sympathetic judge can’t look beyond the status quo and the absolute protection of the industries that are actively endangering all of our futures, then we are in dire straits.”

During the trial in March, Perkins and the judge disagreed over the relevance of other social movements including the fight for civil and voting rights from Black Americans, with Schulman claiming that nonviolent action like the train blockade was not warranted as a response to the climate emergency and the continued use of coal at Merrimack Station—the last coal-fired power plant in New England.

Jonathan O’Hara has said that he and his co-defendants and supporters would be undeterred by Schulman’s decision. “It’s this fortitude and grounding in a sense of justice and rightness that will power us to continue to do what must be done,” he said.

O’Hara says he was not surprised by the judge’s sentence, which he called “absolutely clarifying about the state of climate action in the country.” Also, “I came here today hoping for justice, but not expecting justice, and I got what I expected,” said O’Hara. “If a self-proclaimed sympathetic judge can’t look beyond the status quo and the absolute protection of the industries that are actively endangering all of our futures, then we are in dire straits.”

The defendants spoke at the sentencing about the effects Merrimack Station has on its community. Noting that in one hour of burning coal, Merrimack Station emits as much carbon as the average American does in 26 years, Sanchez asked the judge, “Does justice look like allowing coal to still be burned in New England when we know the consequences? When we know that it contributes to higher rates of lung disease? Cardiac disease? To cancer? When we know it contributes to rapidly increasing global temperatures? To food insecurity? To fires?” Also, “That is why, back in December of 2019, I believed, as I do right now, that every second that we stopped those trains from delivering thousands of tons of harmful and unnecessary coal was my moral obligation,” he said.

Rev. Kendra Ford, a Unitarian Universalist minister and member of No Coal, No Gas, said the sentence reflects how “our legal system doesn’t seem to be able to respond to current circumstances.” Also, “The urgency of climate collapse is terrifying, and yet the court’s decisions today is focused on protecting profits for companies in the fossil fuel industry,” Ford said. “The judge seemed more concerned that these non-violent activists disrupted profits than the fact that the continued use of coal is causing irreparable harm to the planet.”

Announcement of the upcoming hybrid webinar: “Utility-Scale Solar – a Revolution in Progress” — with a live audience in Morgantown, West Virginia, and online via Zoom — on Monday, May 16, from 7-8:00 PM USET.

David Feldman, NREL (US-DOE)

David Feldman will be joined by Danny Chiotos, Sales and Market Development Director at Mountain View Solar in Berkeley Springs, WV, and Betsy Arlen, Director of Development for Sun Tribe Development, a provider of large-scale renewable energy solutions.

The in-person venue will be the WVU Media Innovation Center in the Evansdale Crossing Building, 62 Morrill Way, Morgantown WV 26506 (free parking after 5 PM). Doors open at 6:30 PM USET. WVU’s COVID protocol currently is “masks optional.”

Don’t miss this unique chance to meet and engage with outstanding experts about how we can solve the most important challenge of our time! Registrants who cannot attend will receive a link to a program recording.

To attend and participate in this program — in person or online — register here. For more information, email info@wvclimate.org. Thanks for your climate concerns!

>>> Haley Paul, Project Staff, West Virginia Center on Climate Change

P.S. The March 23 Polar Science webinar had 100 people attending! Thanks goes to everyone who attended, online and in-person. You will enjoy this program, too! Please share this message with others who might be interested! They will appreciate it!

>>> Thanks to the Appalachian Stewardship Foundation and the Dunn Foundation for making these programs possible.

Diversified Energy apparently counts with match sticks, WV & PA & OH beware

From an Article by Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette Mail, April 30, 2022

The WV well inspection staff dwindling from 18 to nine in the past two years on the Legislature’s watch has concerned not just environmentalists but royalty owners who see a corrosive connection between the state’s well inspector shortage and a growing orphaned well problem.

“[Inspectors] may spot problems that can be fixed to keep the well from becoming essentially uneconomic or they could spot a well that needs to be plugged,” West Virginia Royalty Owners Association President Tom Huber said. “As these wells grow older and older and older, that’s when they become orphaned, and then there’s no one to go after to get to plug the well.”

The Ohio River Valley Institute cited an analysis of more than 20,000 Diversified wells in Pennsylvania in observing a sharp decline in company-reported methane emissions post-acquisition.

Diversified reported a well was inaccessible for testing for leakage more than 3,200 times after wells associated with those reports were reported accessible by previous well owners more than 2,000 times the previous year. “Interestingly, [previous ownership] could get to the wellhead,” report author and Cornell University engineering professor emeritus Anthony Ingraffea said. “So I guess the trees grew up very, very quickly after Diversified acquired the wells.” Last year, Bloomberg Green reported it found methane leaks at most of 44 Diversified well sites it visited, including eight in West Virginia.

Diversified reported retiring 136 wells in 2021, exceeding its requirements of plugging 80 wells in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Ohio and moving the company closer to a stated goal of plugging 200 wells across Appalachia by 2023, according to its 2021 annual report.

In a statement, Paul Espenan, vice president of environmental health and safety at Diversified, defended the company’s environmental record. Espenan said the company has invested in pursuing opportunities to use excess plugging capacity to support other operator retirements. Espenan said recent company efforts to equip well tenders with handheld methane detection devices, deploy aerial leak surveys and upgrade equipment resulted in year-over-year reductions in methane intensity as the company works toward a target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. “Sustainability is core to our unique approach as a responsible operator that unlocks value, delivers free cash flow and is committed to asset stewardship through the full life of acquired, low-decline producing assets,” Espenan said.

The 136 wells retired last year represent less than half of 1% of all the wells in Diversified’s portfolio. The company said in its 2021 annual report that it established an in-house plugging team in West Virginia last year.

Diversified and its subsidiaries have 22,876 non-plugged wells in West Virginia, DEP spokesman Terry Fletcher said. Diversified-owned companies have plugged roughly 130 wells in the state since 2018, Fletcher said. The DEP estimates that older wells that have been poorly maintained will likely total over $100,000 in plugging costs. New wells that have been properly maintained cost a few tens of thousands of dollars, per the agency.

The state’s Oil and Gas Abandoned Well Plugging Fund, created in 2020 by House Bill 4090 to pay for reclaiming abandoned wells without a responsible operator, has a balance of $1.86 million, Fletcher said – a fraction of Carbon Tracker’s $7.6 billion estimate of the cost to plug wells that ceased production in West Virginia.

The Office of Oil and Gas reports about 6,300 documented orphaned wells and estimates an additional 9,000 undocumented orphan wells statewide. The plugging workload for even a small portion of Diversified wells would be unlike anything the state has ever tackled before. A study last year by the Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission noted that West Virginia funded plugging of three orphan wells in the state from 2018 to 2020.

A total of 472 wells have been plugged under the state’s program, according to the report by the Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission, a multistate governmental entity that promotes what it calls efficient recovery of oil and gas resources and environmental health. Fletcher said DEP records indicate that state-funded well plugging has been occurring since at least 1993.

The DEP expects to plug 160 orphaned wells — roughly 1% of its statewide orphaned well estimate — in the initial grant phase of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enacted in November, under which states are eligible to receive up to $25 million for cleaning up orphaned oil and gas wells. Fletcher has said the DEP is identifying all areas where staff can be increased given the Office of Oil and Gas’ personnel shortage.

The state Legislature has failed to adopt bills that would restore the Office of Oil and Gas to its previous personnel level despite pressure from environmental, surface and royalty owner advocates to shore up the office’s funding.

The Governor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment on why the office did not add any measures addressing the inspector shortage to the agenda of last week’s special legislative session despite the office’s previously stated support for bills that would have increased funding for state oil and gas inspectors. The governor announces the convening of a special session through a written proclamation referred to as a “call” because it calls the Legislature into session. The Legislature cannot take up items outside the call during a special session.

“We want to make sure that these wells, the gas, the oil that is produced, is sold so the royalty owners can be paid royalties on those products and [that the gas and oil] are not wasted through leakage or broken tanks that seep the oil out into the ground,” Huber said. “So we support any effort to add inspectors.”

Burd argued a proposed $100 annual oversight fee for unplugged wells would have been onerous for operators. It would have applied to wells producing 10,000 cubic feet or more of gas daily. The bill stalled in the House after passing the Senate.

“It speaks to a kind of lax regulatory culture in West Virginia, I guess,” May said. The Ohio River Valley Institute has proposed a production fee ranging 3 to 7 cents per thousand cubic feet in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio over the next 25 years to provide enough funds to decommission most of the states’ unplugged well inventories.

But West Virginia regulators are left to make the most of sweeping federal investments in well reclamation and contend with a projected rise in gas production without strength in numbers. The big numbers are on Diversified’s side — at least for now. “I think more inspectors would mean less orphaned wells, which is a good thing in the long run,” Huber said.

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Diversified Set to Track Appalachia Oil, Gas Methane Leaks with Aerial Scans

From an Article by Matthew Veazey, Natural Gas Intelligence, December 8, 2021

Methane leak detection provider Bridger Photonics has been selected to perform multi-year aerial scans of Diversified Energy Co. plc’s natural gas production and distribution assets, initially in Appalachia.

Bridger plans to deploy its laser imaging, detection and ranging (LiDAR) equipment to track the emissions. “Our Gas Mapping LiDAR technology will efficiently detect, pinpoint and quantify typically more than 90% of basin emissions to inform and streamline Diversified’s repair and maintenance activities,” said Bridger CEO Pete Roos.

Diversified, whose Central Region holdings include the Haynesville and Barnett shales and assets in the Midcontinent, said the LiDAR program would be extended to those assets as well. The company noted that early 2021 field trials of Bridger’s LiDAR technology on a “large segment” of Appalachia pipeline detected fugitive natural gas emissions “well below” 500 parts per million, which is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) leak definition threshold.

Diversified said it would spend $3 million annually over the next three years on LiDAR aerial emissions scanning activities. The total $9 million commitment “supports our near-term goal to reduce our 2020 level methane emissions by 30% by 2026 on the way to net-zero by 2040,” said Diversified CEO Rusty Hutson Jr. “Adding aerial emissions detection to the handheld devices we’ve placed in the hands of our skilled well tenders further enhances our ability to detect and repair fugitive emissions across our asset base.”

By way of proposed changes to the U.S. Clean Air Act, the EPA is seeking to broadly limit methane emissions across oil and gas operations. The new mandate would add covered methane sources at well sites, natural gas gathering and boosting compressor stations, gas processing equipment, as well as transmission and storage equipment.

The Biden administration wants to curb methane emissions from oil and gas operations beyond U.S. territory as well. In November, President Biden hosted his counterparts from Canada and Mexico for a trilateral summit, which featured a pledge to develop a “‘North American strategy on methane and black carbon.’” Also, the Biden administration and the European Union have endorsed a target to cut methane emissions 30% worldwide by 2030.