Climate Money Watchdog
Climate Money Watchdog
Natural Gas is Worse than Coal - Dr. Robert Howarth
While the fossil fuel industry continues to promote "natural gas" as a relatively "clean" energy source, Dr. Robert Howarth has argued since since his seminal report in 2011 that methane (which makes up roughly 5% of "natural gas") poses a greater threat to humankind than "dirty" options like coal and oil. This is particularly true of methane produced through hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") Join us for a conversation about what we've now known for more than a decade, and how much more convinced Dr. Howarth is now that we should not be fracking for gas, nor otherwise be using methane as an energy source.
Dr. Howarth is the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. He’s an Earth systems scientist, ecosystem biologist, and biogeochemist. He has worked extensively on environmental issues related to human-induced changes in the sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon cycles, the impacts of global climate change, the interaction of energy systems and the environment, and implementation of 100% renewable energy policies. He is the Founding Editor of the journal Biogeochemistry.
Currently, Howarth serves as one of 22 members of the Climate Action Council, the group charged by law with implementing the aggressive climate goals of New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act of 2019, often referred to as CLCPA. Howarth has published more than 200 research papers, and these have been cited in other peer-reviewed articles more than 70,000 times, making Howarth one of the ten most cited aquatic scientists in the world. In 2011, Time Magazine named Howarth as one of 50 “People Who Matter” for his research on the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas produced from hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking”.
Topics Discussed Include:
- Why methane is such a concern with regard to climate change
- Why methane emissions are greater than predicted by the gas industry
- Why Dr. Howarth believes methane is worse for the climate than coal
- How some methane leaks are accidental while others are routine, and therefore can't be eliminated
- How OGI thermal cameras are able to see methane and other greenhouse gasses
Further Reading
Dr. Howarth maintains a web site featuring many of the works he's published over the years, including the April 2011 paper on methane leaks from gas fracking.
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
Music.
Gregory A. Williams:Thank you for joining us for another episode of climate money watchdog, where we investigate and report on how federal dollars are being spent on mitigating climate change and protecting the environment. We are a private, nonpartisan nonprofit organization that does not accept advertisers or sponsors, so we can only do this work with your support. Please visit us at climate money watchdog.org to learn more about us and consider making a donation. My name is Greg Williams, and I was taught to investigate and report on waste, fraud and abuse and federal spending. While working at the project on government oversight or Pogo 30 years ago, I learned to do independent research, as well as to work with confidential informants or whistleblowers to uncover things like overpriced spare parts, like the infamous $435 hammers and expensive military weapon systems that didn't work as advertised. I was taught by my co host, Dina razor, who founded Pogo in 1981 and founded climate money watchdog with me three years ago, Dina has spent 40 years investigating and sometimes recovering millions of dollars wasted by the Defense Department and other branches of government. She did this at Pogo as well as as an independent journalist, as an author and as a professional investigator. Our guest tonight is Dr Robert Haworth, a Cornell University Atkinson professor of ecology and environmental biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He's an Earth system scientist, an ecosystem biologist and a biogeochemist. He's worked extensively on environmental issues related to human induced changes in the sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon cycles, the impacts of global climate change, the interaction of energy systems and the environment and the implementation of 100% renewable energy policies. He is the founding editor of the journal biogeochemistry, and currently serves as one of the 22 members of the Climate Action Council, a group charged by law with implementing the aggressive climate goals of New York's climate leadership and community Protection Act of 2019 often referred to as clcpa, haarth has published more than 200 research papers, and these have been cited in other peer review articles more than 70,000 times, making Haworth one of the 10 most cited aquatic scientists in the world in 2011 Time Magazine named Haworth of one of the 50 people who matter for his research on the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas produced from hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking. Dina, would you like to say a few words about why we're excited to have Dr Howarth with us?
Dina Rasor:We're very excited, clearly, a very impressive background, but we're also very excited on the whole idea of methane and venting. And people say, Oh, just leaks. That happens, but there's been questions about venting and whatever. So I'm really looking forward for everybody who's concerned about methane, and I'll have him tell you why you should be concerned about methane, but that we look at this and get good scientific facts about what's going on, so that they there's not a lot of this greenwashing and silliness that goes on about saying, you know, we have to, we have to do this. So anyway, thank you, Dr Holt with for coming. Can we call you Bob?
Dr. Robert Howarth:Yeah, Bob. Bob would be fine, and I'm delighted to be with you. I hate to confess, but I've been working on methane for showing my age here over 50 years.
Dina Rasor:How's that working out for you?
Dr. Robert Howarth:Because I've gotten worse. What's the time I've been working on it?
Dina Rasor:Right? Similar to my work in Department of Defense, and now Greg's work in the Department of Defense, it's Sisyphus in the rock. And, you know, you just have to accept that. You pound your head against the wall exactly. Okay, spend
Gregory A. Williams:a couple of minutes just talking about the different terms we're going to use, methane, shale gas, natural gas, etc. Sure,
Dr. Robert Howarth:yeah. You know, natural gas is been around for a long time. It's, it's a fuel. It's overwhelmingly composed of methane when it's first developed out of the ground, unprocessed. It's, it might be only 80, 70% methane by the time they put a pipeline. It's, it's 93 95% methane. So natural gas is methane. Gas. Uh, shale gas is, is a type of natural gas. It's only been developed in this this century. There's no way to commercially develop shale gas until, oh, 2005 or six or so, when two technologies came together to capture that to to obtain the methane, which is still buried deep in the earth. So, you know, conventional natural gas is methane that came from Shell formations, but they migrated over geological time frame into little reservoirs which are captured. And you just put a well down and got it out of the ground. A lot of the methane was left behind in the shale, and until about 2005 again, you couldn't get at it. Two technologies made it possible to get it. One is high precision directional drilling, which is an amazing technology, evil in a way, but wonderful. You drill down, what five, 610, miles underground, until you find a shell formation, which might only be 30 or 40 feet thick, but it goes on for hundreds of miles. Once you encounter that with your well, you move the well laterally, and you drill, you know, miles laterally as well, so you can break up the shell. You break up the show by putting down water and chemical additives, massive amounts of water, and that's high volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and those two technologies weren't around until this century. Now, almost all of the gas, 85 90% of the gas that's produced in the United States comes from this technology. It's still natural gas, but again, it's coming from from the shale, which was not commercially exploitable even two decades ago.
Dina Rasor:Okay, so your research suggests that methane emissions natural gas are higher than previously thought. What's what's priced you most about these findings?
Dr. Robert Howarth:Well, you know that they're not higher than than I've been thinking for a while, but my colleague at Cornell Tony and grafia, who's a engineer who helped develop this whole hydraulic fracturing process way back quite a while ago, and Renee Santoro and I published a paper back in 2011 on what methane emissions from shale gas might be. Because at that point in time, shale gas was still a new phenomenon, and it was being sold not only by the oil and gas industry, but also by politicians, including President Obama, as a bridge fuel, something where we could, you know, use this gas instead of coal and reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. And there's an element of truth in all of that, but the argument ignored methane. And again, I've worked on methane off and on for 50 years, and it seemed to me that, how are we going to develop this shale gas without having some of the methane, which is what natural gas and shale gas are emitted, unburned to the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gasses more than 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide by the time it's in the atmosphere. So small emissions of methane really matter. And we took it as a research challenge to try and do some early guesstimates. And I use the word guesstimates because there were very few quality data available at that point in time, but we published a paper saying, you know, it looks like methane emissions might be pretty high in this process, and if so, this is no bridge fuel. It's actually really, really bad for the climate, and people have to get out there and make better measurements. So that paper, we published, what, 2011 14 years ago, next month, ours was the first. There are now over 2000 papers that have been published, other peer reviewed papers. Our study was based on, you know, a few dozen measurements which we pulled out of Industry Reports people leaked to us, things of that sort. There are now over a million observations. And you know, our initial estimates actually held up incredibly well. And so it's I'm not surprised by where we are. The only thing that surprises me is that our initial guesstimates were as accurate as they were, and that's because the people in industry who were leaking this information to us knew it was a problem, and they were happy to have us publicize it. And they were they were right, and we were correct in passing on to the to the world those early estimates, which have held up really well,
Dina Rasor:okay. Well, also I know that you you discussed all the new ways of trying to
Dr. Robert Howarth:spot it, yeah, how do you measure it? Yeah,
Dina Rasor:yeah, I had to measure it, you know, and everything else, because you can see in some videos. But. That you look it's a bright day, doesn't see you don't see anything. You don't even see any heat weaving or anything else. And then you put a thermal camera up and you can see the places leaking, like sip. This is, you know, if this was coal smoke, you would have seen it. And anyway, let maybe should discuss the satellites and aircraft, and now this new tech, this new Ogi technology, although Gregory,
Gregory A. Williams:I just want to interject that, you know, we're taught in school that natural gas doesn't have doesn't have any smell until the companies actually put something in it, so that you can tell if there's a gas leak, but that means that if it's leaking or being vented before that that smell has been inserted to it, you know, they can pump as much as they wanted that into the atmosphere and and you would have no way of knowing it without these thermal cameras. Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth:that's an excellent point, that the gas you know, if you, if you walk along the street in an urban area, and you smell gas like what you're quite likely to do, what you're smelling is not the methane gas. You're smelling the chemical additives. They've added methane mercaptan, which is a rotten egg like smell. Methane itself has no no smell, no odor. It's invisible to the naked eye. You can't see it. So how do we how do we visualize it? Well, we use cameras which are tuned to looking at the infrared spectrum. You know, greenhouse gasses are greenhouse gasses because they absorb radiation in the infrared spectrum. The Earth comes down, heats the Earth's surface. Radiation is rerated. In the surface of the earth, and carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gasses, methane, critically capture that. So there are cameras which, unlike our eye, are tuned to see those wavelengths. We don't see those infrared radiations, but cameras can, and if you have a camera that's tuned that way, it'll look like smoke coming out of, you know, leaks or out of vents that are that are letting it go to the atmosphere. Purpose, when we can come back to that, the technology is incredible. You can also use the infrared spectrum and measure methane from space and satellites. And the, you know, originally, satellites weren't designed specifically to do that, but nonetheless, some smart people figured out how to, how to tune them and get data on methane emissions going back, you know, 15 years or so ago from now, we now have a whole set of satellites that are up there specifically to measure methane emissions, and they they're very, very good at at looking at the spatial distribution across the surface of the earth. So before that technology came on, what did you have to do? You'd have to be on the ground. You'd have to measure, you'd have to have an instrument that specifically measures methane. You'd have to try and estimate how it's interacting with the wind and all. Usually you need permission from the people running facilities in order to get close enough to make these measurements. Otherwise, the police come and ask you to move away. So a lot of our early data going back, you know, 15 years ago, are highly biased. They come just from places where industry would let scientists work. Often, the information was funded by industry. Nonetheless, there's some very worrisome data coming out, as they say, which people leaked to us for our paper, from 2011
Dina Rasor:and so now you got this, the satellites, and then some. I think before, before they really perfected the satellites, they used a lot of aircraft. They'd fly over different things, yeah, yeah, exactly the satellites. And my understanding, of course, there's going to be a whole constellation of them and and from two different areas, and we don't need to get into that as much, but I think Al Gore put together a new organization that takes all the all the data from all the satellites, so you can actually go and see and that actually worked with one of the local activists we had with our that we had on our podcast. She knew there was a methane leak near her, the plant near her home, but she couldn't see it. And they kept saying, no, no, the monitors show everything's fine. And I said, Hey, go, go look at area. And she, she got down to her Street, and there's a red wall.
Dr. Robert Howarth:It's incredible. There's, there's so many satellites doing it now, a lot of organizations working out. But I think Al Gore has done an incredible job of pulling that together and making it visible. And just as an aside to two months ago, little well, six weeks ago, I was in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, and I I ran into El Gore, and he and I spent 15 or 20 minutes talking about methane. And because he asked why. I was doing there. And of course, I was trying to convince the point 00, 1% that methane is a problem, and he agreed with me. But so he's telling me about what he's doing, which is fantastic. And he also started to sort of lecture me on the basics of methane, which he got about 92% correct, but I gently pointed out to him that much of what he was citing back was coming out of my research, and he was getting a solid A minus on it, but not quite an so we agreed to follow up.
Gregory A. Williams:So maybe this is a good time to talk about the distinction between the potency of methane versus CO two, and the difference between methane as as a direct impact on on the greenhouse effect versus what happens when methane is burned.
Dina Rasor:Right before you answer that, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I had one more thing, and I'm afraid there's been allegations that the companies, because the satellite, you know, satellites can't do this through heavy cloud cover, right? They can't be down on it. Yeah, there's, there's been rumors floating around the anti methane world that they are trying to do. They wait until it's a cloudy day, like reinvention in California, it's a cloudy day, and then they vent like crazy, because the the the thing can do it so that that might be something where a oh, I OG, excuse me, Ogi thermal camera could actually go on a cloudy day. And yeah, if they're just
Dr. Robert Howarth:No, that's an excellent point. That's that's where airplanes can come in too, because the airplane flyers actually don't use the infrared sensors. They instead measure methane directly, okay, but it's more expensive. That's a great point. You know, I can tell you, I trusted the oil and gas industry, but, you know, I've been working with them off and on, on this other issues for a long time, and, well, it
Dina Rasor:sounds like it's becoming a cat and mouse game now with these new satellites. Okay, Greg, I'm sorry, go
Dr. Robert Howarth:ahead, that's their whole strategy, yeah. But going back to you know, the reason Methane is a greenhouse gas is it absorbs this infrared radiation, and it does so in a wavelength which carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses don't. So for the time it's in the atmosphere, it's more than 100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. That's the bad news. The good news is it doesn't stay in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide. It's got a half life of about 12 years. But that doesn't mean it's gone in 12 years. It means half of it's gone in 12 years, and in 24 years, three quarter, but it's gone and so on. So it has quite a, quite a pronounced impact in the shorter term, where, where does it go? It gets oxidized in the atmosphere, and it becomes carbon dioxide, and it becomes water vapor, and some of that water vapor, when it's oxidized, gets very, very high up in the atmosphere, in the stratosphere, where it also contributes to global warming. So Methane is a pretty bad player, and the very latest science from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their synthesis report from three years ago now says that since the start of the Industrial Revolution, methane has caused 1/3 of all global warming. And I don't think people realize that, you know, we're not talking about a sub player here. It's a major, major player in in the warming we've seen to date, and its short term impact is quite high. So we really need to reduce these methane emissions. And just one aside, you know, the at the start of this century, methane emissions have been going up quickly in the 20th century, and for the first decade of this century, they actually leveled off. They were not going up. It's good news and good for the climate. But since the shale gas revolution, they've been going up again, and they're going up now as rapidly as they've ever done in the history of the planet. And that's that's a real, real problem for the climate.
Dina Rasor:And you see that in refineries too. There's the problem when they were doing the refineries that do they contribute a lot to the methane leakage? Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth:you know, there's still to be 100% transparent and honest. There's, there's a ongoing and raging debate in the scientific community as to why methane was emissions were stable for a decade, and then why they've been going up over the last 15 years ago, but, but my research strongly indicates that the major cause of the increase is the shale gas revolution in the United States. You know, we've most of the increase in natural gas production globally over the last 15 years has been from the United States. It's mostly shale gas. Methane emissions from that are pretty high, and my research suggests it's between 1/3 and. Two thirds of all of the increase in global methane over that time period in the atmosphere has come from the United States due to shale gas.
Gregory A. Williams:And how much of that will you characterize as fugitive gas? You know, gas leaking from from pipelines and other sources. You know,
Dr. Robert Howarth:I'm not a real big fan of the term fugitive, because it's not well defined. It's a little ambiguous. But we can talk about leaks and we can talk about purposeful emissions, okay? And leaks, to me, implies something that's inadvertent, you know, it's coming out of a bad joint and a pipe, and you go up with a better wrench and some Teflon tape, and you seal it up and it takes care of it, right? That that's how we deal with leaks. And there are plenty of leaks with methane. It's a small molecule. It's it leaks. It leaks like a silk, particularly in urban distribution systems, old pipeline systems. They're, they're leaky as hell. But a lot of the methane emissions are coming well before we get to urban and suburban distribution systems, they're coming from the well sites. They're coming from high pressure pipelines and all. And it's not I'm sure that there are leaks there. There's no doubt about it, but most of the emissions that are coming from there are not leaks. They're part of the purposeful operation. So let me give you a couple of examples of that. We're talking about airplane flyovers as a way to measure methane emissions earlier. And one of the first efforts to do that, I was a co author in a paper we published back in 2013 Dana Carlton, so graduate student at the time, was the lead author on that, and Paul shepsen was her PhD professor. He flew the airplane, and they measured methane from airplane emissions, measuring real time. One of the surprises to us, though, was that we were seeing emissions from wells which were being drilled that had not yet reached the shell formations. And you know, we, we'd expected no emissions from drilling operations until you hit a shale. And the US, EPA, to this day, says there are no such emissions. And industry says that. But we, we measure them, and then they're real and they're large. And what seemed to be going on this was in Pennsylvania. You're talking about an area with 130 140 years worth of history of developing fossil fuel energy resources, natural gas going way back, oil going way back, and coal, lot of buried stuff in the ground, all of which accumulates methane. These shale formations tend to be deeper than that. So the shale drillers are drilling through this, this history of the Industrial Revolution over the past 100 years. And in so doing, they're they're finding pockets of methane gas and blowing it off to the atmosphere. That's not a leak. It's not easy to do anything about it, it's inherent in drilling through this area of history. So
Dina Rasor:also on that, just for the reader to know. I mean, everybody knows what happens when natural gas gets built up in a house and you like, you turn the light switch on it It blows, then it can leak and do that. Isn't that also part of the problem. And all the processes of methane and moving it around, or refining it and everything else, it builds up a certain amount of energy, and they've got to, they have to let it out. Yeah, penalize it
Dr. Robert Howarth:exactly. You need to maintain pressure control. And it's you know, you're dealing with geology and nature and weather. And it's you know, it's not entirely predictable. So when they're processing the gas, when they're storing the gas, when they're transporting it through pipelines to control pressure, they are admitting it, venting it to the atmosphere. And also,
Dina Rasor:when they do those flares, I know some people, when you drive by a refinery or oil fill yourself, you see it flaring. It's really supposed to be burning off, most of it off, and not letting it in the atmosphere. But I've seen those Oh, Ogi cameras, yeah, looking at it, and you can see the you can see that it's not, it's not burning down to the top of the pipe. It's kind of like your gas
Dr. Robert Howarth:and a bunch of things going on there this we can, you know, there are two terms that the industry uses. Venting means just letting it go off without burning it. Flaring is when you try to burn it, and if it's, you know, flaring is better from the standpoint of methane, because you're burning some of it and it's becoming carbon dioxide. It's bad in other ways, because you're producing a lot of local air pollution, and it's bad for people who live near it, and it also makes a huge amount of noise, and it's really visible at night for miles around so, you know, I have friends in the industry who say they really don't like to do. Flare it burn it, because it's people complain, and when they vent it, it's, again, it's an odorless gas that's invisible, and people don't see it, they don't complain. So, yeah, so there's that. But on top of that, the when you flare, you have to, you have to light it, and the flares go out, and they don't necessarily routinely go out and relight them, and not all of the methane that's being burned is actually burned. And traditionally, industry likes to say it's like 99.9% burned. Well, that's nonsense under controlled lab conditions, it might be 96 98% burned. But I just saw a new study, literally published a couple days ago, which came as a surprise even to me, saying that with any decent wind out there in nature, the burning efficiencies go down to 60% 60% burn, 40% vented off. Because it's, you know, it's just blowing up faster than than it can burn. So it's so that that that's one example. Another example is that, you know, sort of routine operations. You're moving the gas from the place where it's produced to market, to high pressure pipelines, and you have to do maintenance on those pipelines now and then, and you can't just go out and weld on a pipeline that's full of methane gas, because it will blow up, or at least it might, and so you got to get the gas out of there. And what they do is just literal, go to the atmosphere very quickly. It's called a blow down, and it's done all of the time. You know, not every day. It's when you have to do maintenance, but it's an incredible amount of methane that's released, and it's not leak, you know, it's not an accident. It's a purposeful part of the maintenance regime. And industry likes to say, oh, we'll cut down on these leaks and emissions. I've asked repeatedly, what are you going to do, other than blow downs in terms of getting the gas out of the pipeline before you do maintenance? Do you have any suggestion you're going to suck it by vacuum back into a storage facility? They don't have the technology to do that. They don't have another answer. So, so they're all all of these aspects that are just routine parts of the operation, which are a substantial part of the methane emissions, and they're inherent in our use of using natural gas.
Dina Rasor:Okay, well, how, how do you think the industry does? Just trying to now tell me how the industry is responding now. Now, how they responding now may be a lot different than they were before November 5, because they Yeah, they didn't know who was going to, you know, what kind of oversight they're going to see. But how is the industry responding? Are there? Are there good, good actors and bad actors? Or, you know, what are, what's, what is the green boy? Exactly. That's a great, great
Dr. Robert Howarth:question. Let me give you a little historical perspective. When we published our paper back in 2011 saying that, you know, they're probably substantial methane emissions from developing and using shale gas. And all the industry response at the time was, oh, no, we would never do that. The gas is is too valuable. We wouldn't waste it. You know, so Well, it takes money to try and capture it. And again, they don't have alternative technologies for a lot of this stuff. So you know that the people who run these industries are smart, and they they maximize profits. They don't The goal is not to minimize methane emissions. But over time, they just sort of dismissed it as happening. Within a few years, as more and more papers came online, and more and more data that showed that we were probably largely correct. They sort of changed course and said, Oh yeah, well, there's some methane emissions, but we're tackling it because we have all these new technologies, and emissions are going steadily down, and that that's been the language for the last. You know, several years, objective data don't show that a satellite data and all show no reduction in methane emissions, but nonetheless, you know, industry says they're going down. Now we have a, you know, new, new government in in in Washington. I was going to call it leadership, but that's not quite the right word, a new government in Washington that is probably fine with methane emissions and wants to promote oil and gas interests, and the oil and gas industries clearly energized to just do what they want to do. So they're walking back from from even pretending they're dealing with methane, at least in the US now they do. They want to keep our European colleagues happy, because European Union in particular has promulgated regulations to say we shouldn't be taking gas from the US if it has high methane emissions.
Dina Rasor:Okay, is there? What is then the industry's reaction to the satellites and stuff they've surely based on what I've seen. On how many times they've said there's nothing to see, and then you satellite goes over and the giant red blob is over it. What has been their reaction to that kind of
Dr. Robert Howarth:you know, I, I haven't seen them publicly comment on it. It's hard to repeat the evidence. It's really quite strong.
Dina Rasor:They deny that the satellites capture that images correctly,
Dr. Robert Howarth:not the Not that I've heard, not that I've heard. That'd be a very hard argument to make. Yeah, yeah.
Dina Rasor:Okay, all right. Well, what? What is your focus now? Because obviously, you can probably go up to the the federal EPA, and knock on the door for 100 hours, and they're not going to, they're not going to, you know, heed what you're saying. But why? What? What? What would you think now this way to do it, and if you had one message to convey to the public, what would that be? But then also, how do, how to, what are the avenues to try to fix this? Because I'm we're always on there. If you expose the problem and you don't fix it, people get very cynical.
Dr. Robert Howarth:Yeah, no, there's, you're right, and we can't afford to be cynical. We need, we need to fix it. You got multiple questions there. Let me give you a a two part answer. One is that, you know, the United States exports a lot of of this shale gas, a lot of natural gas as liquefied natural gas. You take the gas, you super cool it into liquid form, so you can transport it in tankers. And before 2016 it was illegal to do that from the United States, because we were concerned about our energy security. We wanted to hold on to our gas. But since 2016 we've we've been exporting it. The United States is now the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the world. We're the largest producer of natural gas in the world by far. And if you look at you know natural gas production globally has been stable over the last year, except from the United States, where we've increased it incredibly. So the US is a bad player here, and our methane emissions are high from that and that they're globally significant. So you know, the Biden administration over the last year, based on these sort of arguments, decided not to allow any more LNG exports. Of course, the Trump administration has reversed that already. I think it's important for the rest of the world to understand that they do not want to be taking our liquefied natural gas. The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas is higher than that of any other fossil fuel because of its methane emissions and because of the energy intensity of taking shale gas and making it into LNG. So it's a climate disaster for countries to be taking that and beyond that. It's expensive, and since we banned LNG exports until 2016 now we're allowing it. One could imagine, as US consumers start to worry about our own domestic needs and costs and things again in 3458, years, that we will ban it again, right? So I personally think it's incredibly important to message to the rest of the world you don't, economically and politically, want to be dependent on our gas and our gas as a climate disaster, don't take it. And if the rest of the world listens to that, that'll have ramifications back here in the US. It will suppress gas production. I think it'll be really great. But the long term solution, sorry, no, no, go ahead. The long term solution, people say, you know, we need to fix these leaks. We need to do this, and that, I think what we need to do is to just move away from fossil natural gas, Shell gas, all gas, as quickly as we possibly can. In the IPCC, climate scientists of the world tell us that we need to have a world that's largely free of fossil fuels by 20 years from now, all fossil fuels, if we're to keep the planet from runaway, devastating feedbacks in the climate system, which would hugely disrupt Human society, disrupt our food production, disrupt our water supply, no fossil fuels within 20 years. That means we need to be moving as quickly as we can in all of them. And natural gas is among the very, very worst of the fossil fuels in terms of climate because of methane, liquefied natural gas is the worst fossil fuel. It's far worse than coal, and so we simply need to be moving away from it. And I think the whole thought that we'll just, you know, somehow fix fix the leak problems, fix the emissions problem, and continue to use the fuel, maybe with carbon capture, which is a scam, quite frank. Quickly. You know, we just we can't afford to go that way. Let's move as quickly as we can to solar power, wind power, hydro power, beneficial electrification of heating with heat pumps, electric vehicles, which use less fuels. The all of those technologies are cost effective today, anywhere in the world. Let's push there and not nickel and dime ourselves with trying to solve the methane emissions problems. Just get rid of natural gas. And
Gregory A. Williams:just to be clear, it's not that the United States is liquefied natural gas is any worse than anyone else's. It's just that we're making a lot
Dr. Robert Howarth:of it. We're the largest we make more than anyone else, yeah.
Gregory A. Williams:So you'd recommend to Europe that they not use LNG period
Dr. Robert Howarth:absolutely, you know, and I've published a paper on that, precisely on the greenhouse gas footprint. And I actually say, you know, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You've got a huge short term challenge, but you're better off reopening coal mines and coal burning plants in Europe than you are importing more LNG a the coal isn't as bad for the climate, although we got to get rid of coal too. But as a short term fix, you already have the infrastructure reopen it. Don't build new infrastructure at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars for liquefied natural gas. That is even worse for the climate. Don't do it. Use those resources to to go with heat pumps again, and much of Europe has done so. You know, the use of natural gas has declined very, very markedly over the last year in Europe, as they've moved to using heat pumps for heating, as they've increased wind and solar power.
Dina Rasor:Okay. Well, okay, so now we wanted to talk about Okay. Here we are. It's what, month and a half within the Trump administration, and things may not change until the midterm elections. Just try to slow down and stop that. You're not going to get any reform in Washington. I'm in California, and you and Greg are in New York, and I'm looking at California just passed three really tough methane laws in September of last year, not just methane, but capping low yielding oil wells, which they said, once the oil gets low, the methane just comes roaring out, and all the toxins come roaring out. And there's 3000 low, low producing oil wells in California that they're going to try to cap. So California is actually doing something about it going along, because we are, you know, the fifth largest economics in the world, of it. But what would you say economics in the world? And you were telling me that New York is 10 so, yeah, yeah. And so as an economic entity, by the way. Just to put it in context, people don't realize Russia is half of Texas. But that is every time I tell somebody that they go, No, it's a big country. No,
Dr. Robert Howarth:yeah, no, in terms of the economy, California, Texas and New York are all ahead of Russia.
Dina Rasor:Yeah. So anyway, and looking at looking at New York, what do you see? What you and Greg see that I'm out here working to try to help now, help this. You know, California government is going to have their little pro their program of how they oversee it, but they really count on local people and scientists and everybody activists to help them know where all these gas leaks are. And so we're, we're going to start looking at that and all the uncapped wells, but what's going on in New York and and do you think this is a good idea for the states to try to move on beyond federal money and solve the ones who have the money try to solve the problem in their their neck of the woods? Yeah.
Dr. Robert Howarth:Well, we have, have to do so, right? And, you know, I think it's great idea for California to be capping those wells, and all we should be doing in New York too. But you know, we're not anywhere near as big of an oil or gas producer here in New York as as California. And in that regard, you know, we banned fracking here in New York back 11 years ago. And we're not big gas producers. We are, you know, New York uses more natural gas than any other state in the country, and since we banned fracking 11 years ago, our use of natural gas in New York has arisen more rapidly than any other state in the country, as well, in part as we displaced coal and as we displaced fuel oil for for heating in New York City, uh. And the, you know, our gas, it's coming from Pennsylvania, it's coming from West Virginia, it's coming from Ohio. It's all fracked gas has high methane emissions, but those occur from outside of our state. So, you know, our we have a climate law, the clcpa of 2019 and it it dictates many things. But among other things, it dictates that when we account for greenhouse gasses, that we take responsibility for the methane emissions which occur outside of our state, for the energy we use when we use natural gas from here, we are causing methane emissions in Pennsylvania, so we should stop using our natural gas. You know, I sit on the Climate Action Council, which is the group charged by law, with coming up with a blueprint for implementing that law. And we, we came up with a highly detailed plan. What 2025, months ago now we put it out, and the state is supposed to be following our plan. They've fallen behind that a little bit, but the plan was to cut our use of natural gas in half by 2035 relative to to current usage. And I think we can do that, and I think we can do that in a cost effective way that's good for New York consumers. Good, good for our economy. Good. Good for our health. And I think we've gotten sidetracked a little bit, to be honest, over the last few years, as as the political leadership in our state looked for solutions, waited for Washington to, you know, help us out. That's not going to happen. The original law we passed back in 2019 came because the people of New York insisted on doing something when there was no political leadership from from Washington, and here we are using more and more gas. We need to go back to our roots in that law and grab hold of it and and meet its goals. And I think we can do so. I think we have the economic capacity to do so. I think it'll be great for the economy of New York, good for the health of our citizens. You know, it's not just about climate. I'm a climate I'm a climate scientist, so I care about climate immensely. But 4000 people, we estimate, die prematurely every year in New York state due to air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, not to mention the amount of you know, people who miss school and miss work and etc, etc, huge economic costs associated with our to pollution from fossil fuels. So even aside from climate change, moving away from these fossil fuels would be lead to a much healthier, literally, healthier economy, healthier population. And we can do it. I'm convinced we can do it if, if the people of New York realize where we are. You know, we've had a huge disinformation campaign from the oil and gas industry since our clcpa was passed in 2019 and that that makes politicians scared, and we need to rise above that. But I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic we're going to do that. Greg. Greg lives. I'd call it downstate. He says, over in soggy What do you think we're going to be
Gregory A. Williams:able to do it? I think we will be able to do it. I think the clcpa was certainly a visionary piece of legislation. There has been, as you said, all kinds of political tussling about whether to stick to those objectives, but I think New Yorkers seem to keep voting in favor of measures like this and and so we'll make it happen. I agree.
Dina Rasor:Well then on that being positive about to look, you know, I don't know, to tell you if you live in Texas, but you're working on it. But if you're in a blue state, you know, you could be like Pennsylvania, which is purpley blue, whatever, you know, they're still, you're you. They're still developing it. They're still fracking it. They're still, yeah, they're losing it. So, you know, if you're in Pennsylvania, I know that they probably think that's a good income and everything. But on the other hand, people, it's as it starts encroaching on neighborhoods, like it did in Los Angeles. It's incredibly crazy. They're fracking in the middle of neighborhoods and then putting all the toxic stuff below, they're
Dr. Robert Howarth:doing that Pennsylvania. You know, I only live about 40 miles from the Pennsylvania border, so it's, it's banned here. But if I drive 50 miles south, you're, we're in major fracking area. And I'll tell you, those are not economically prosperous areas. Whatever economic boon is coming from the fracking isn't spilling over into the average neighborhood, and the people there are seeing the air and water pollution, they don't like it. I will, I will guarantee you, yeah,
Dina Rasor:well, I'm hoping that, in the very least, we can get people to understand that how dangerous gas stoves are, which is basically methane stoves, because I. I still know people who love their big, fancy, industrial gas stove, and they got little kids, and the rates of asthma is so much higher, and you've got a pilot like constantly burning methane in your house. So maybe if they people can understand that, they'll they'll branch it out from G my stove, and now we're flaring it in the air and all that kind of stuff, or something's going to blow up. That's I the pipeline. Pipeline explosions with the CO two in it are quite spectacular. And and also, also, just thinking about some of those plants, they're venting because the pressure is getting too high that one of these plants could blow up, and it would be a mess,
Gregory A. Williams:exactly. So, are there any, are there any thoughts you'd like to leave us with tonight? Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to talk about? What?
Dr. Robert Howarth:No, just, just to restate, I mean, the climate change is the existential threat to our, our generation, right and the younger generations, we've warmed the planet to levels where the climate scientists are unanimous in the world that we're on the edge of high, high risk of runaway climate disruption, from which it might take 1000s, 10s of 1000s of years to recover. And, you know, the IPCC tells us we have a brief window. Three years ago, they told us we had a brief window of a decade to solve this. We've got seven years to solve it. We need to move away from fossil fuels. That's the cause. And the technologies are there. They're cost effective. You know, it's the only thing standing in our way, or the disinformation from powerful interests and the and the political leadership that's scared off by that. But I it's hard to be optimistic about politics in United States in early March of 2025 right? And yet, I am optimistic that our states will rise to this occasion show an example to the world. And if we can prove we can move away from fossil fuels in New York and California, that'll be dramatically important. And you know, we mentioned Texas earlier, you mentioned Texas. You know, they don't, they don't like to admit it, but they've moved to solar and wind far faster than either California or New York, the way, the hell ahead of us. So,
Dina Rasor:you know, they still got a lot of leaks they don't fix.
Dr. Robert Howarth:They do. They got a lot of problems. But you know, their their energy is moving rapidly towards the future as well, because pure economics drives that. Well,
Dina Rasor:I'm hoping the younger generation, who has lot more of this to worry about than we do, really starts stepping up and insisting, you know, that something be done. Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth:no, I yes, they need to. They should, and it's they should view it as part of the, you know, the total onslaught against their generation in all sorts of ways. Climate is part of it. It's a major part of it, but it's just part of the pattern of issues that need to be addressed.
Gregory A. Williams:Well, thank you very much for being with us here tonight to do our part to combat that kind of misinformation. And I'll repeat quote that I heard recently, which is that perhaps the most important renewable resource is political will.
Dr. Robert Howarth:That's a great statement. Thank you for that.
Gregory A. Williams:Yeah, and we'll, of course, be looking for your your new research, and if anything comes up that you'd like to talk about we hope you'll give us a call.
Dr. Robert Howarth:Enjoyed talking to you tonight. So thank you. You.
