March 13, 2025 • 48 mins
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!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:00):
Music.
Gregory A. Williams (00:10):
Thank you for joining us for another
episode of climate moneywatchdog, where we investigate
and report on how federaldollars are being spent on
mitigating climate change andprotecting the environment. We
are a private, nonpartisannonprofit organization that does
not accept advertisers orsponsors, so we can only do this
work with your support. Pleasevisit us at climate money
(00:33):
watchdog.org to learn more aboutus and consider making a
donation. My name is GregWilliams, and I was taught to
investigate and report on waste,fraud and abuse and federal
spending. While working at theproject on government oversight
or Pogo 30 years ago, I learnedto do independent research, as
well as to work withconfidential informants or
(00:55):
whistleblowers to uncover thingslike overpriced spare parts,
like the infamous $435 hammersand expensive military weapon
systems that didn't work asadvertised. I was taught by my
co host, Dina razor, who foundedPogo in 1981 and founded climate
money watchdog with me threeyears ago, Dina has spent 40
(01:17):
years investigating andsometimes recovering millions of
dollars wasted by the DefenseDepartment and other branches of
government. She did this at Pogoas well as as an independent
journalist, as an author and asa professional investigator. Our
guest tonight is Dr RobertHaworth, a Cornell University
(01:40):
Atkinson professor of ecologyand environmental biology in the
Department of Ecology andEvolutionary Biology. He's an
Earth system scientist, anecosystem biologist and a
biogeochemist. He's workedextensively on environmental
issues related to human inducedchanges in the sulfur, nitrogen,
(02:01):
phosphorus and carbon cycles,the impacts of global climate
change, the interaction ofenergy systems and the
environment and theimplementation of 100% renewable
energy policies. He is thefounding editor of the journal
biogeochemistry, and currentlyserves as one of the 22 members
(02:23):
of the Climate Action Council, agroup charged by law with
implementing the aggressiveclimate goals of New York's
climate leadership and communityProtection Act of 2019 often
referred to as clcpa, haarth haspublished more than 200 research
papers, and these have beencited in other peer review
(02:43):
articles more than 70,000 times,making Haworth one of the 10
most cited aquatic scientists inthe world in 2011 Time Magazine
named Haworth of one of the 50people who matter for his
research on the greenhouse gasfootprint of shale gas produced
from hydraulic fracturing,better known as fracking. Dina,
(03:07):
would you like to say a fewwords about why we're excited to
have Dr Howarth with us?
Dina Rasor (03:11):
We're very excited, clearly, a very impressive
background, but we're also veryexcited on the whole idea of
methane and venting. And peoplesay, Oh, just leaks. That
happens, but there's beenquestions about venting and
whatever. So I'm really lookingforward for everybody who's
concerned about methane, andI'll have him tell you why you
(03:34):
should be concerned aboutmethane, but that we look at
this and get good scientificfacts about what's going on, so
that they there's not a lot ofthis greenwashing and silliness
that goes on about saying, youknow, we have to, we have to do
this. So anyway, thank you, DrHolt with for coming.
(03:56):
Can we call you Bob?
Dr. Robert Howarth (03:57):
Yeah, Bob.
Bob would be fine, and I'mdelighted to be with you. I hate
to confess, but I've beenworking on methane for showing
my age here over 50 years.
Dina Rasor (04:09):
How's that working out for you?
Dr. Robert Howarth (04:12):
Because I've gotten worse. What's the time
I've been working on it?
Dina Rasor (04:15):
Right? Similar to my work in Department of Defense,
and now Greg's work in theDepartment of Defense, it's
Sisyphus in the rock. And, youknow, you just have to accept
that. You pound your headagainst the wall exactly. Okay,
spend
Gregory A. Williams (04:28):
a couple of minutes just talking about the
different terms we're going touse, methane, shale gas, natural
gas, etc. Sure,
Dr. Robert Howarth (04:36):
yeah. You know, natural gas is been around
for a long time. It's, it's afuel. It's overwhelmingly
composed of methane when it'sfirst developed out of the
ground, unprocessed. It's, itmight be only 80, 70% methane by
the time they put a pipeline.
It's, it's 93 95% methane. Sonatural gas is methane. Gas. Uh,
(04:58):
shale gas is, is a type ofnatural gas. It's only been
developed in this this century.
There's no way to commerciallydevelop shale gas until, oh,
2005 or six or so, when twotechnologies came together to
capture that to to obtain themethane, which is still buried
(05:21):
deep in the earth. So, you know,conventional natural gas is
methane that came from Shellformations, but they migrated
over geological time frame intolittle reservoirs which are
captured. And you just put awell down and got it out of the
ground. A lot of the methane wasleft behind in the shale, and
until about 2005 again, youcouldn't get at it. Two
(05:43):
technologies made it possible toget it. One is high precision
directional drilling, which isan amazing technology, evil in a
way, but wonderful. You drilldown, what five, 610, miles
underground, until you find ashell formation, which might
only be 30 or 40 feet thick, butit goes on for hundreds of
(06:04):
miles. Once you encounter thatwith your well, you move the
well laterally, and you drill,you know, miles laterally as
well, so you can break up theshell. You break up the show by
putting down water and chemicaladditives, massive amounts of
water, and that's high volumehydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, and those twotechnologies weren't around
(06:26):
until this century. Now, almostall of the gas, 85 90% of the
gas that's produced in theUnited States comes from this
technology. It's still naturalgas, but again, it's coming from
from the shale, which was notcommercially exploitable even
two decades ago.
Dina Rasor (06:47):
Okay, so your research suggests that methane
emissions natural gas are higherthan previously thought. What's
what's priced you most aboutthese findings?
Dr. Robert Howarth (06:58):
Well, you know that they're not higher
than than I've been thinking fora while, but my colleague at
Cornell Tony and grafia, who's aengineer who helped develop this
whole hydraulic fracturingprocess way back quite a while
ago, and Renee Santoro and Ipublished a paper back in 2011
(07:21):
on what methane emissions fromshale gas might be. Because at
that point in time, shale gaswas still a new phenomenon, and
it was being sold not only bythe oil and gas industry, but
also by politicians, includingPresident Obama, as a bridge
fuel, something where we could,you know, use this gas instead
of coal and reduce our carbondioxide emissions. And there's
(07:44):
an element of truth in all ofthat, but the argument ignored
methane. And again, I've workedon 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 ofthe methane, which is what
natural gas and shale gas areemitted, unburned to the
atmosphere. Methane is agreenhouse gasses more than 100
(08:08):
times more potent than carbondioxide by the time it's in the
atmosphere. So small emissionsof methane really matter. And we
took it as a research challengeto try and do some early
guesstimates. And I use the wordguesstimates because there were
very few quality data availableat that point in time, but we
(08:30):
published a paper saying, youknow, it looks like methane
emissions might be pretty highin this process, and if so, this
is no bridge fuel. It's actuallyreally, really bad for the
climate, and people have to getout there and make better
measurements. So that paper, wepublished, what, 2011 14 years
ago, next month, ours was thefirst. There are now over 2000
(08:51):
papers that have been published,other peer reviewed papers. Our
study was based on, you know, afew dozen measurements which we
pulled out of Industry Reportspeople leaked to us, things of
that sort. There are now over amillion observations. And you
know, our initial estimatesactually held up incredibly
(09:12):
well. And so it's I'm notsurprised by where we are. The
only thing that surprises me isthat our initial guesstimates
were as accurate as they were,and that's because the people in
industry who were leaking thisinformation to us knew it was a
problem, and they were happy tohave us publicize it. And they
were they were right, and wewere correct in passing on to
(09:36):
the to the world those earlyestimates, which have held up
really well,
Dina Rasor (09:40):
okay. Well, also I know that you you discussed all
the new ways of trying to
Dr. Robert Howarth (09:48):
spot it, yeah, how do you measure it?
Yeah,
Dina Rasor (09:51):
yeah, I had to measure it, you know, and
everything else, because you cansee 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 anyheat weaving or anything else.
And then you put a thermalcamera up and you can see the
places leaking, like sip. Thisis, you know, if this was coal
(10:14):
smoke, you would have seen it.
And anyway, let maybe shoulddiscuss the satellites and
aircraft, and now this new tech,this new Ogi technology,
although Gregory,
Gregory A. Williams (10:28):
I just want to interject that, you know,
we're taught in school thatnatural gas doesn't have doesn't
have any smell until thecompanies actually put something
in it, so that you can tell ifthere's a gas leak, but that
means that if it's leaking orbeing vented before that that
smell has been inserted to it,you know, they can pump as much
(10:49):
as they wanted that into theatmosphere and and you would
have no way of knowing itwithout these thermal cameras.
Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth (10:56):
that's an excellent point, that the gas
you know, if you, if you walkalong the street in an urban
area, and you smell gas likewhat you're quite likely to do,
what you're smelling is not themethane gas. You're smelling the
chemical additives. They'veadded methane mercaptan, which
is a rotten egg like smell.
Methane itself has no no smell,no odor. It's invisible to the
(11:17):
naked eye. You can't see it. Sohow do we how do we visualize
it? Well, we use cameras whichare tuned to looking at the
infrared spectrum. You know,greenhouse gasses are greenhouse
gasses because they absorbradiation in the infrared
spectrum. The Earth comes down,heats the Earth's surface.
(11:38):
Radiation is rerated. In thesurface of the earth, and carbon
dioxide, other greenhousegasses, methane, critically
capture that. So there arecameras which, unlike our eye,
are tuned to see thosewavelengths. We don't see those
infrared radiations, but camerascan, and if you have a camera
that's tuned that way, it'lllook like smoke coming out of,
(12:02):
you know, leaks or out of ventsthat are that are letting it go
to the atmosphere. Purpose, whenwe can come back to that, the
technology is incredible. Youcan also use the infrared
spectrum and measure methanefrom space and satellites. And
the, you know, originally,satellites weren't designed
(12:24):
specifically to do that, butnonetheless, some smart people
figured out how to, how to tunethem and get data on methane
emissions going back, you know,15 years or so ago from now, we
now have a whole set ofsatellites that are up there
specifically to measure methaneemissions, and they they're
very, very good at at looking atthe spatial distribution across
the surface of the earth. Sobefore that technology came on,
(12:48):
what did you have to do? You'dhave to be on the ground. You'd
have to measure, you'd have tohave an instrument that
specifically measures methane.
You'd have to try and estimatehow it's interacting with the
wind and all. Usually you needpermission from the people
running facilities in order toget close enough to make these
(13:08):
measurements. Otherwise, thepolice come and ask you to move
away. So a lot of our early datagoing back, you know, 15 years
ago, are highly biased. Theycome just from places where
industry would let scientistswork. Often, the information was
funded by industry. Nonetheless,there's some very worrisome data
(13:32):
coming out, as they say, whichpeople leaked to us for our
paper, from 2011
Dina Rasor (13:37):
and so now you got this, the satellites, and then
some. I think before, beforethey really perfected the
satellites, they used a lot ofaircraft. 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 andfrom two different areas, and we
(13:57):
don't need to get into that asmuch, but I think Al Gore put
together a new organization thattakes all the all the data from
all the satellites, so you canactually go and see and that
actually worked with one of thelocal activists we had with our
that we had on our podcast. Sheknew there was a methane leak
(14:19):
near her, the plant near herhome, but she couldn't see it.
And they kept saying, no, no,the monitors show everything's
fine. And I said, Hey, go, golook at area. And she, she got
down to her Street, and there'sa red wall.
Dr. Robert Howarth (14:34):
It's incredible. There's, there's so
many satellites doing it now, alot of organizations working
out. But I think Al Gore hasdone an incredible job of
pulling that together and makingit visible. And just as an aside
to two months ago, little well,six weeks ago, I was in Davos,
Switzerland for the WorldEconomic Forum, and I I ran into
El Gore, and he and I spent 15or 20 minutes talking about
(14:57):
methane. And because he askedwhy. I was doing there. And of
course, I was trying to convincethe point 00, 1% that methane is
a problem, and he agreed withme. But so he's telling me about
what he's doing, which isfantastic. And he also started
to sort of lecture me on thebasics of methane, which he got
about 92% correct, but I gentlypointed out to him that much of
(15:21):
what he was citing back wascoming out of my research, and
he was getting a solid A minuson it, but not quite an so we
agreed to follow up.
Gregory A. Williams (15:33):
So maybe this is a good time to talk
about the distinction betweenthe potency of methane versus CO
two, and the difference betweenmethane as as a direct impact on
on the greenhouse effect versuswhat happens when methane is
burned.
Dina Rasor (15:51):
Right before you answer that, I'm sorry to
interrupt, but I had one morething, and I'm afraid there's
been allegations that thecompanies, because the
satellite, you know, satellitescan't do this through heavy
cloud cover, right? They can'tbe down on it. Yeah, there's,
(16:12):
there's been rumors floatingaround the anti methane world
that they are trying to do. Theywait until it's a cloudy day,
like reinvention in California,it's a cloudy day, and then they
vent like crazy, because the thethe thing can do it so that that
might be something where a oh, IOG, excuse me, Ogi thermal
(16:37):
camera could actually go on acloudy day. And yeah, if they're
just
Dr. Robert Howarth (16:41):
No, that's an excellent point. That's
that's where airplanes can comein too, because the airplane
flyers actually don't use theinfrared sensors. They instead
measure methane directly, okay,but it's more expensive. That's
a great point. You know, I cantell you, I trusted the oil and
gas industry, but, you know,I've been working with them off
and on, on this other issues fora long time, and, well, it
Dina Rasor (17:02):
sounds like it's becoming a cat and mouse game
now with these new satellites.
Okay, Greg, I'm sorry, go
Dr. Robert Howarth (17:07):
ahead, that's their whole strategy,
yeah. But going back to youknow, the reason Methane is a
greenhouse gas is it absorbsthis infrared radiation, and it
does so in a wavelength whichcarbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gasses don't. So forthe time it's in the atmosphere,
it's more than 100 times morepowerful than carbon dioxide.
That's the bad news. The goodnews is it doesn't stay in the
(17:29):
atmosphere for as long as carbondioxide. It's got a half life of
about 12 years. But that doesn'tmean it's gone in 12 years. It
means half of it's gone in 12years, and in 24 years, three
quarter, but it's gone and soon. So it has quite a, quite a
pronounced impact in the shorterterm, where, where does it go?
It gets oxidized in theatmosphere, and it becomes
(17:52):
carbon dioxide, and it becomeswater 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 apretty bad player, and the very
latest science from the UN'sIntergovernmental Panel on
(18:13):
Climate Change, their synthesisreport from three years ago now
says that since the start of theIndustrial Revolution, methane
has caused 1/3 of all globalwarming. And I don't think
people realize that, you know,we're not talking about a sub
player here. It's a major, majorplayer in in the warming we've
seen to date, and its short termimpact is quite high. So we
(18:37):
really need to reduce thesemethane emissions. And just one
aside, you know, the at thestart of this century, methane
emissions have been going upquickly in the 20th century, and
for the first decade of thiscentury, they actually leveled
off. They were not going up.
It's good news and good for theclimate. But since the shale gas
revolution, they've been goingup again, and they're going up
(18:59):
now as rapidly as they've everdone in the history of the
planet. And that's that's areal, real problem for the
climate.
Dina Rasor (19:09):
And you see that in refineries too. There's the
problem when they were doing therefineries that do they
contribute a lot to the methaneleakage? Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth (19:20):
you know, there's still to be 100%
transparent and honest. There's,there's a ongoing and raging
debate in the scientificcommunity as to why methane was
emissions were stable for adecade, and then why they've
been going up over the last 15years ago, but, but my research
strongly indicates that themajor cause of the increase is
(19:41):
the shale gas revolution in theUnited States. You know, we've
most of the increase in naturalgas production globally over the
last 15 years has been from theUnited States. It's mostly shale
gas. Methane emissions from thatare pretty high, and my research
suggests it's between 1/3 and.
Two thirds of all of theincrease in global methane over
that time period in theatmosphere has come from the
(20:04):
United States due to shale gas.
Gregory A. Williams (20:09):
And how much of that will you
characterize as fugitive gas?
You know, gas leaking from frompipelines and other sources. You
know,
Dr. Robert Howarth (20:19):
I'm not a real big fan of the term
fugitive, because it's not welldefined. It's a little
ambiguous. But we can talk aboutleaks and we can talk about
purposeful emissions, okay? Andleaks, 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 abetter wrench and some Teflon
(20:39):
tape, and you seal it up and ittakes care of it, right? That
that's how we deal with leaks.
And there are plenty of leakswith methane. It's a small
molecule. It's it leaks. Itleaks like a silk, particularly
in urban distribution systems,old pipeline systems. They're,
they're leaky as hell. But a lotof the methane emissions are
coming well before we get tourban and suburban distribution
(21:00):
systems, they're coming from thewell sites. They're coming from
high pressure pipelines and all.
And it's not I'm sure that thereare leaks there. There's no
doubt about it, but most of theemissions that are coming from
there are not leaks. They'repart of the purposeful
operation. So let me give you acouple of examples of that.
(21:24):
We're talking about airplaneflyovers as a way to measure
methane emissions earlier. Andone of the first efforts to do
that, I was a co author in apaper we published back in 2013
Dana Carlton, so graduatestudent at the time, was the
lead author on that, and Paulshepsen was her PhD professor.
(21:46):
He flew the airplane, and theymeasured methane from airplane
emissions, measuring real time.
One of the surprises to us,though, was that we were seeing
emissions from wells which werebeing drilled that had not yet
reached the shell formations.
And you know, we, we'd expectedno emissions from drilling
(22:07):
operations until you hit ashale. And the US, EPA, to this
day, says there are no suchemissions. And industry says
that. But we, we measure them,and then they're real and
they're large. And what seemedto be going on this was in
Pennsylvania. You're talkingabout an area with 130 140 years
worth of history of developingfossil fuel energy resources,
(22:32):
natural gas going way back, oilgoing way back, and coal, lot of
buried stuff in the ground, allof which accumulates methane.
These shale formations tend tobe deeper than that. So the
shale drillers are drillingthrough this, this history of
the Industrial Revolution overthe past 100 years. And in so
doing, they're they're findingpockets of methane gas and
(22:54):
blowing it off to theatmosphere. That's not a leak.
It's not easy to do anythingabout it, it's inherent in
drilling through this area ofhistory. So
Dina Rasor (23:07):
also on that, just for the reader to know. I mean,
everybody knows what happenswhen natural gas gets built up
in a house and you like, youturn the light switch on it It
blows, then it can leak and dothat. Isn't that also part of
the problem. And all theprocesses of methane and moving
(23:28):
it around, or refining it andeverything else, it builds up a
certain amount of energy, andthey've got to, they have to let
it out. Yeah, penalize it
Dr. Robert Howarth (23:39):
exactly. You need to maintain pressure
control. And it's you know,you're dealing with geology and
nature and weather. And it's youknow, it's not entirely
predictable. So when they'reprocessing the gas, when they're
storing the gas, when they'retransporting it through
pipelines to control pressure,they are admitting it, venting
it to the atmosphere. And also,
Dina Rasor (24:00):
when they do those flares, I know some people, when
you drive by a refinery or oilfill yourself, you see it
flaring. It's really supposed tobe burning off, most of it off,
and not letting it in theatmosphere. But I've seen those
Oh, Ogi cameras, yeah, lookingat it, and you can see the you
(24:20):
can see that it's not, it's notburning down to the top of the
pipe. It's kind of like your gas
Dr. Robert Howarth (24:27):
and a bunch of things going on there this we
can, you know, there are twoterms that the industry uses.
Venting means just letting it gooff without burning it. Flaring
is when you try to burn it, andif it's, you know, flaring is
better from the standpoint ofmethane, because you're burning
some of it and it's becomingcarbon dioxide. It's bad in
other ways, because you'reproducing a lot of local air
(24:47):
pollution, and it's bad forpeople who live near it, and it
also makes a huge amount ofnoise, and it's really visible
at night for miles around so,you know, I have friends in the
industry who say they reallydon't like to do. Flare it burn
it, because it's peoplecomplain, and when they vent it,
it's, again, it's an odorlessgas that's invisible, and people
(25:07):
don't see it, they don'tcomplain. So, yeah, so there's
that. But on top of that, thewhen you flare, you have to, you
have to light it, and the flaresgo out, and they don't
necessarily routinely go out andrelight them, and not all of the
methane that's being burned isactually burned. And
(25:28):
traditionally, industry likes tosay it's like 99.9% burned.
Well, that's nonsense undercontrolled lab conditions, it
might be 96 98% burned. But Ijust saw a new study, literally
published a couple days ago,which came as a surprise even to
me, saying that with any decentwind out there in nature, the
burning efficiencies go down to60% 60% burn, 40% vented off.
(25:53):
Because it's, you know, it'sjust blowing up faster than than
it can burn. So it's so thatthat that's one example. Another
example is that, you know, sortof routine operations. You're
moving the gas from the placewhere it's produced to market,
to high pressure pipelines, andyou have to do maintenance on
(26:15):
those pipelines now and then,and you can't just go out and
weld on a pipeline that's fullof 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 dois just literal, go to the
atmosphere very quickly. It'scalled 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'san incredible amount of methane
(26:39):
that's released, and it's notleak, you know, it's not an
accident. It's a purposeful partof the maintenance regime. And
industry likes to say, oh, we'llcut down on these leaks and
emissions. I've askedrepeatedly, what are you going
to do, other than blow downs interms of getting the gas out of
the pipeline before you domaintenance? Do you have any
(27:00):
suggestion you're going to suckit by vacuum back into a storage
facility? They don't have thetechnology to do that. They
don't have another answer. So,so they're all all of these
aspects that are just routineparts of the operation, which
are a substantial part of themethane emissions, and they're
inherent in our use of usingnatural gas.
Dina Rasor (27:26):
Okay, well, how, how do you think the industry does?
Just trying to now tell me howthe industry is responding now.
Now, how they responding now maybe a lot different than they
were before November 5, becausethey Yeah, they didn't know who
was going to, you know, whatkind of oversight they're going
to see. But how is the industryresponding? Are there? Are there
(27:48):
good, good actors and badactors? Or, you know, what are,
what's, what is the green boy?
Exactly. That's a great, great
Dr. Robert Howarth (27:55):
question.
Let me give you a littlehistorical perspective. When we
published our paper back in 2011saying that, you know, they're
probably substantial methaneemissions from developing and
using shale gas. And all theindustry response at the time
was, oh, no, we would never dothat. The gas is is too
valuable. We wouldn't waste it.
(28:16):
You know, so Well, it takesmoney to try and capture it. And
again, they don't havealternative technologies for a
lot of this stuff. So you knowthat the people who run these
industries are smart, and theythey maximize profits. They
don't The goal is not tominimize methane emissions. But
over time, they just sort ofdismissed it as happening.
Within a few years, as more andmore papers came online, and
(28:39):
more and more data that showedthat we were probably largely
correct. They sort of changedcourse 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 thelanguage for the last. You know,
several years, objective datadon't show that a satellite data
(28:59):
and all show no reduction inmethane emissions, but
nonetheless, you know, industrysays they're going down. Now we
have a, you know, new, newgovernment in in in Washington.
I was going to call itleadership, but that's not quite
the right word, a new governmentin Washington that is probably
fine with methane emissions andwants to promote oil and gas
(29:22):
interests, and the oil and gasindustries clearly energized to
just do what they want to do. Sothey're walking back from from
even pretending they're dealingwith methane, at least in the US
now they do. They want to keepour European colleagues happy,
because European Union inparticular has promulgated
(29:44):
regulations to say we shouldn'tbe taking gas from the US if it
has high methane emissions.
Dina Rasor (29:50):
Okay, is there? What is then the industry's reaction
to the satellites and stuffthey've surely based on what
I've seen. On how many timesthey've said there's nothing to
see, and then you satellite goesover and the giant red blob is
over it. What has been theirreaction to that kind of
Dr. Robert Howarth (30:10):
you know, I, I haven't seen them publicly
comment on it. It's hard torepeat the evidence. It's really
quite strong.
Dina Rasor (30:18):
They deny that the satellites capture that images
correctly,
Dr. Robert Howarth (30:23):
not the Not that I've heard, not that I've
heard. That'd be a very hardargument to make. Yeah, yeah.
Dina Rasor (30:31):
Okay, all right.
Well, what? What is your focusnow? Because obviously, you can
probably go up to the thefederal EPA, and knock on the
door for 100 hours, and they'renot going to, they're not going
to, you know, heed what you'resaying. But why? What? What?
What would you think now thisway to do it, and if you had one
(30:55):
message to convey to the public,what would that be? But then
also, how do, how to, what arethe avenues to try to fix this?
Because I'm we're always onthere. If you expose the problem
and you don't fix it, people getvery cynical.
Dr. Robert Howarth (31:11):
Yeah, no, there's, you're right, and we
can't afford to be cynical. Weneed, we need to fix it. You got
multiple questions there. Let megive you a a two part answer.
One is that, you know, theUnited States exports a lot of
of this shale gas, a lot ofnatural gas as liquefied natural
gas. You take the gas, you supercool it into liquid form, so you
(31:33):
can transport it in tankers. Andbefore 2016 it was illegal to do
that from the United States,because we were concerned about
our energy security. We wantedto hold on to our gas. But since
2016 we've we've been exportingit. The United States is now the
largest exporter of liquefiednatural gas in the world. We're
the largest producer of naturalgas in the world by far. And if
(31:58):
you look at you know natural gasproduction globally has been
stable over the last year,except from the United States,
where we've increased itincredibly. So the US is a bad
player here, and our methaneemissions are high from that and
that they're globallysignificant. So you know, the
Biden administration over thelast year, based on these sort
(32:22):
of arguments, decided not toallow any more LNG exports. Of
course, the Trump administrationhas reversed that already. I
think it's important for therest of the world to understand
that they do not want to betaking our liquefied natural
gas. The greenhouse gasfootprint of liquefied natural
gas is higher than that of anyother fossil fuel because of its
(32:44):
methane emissions and because ofthe energy intensity of taking
shale gas and making it intoLNG. So it's a climate disaster
for countries to be taking thatand beyond that. It's expensive,
and since we banned LNG exportsuntil 2016 now we're allowing
it. One could imagine, as USconsumers start to worry about
(33:07):
our own domestic needs and costsand things again in 3458, years,
that we will ban it again,right? So I personally think
it's incredibly important tomessage to the rest of the world
you don't, economically andpolitically, want to be
dependent on our gas and our gasas a climate disaster, don't
take it. And if the rest of theworld listens to that, that'll
(33:29):
have ramifications back here inthe US. It will suppress gas
production. I think it'll bereally great. But the long term
solution, sorry, no, no, goahead. The long term solution,
people say, you know, we need tofix these leaks. We need to do
this, and that, I think what weneed to do is to just move away
from fossil natural gas, Shellgas, all gas, as quickly as we
(33:54):
possibly can. In the IPCC,climate scientists of the world
tell us that we need to have aworld that's largely free of
fossil fuels by 20 years fromnow, all fossil fuels, if we're
to keep the planet from runaway,devastating feedbacks in the
(34:16):
climate system, which wouldhugely disrupt Human society,
disrupt our food production,disrupt our water supply, no
fossil fuels within 20 years.
That means we need to be movingas quickly as we can in all of
them. And natural gas is amongthe very, very worst of the
fossil fuels in terms of climatebecause of methane, liquefied
(34:38):
natural gas is the worst fossilfuel. It's far worse than coal,
and so we simply need to bemoving away from it. And I think
the whole thought that we'lljust, you know, somehow fix fix
the leak problems, fix theemissions problem, and continue
to use the fuel, maybe withcarbon capture, which is a scam,
quite frank. Quickly. You know,we just we can't afford to go
(35:01):
that way. Let's move as quicklyas we can to solar power, wind
power, hydro power, beneficialelectrification of heating with
heat pumps, electric vehicles,which use less fuels. The all of
those technologies are costeffective today, anywhere in the
world. Let's push there and notnickel and dime ourselves with
(35:24):
trying to solve the methaneemissions problems. Just get rid
of natural gas. And
Gregory A. Williams (35:34):
just to be clear, it's not that the United
States is liquefied natural gasis any worse than anyone else's.
It's just that we're making alot
Dr. Robert Howarth (35:42):
of it. We're the largest we make more than
anyone else, yeah.
Gregory A. Williams (35:47):
So you'd recommend to Europe that they
not use LNG period
Dr. Robert Howarth (35:51):
absolutely, you know, and I've published a
paper on that, precisely on thegreenhouse gas footprint. And I
actually say, you know, becauseof the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. You've got a huge shortterm challenge, but you're
better off reopening coal minesand coal burning plants in
Europe than you are importingmore LNG a the coal isn't as bad
(36:13):
for the climate, although we gotto get rid of coal too. But as a
short term fix, you already havethe infrastructure reopen it.
Don't build new infrastructureat the cost of hundreds of
billions of dollars forliquefied natural gas. That is
even worse for the climate.
Don't do it. Use those resourcesto to go with heat pumps again,
and much of Europe has done so.
(36:34):
You know, the use of natural gashas declined very, very markedly
over the last year in Europe, asthey've moved to using heat
pumps for heating, as they'veincreased wind and solar power.
Dina Rasor (36:48):
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 thingsmay not change until the midterm
elections. Just try to slow downand stop that. You're not going
to get any reform in Washington.
I'm in California, and you andGreg are in New York, and I'm
(37:10):
looking at California justpassed three really tough
methane laws in September oflast year, not just methane, but
capping low yielding oil wells,which they said, once the oil
gets low, the methane just comesroaring out, and all the toxins
come roaring out. And there's3000 low, low producing oil
(37:33):
wells in California that they'regoing to try to cap. So
California is actually doingsomething about it going along,
because we are, you know, thefifth largest economics in the
world, of it. But what would yousay economics in the world? And
you were telling me that NewYork is 10 so, yeah, yeah. And
(37:55):
so as an economic entity, by theway. Just to put it in context,
people don't realize Russia ishalf of Texas. But that is every
time I tell somebody that theygo, No, it's a big country. No,
Dr. Robert Howarth (38:18):
yeah, no, in terms of the economy,
California, Texas and New Yorkare all ahead of Russia.
Dina Rasor (38:24):
Yeah. So anyway, and looking at looking at New York,
what do you see? What you andGreg see that I'm out here
working to try to help now, helpthis. You know, California
government is going to havetheir little pro their program
of how they oversee it, but theyreally count on local people and
(38:48):
scientists and everybodyactivists to help them know
where all these gas leaks are.
And so we're, we're going tostart looking at that and all
the uncapped wells, but what'sgoing on in New York and and do
you think this is a good ideafor the states to try to move on
beyond federal money and solvethe ones who have the money try
to solve the problem in theirtheir neck of the woods? Yeah.
Dr. Robert Howarth (39:12):
Well, we have, have to do so, right? And,
you know, I think it's greatidea for California to be
capping those wells, and all weshould be doing in New York too.
But you know, we're not anywherenear as big of an oil or gas
producer here in New York as asCalifornia. And in that regard,
you know, we banned frackinghere in New York back 11 years
(39:33):
ago. And we're not big gasproducers. We are, you know, New
York uses more natural gas thanany other state in the country,
and since we banned fracking 11years ago, our use of natural
gas in New York has arisen morerapidly than any other state in
the country, as well, in part aswe displaced coal and as we
(39:55):
displaced fuel oil for forheating in New York City, uh.
And the, you know, our gas, it'scoming from Pennsylvania, it's
coming from West Virginia, it'scoming from Ohio. It's all
fracked gas has high methaneemissions, but those occur from
outside of our state. So, youknow, our we have a climate law,
the clcpa of 2019 and it itdictates many things. But among
(40:21):
other things, it dictates thatwhen we account for greenhouse
gasses, that we takeresponsibility for the methane
emissions which occur outside ofour state, for the energy we use
when we use natural gas fromhere, we are causing methane
emissions in Pennsylvania, so weshould stop using our natural
gas. You know, I sit on theClimate Action Council, which is
the group charged by law, withcoming up with a blueprint for
(40:44):
implementing that law. And we,we came up with a highly
detailed plan. What 2025, monthsago now we put it out, and the
state is supposed to befollowing our plan. They've
fallen behind that a little bit,but the plan was to cut our use
of natural gas in half by 2035relative to to current usage.
(41:07):
And I think we can do that, andI think we can do that in a cost
effective way that's good forNew York consumers. Good, good
for our economy. Good. Good forour health. And I think we've
gotten sidetracked a little bit,to be honest, over the last few
years, as as the politicalleadership in our state looked
for solutions, waited forWashington to, you know, help us
(41:29):
out. That's not going to happen.
The original law we passed backin 2019 came because the people
of New York insisted on doingsomething when there was no
political leadership from fromWashington, and here we are
using more and more gas. We needto go back to our roots in that
law and grab hold of it and andmeet its goals. And I think we
(41:50):
can do so. I think we have theeconomic capacity to do so. I
think it'll be great for theeconomy of New York, good for
the health of our citizens. Youknow, it's not just about
climate. I'm a climate I'm aclimate scientist, so I care
about climate immensely. But4000 people, we estimate, die
prematurely every year in NewYork state due to air pollution
caused by burning fossil fuels,not to mention the amount of you
(42:12):
know, people who miss school andmiss work and etc, etc, huge
economic costs associated withour to pollution from fossil
fuels. So even aside fromclimate change, moving away from
these fossil fuels would be leadto a much healthier, literally,
healthier economy, healthierpopulation. And we can do it.
I'm convinced we can do it if,if the people of New York
(42:38):
realize where we are. You know,we've had a huge disinformation
campaign from the oil and gasindustry since our clcpa was
passed in 2019 and that thatmakes politicians scared, and we
need to rise above that. ButI'm, I'm cautiously optimistic
we're going to do that. Greg.
(42:59):
Greg lives. I'd call itdownstate. He says, over in
soggy What do you think we'regoing to be
Gregory A. Williams (43:07):
able to do it? I think we will be able to
do it. I think the clcpa wascertainly a visionary piece of
legislation. There has been, asyou said, all kinds of political
tussling about whether to stickto those objectives, but I think
(43:27):
New Yorkers seem to keep votingin favor of measures like this
and and so we'll make it happen.
I agree.
Dina Rasor (43:38):
Well then on that being positive about to look,
you know, I don't know, to tellyou if you live in Texas, but
you're working on it. But ifyou're in a blue state, you
know, you could be likePennsylvania, which is purpley
blue, whatever, you know,they're still, you're you.
They're still developing it.
They're still fracking it.
(43:59):
They're still, yeah, they'relosing it. So, you know, if
you're in Pennsylvania, I knowthat 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 inLos Angeles. It's incredibly
crazy. They're fracking in themiddle of neighborhoods and then
putting all the toxic stuffbelow, they're
Dr. Robert Howarth (44:22):
doing that Pennsylvania. You know, I only
live about 40 miles from thePennsylvania border, so it's,
it's banned here. But if I drive50 miles south, you're, we're in
major fracking area. And I'lltell you, those are not
economically prosperous areas.
Whatever economic boon is comingfrom the fracking isn't spilling
over into the averageneighborhood, and the people
(44:42):
there are seeing the air andwater pollution, they don't like
it. I will, I will guaranteeyou, yeah,
Dina Rasor (44:49):
well, I'm hoping that, in the very least, we can
get people to understand thathow dangerous gas stoves are,
which is basically methanestoves, because I. I still know
people who love their big,fancy, industrial gas stove, and
they got little kids, and therates of asthma is so much
(45:10):
higher, and you've got a pilotlike constantly burning methane
in your house. So maybe if theypeople can understand that,
they'll they'll branch it outfrom G my stove, and now we're
flaring it in the air and allthat kind of stuff, or
something's going to blow up.
That's I the pipeline. Pipelineexplosions with the CO two in it
are quite spectacular. And andalso, also, just thinking about
(45:33):
some of those plants, they'reventing because the pressure is
getting too high that one ofthese plants could blow up, and
it would be a mess,
Gregory A. Williams (45:44):
exactly.
So, are there any, are there anythoughts you'd like to leave us
with tonight? Is there anythingwe haven't covered that you'd
like to talk about? What?
Dr. Robert Howarth (45:53):
No, just, just to restate, I mean, the
climate change is theexistential threat to our, our
generation, right and theyounger generations, we've
warmed the planet to levelswhere the climate scientists are
unanimous in the world thatwe're on the edge of high, high
(46:15):
risk of runaway climatedisruption, from which it might
take 1000s, 10s of 1000s ofyears to recover. And, you know,
the IPCC tells us we have abrief window. Three years ago,
they told us we had a briefwindow of a decade to solve
this. We've got seven years tosolve it. We need to move away
from fossil fuels. That's thecause. And the technologies are
(46:37):
there. They're cost effective.
You know, it's the only thingstanding in our way, or the
disinformation from powerfulinterests and the and the
political leadership that'sscared off by that. But I it's
hard to be optimistic aboutpolitics in United States in
early March of 2025 right? Andyet, I am optimistic that our
(47:00):
states will rise to thisoccasion show an example to the
world. And if we can prove wecan move away from fossil fuels
in New York and California,that'll be dramatically
important. And you know, wementioned Texas earlier, you
mentioned Texas. You know, theydon't, they don't like to admit
it, but they've moved to solarand wind far faster than either
(47:23):
California or New York, the way,the hell ahead of us. So,
Dina Rasor (47:28):
you know, they still got a lot of leaks they don't
fix.
Dr. Robert Howarth (47:30):
They do.
They got a lot of problems. Butyou know, their their energy is
moving rapidly towards thefuture as well, because pure
economics drives that. Well,
Dina Rasor (47:41):
I'm hoping the younger generation, who has lot
more of this to worry about thanwe do, really starts stepping up
and insisting, you know, thatsomething be done. Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth (47:55):
no, I yes, they need to. They should, and
it's they should view it as partof the, you know, the total
onslaught against theirgeneration in all sorts of ways.
Climate is part of it. It's amajor part of it, but it's just
part of the pattern of issuesthat need to be addressed.
Gregory A. Williams (48:12):
Well, thank you very much for being with us
here tonight to do our part tocombat that kind of
misinformation. And I'll repeatquote that I heard recently,
which is that perhaps the mostimportant renewable resource is
political will.
Dr. Robert Howarth (48:29):
That's a great statement. Thank you for
that.
Gregory A. Williams (48:32):
Yeah, and we'll, of course, be looking for
your your new research, and ifanything comes up that you'd
like to talk about we hopeyou'll give us a call.
Dr. Robert Howarth (48:43):
Enjoyed talking to you tonight. So thank
you. You.
Music.
Gregory A. Williams (00:10):
Thank you for joining us for another
episode of climate moneywatchdog, where we investigate
and report on how federaldollars are being spent on
mitigating climate change andprotecting the environment. We
are a private, nonpartisannonprofit organization that does
not accept advertisers orsponsors, so we can only do this
work with your support. Pleasevisit us at climate money
(00:33):
watchdog.org to learn more aboutus and consider making a
donation. My name is GregWilliams, and I was taught to
investigate and report on waste,fraud and abuse and federal
spending. While working at theproject on government oversight
or Pogo 30 years ago, I learnedto do independent research, as
well as to work withconfidential informants or
(00:55):
whistleblowers to uncover thingslike overpriced spare parts,
like the infamous $435 hammersand expensive military weapon
systems that didn't work asadvertised. I was taught by my
co host, Dina razor, who foundedPogo in 1981 and founded climate
money watchdog with me threeyears ago, Dina has spent 40
(01:17):
years investigating andsometimes recovering millions of
dollars wasted by the DefenseDepartment and other branches of
government. She did this at Pogoas well as as an independent
journalist, as an author and asa professional investigator. Our
guest tonight is Dr RobertHaworth, a Cornell University
(01:40):
Atkinson professor of ecologyand environmental biology in the
Department of Ecology andEvolutionary Biology. He's an
Earth system scientist, anecosystem biologist and a
biogeochemist. He's workedextensively on environmental
issues related to human inducedchanges in the sulfur, nitrogen,
(02:01):
phosphorus and carbon cycles,the impacts of global climate
change, the interaction ofenergy systems and the
environment and theimplementation of 100% renewable
energy policies. He is thefounding editor of the journal
biogeochemistry, and currentlyserves as one of the 22 members
(02:23):
of the Climate Action Council, agroup charged by law with
implementing the aggressiveclimate goals of New York's
climate leadership and communityProtection Act of 2019 often
referred to as clcpa, haarth haspublished more than 200 research
papers, and these have beencited in other peer review
(02:43):
articles more than 70,000 times,making Haworth one of the 10
most cited aquatic scientists inthe world in 2011 Time Magazine
named Haworth of one of the 50people who matter for his
research on the greenhouse gasfootprint of shale gas produced
from hydraulic fracturing,better known as fracking. Dina,
(03:07):
would you like to say a fewwords about why we're excited to
have Dr Howarth with us?
Dina Rasor (03:11):
We're very excited, clearly, a very impressive
background, but we're also veryexcited on the whole idea of
methane and venting. And peoplesay, Oh, just leaks. That
happens, but there's beenquestions about venting and
whatever. So I'm really lookingforward for everybody who's
concerned about methane, andI'll have him tell you why you
(03:34):
should be concerned aboutmethane, but that we look at
this and get good scientificfacts about what's going on, so
that they there's not a lot ofthis greenwashing and silliness
that goes on about saying, youknow, we have to, we have to do
this. So anyway, thank you, DrHolt with for coming.
(03:56):
Can we call you Bob?
Dr. Robert Howarth (03:57):
Yeah, Bob.
Bob would be fine, and I'mdelighted to be with you. I hate
to confess, but I've beenworking on methane for showing
my age here over 50 years.
Dina Rasor (04:09):
How's that working out for you?
Dr. Robert Howarth (04:12):
Because I've gotten worse. What's the time
I've been working on it?
Dina Rasor (04:15):
Right? Similar to my work in Department of Defense,
and now Greg's work in theDepartment of Defense, it's
Sisyphus in the rock. And, youknow, you just have to accept
that. You pound your headagainst the wall exactly. Okay,
spend
Gregory A. Williams (04:28):
a couple of minutes just talking about the
different terms we're going touse, methane, shale gas, natural
gas, etc. Sure,
Dr. Robert Howarth (04:36):
yeah. You know, natural gas is been around
for a long time. It's, it's afuel. It's overwhelmingly
composed of methane when it'sfirst developed out of the
ground, unprocessed. It's, itmight be only 80, 70% methane by
the time they put a pipeline.
It's, it's 93 95% methane. Sonatural gas is methane. Gas. Uh,
(04:58):
shale gas is, is a type ofnatural gas. It's only been
developed in this this century.
There's no way to commerciallydevelop shale gas until, oh,
2005 or six or so, when twotechnologies came together to
capture that to to obtain themethane, which is still buried
(05:21):
deep in the earth. So, you know,conventional natural gas is
methane that came from Shellformations, but they migrated
over geological time frame intolittle reservoirs which are
captured. And you just put awell down and got it out of the
ground. A lot of the methane wasleft behind in the shale, and
until about 2005 again, youcouldn't get at it. Two
(05:43):
technologies made it possible toget it. One is high precision
directional drilling, which isan amazing technology, evil in a
way, but wonderful. You drilldown, what five, 610, miles
underground, until you find ashell formation, which might
only be 30 or 40 feet thick, butit goes on for hundreds of
(06:04):
miles. Once you encounter thatwith your well, you move the
well laterally, and you drill,you know, miles laterally as
well, so you can break up theshell. You break up the show by
putting down water and chemicaladditives, massive amounts of
water, and that's high volumehydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, and those twotechnologies weren't around
(06:26):
until this century. Now, almostall of the gas, 85 90% of the
gas that's produced in theUnited States comes from this
technology. It's still naturalgas, but again, it's coming from
from the shale, which was notcommercially exploitable even
two decades ago.
Dina Rasor (06:47):
Okay, so your research suggests that methane
emissions natural gas are higherthan previously thought. What's
what's priced you most aboutthese findings?
Dr. Robert Howarth (06:58):
Well, you know that they're not higher
than than I've been thinking fora while, but my colleague at
Cornell Tony and grafia, who's aengineer who helped develop this
whole hydraulic fracturingprocess way back quite a while
ago, and Renee Santoro and Ipublished a paper back in 2011
(07:21):
on what methane emissions fromshale gas might be. Because at
that point in time, shale gaswas still a new phenomenon, and
it was being sold not only bythe oil and gas industry, but
also by politicians, includingPresident Obama, as a bridge
fuel, something where we could,you know, use this gas instead
of coal and reduce our carbondioxide emissions. And there's
(07:44):
an element of truth in all ofthat, but the argument ignored
methane. And again, I've workedon 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 ofthe methane, which is what
natural gas and shale gas areemitted, unburned to the
atmosphere. Methane is agreenhouse gasses more than 100
(08:08):
times more potent than carbondioxide by the time it's in the
atmosphere. So small emissionsof methane really matter. And we
took it as a research challengeto try and do some early
guesstimates. And I use the wordguesstimates because there were
very few quality data availableat that point in time, but we
(08:30):
published a paper saying, youknow, it looks like methane
emissions might be pretty highin this process, and if so, this
is no bridge fuel. It's actuallyreally, really bad for the
climate, and people have to getout there and make better
measurements. So that paper, wepublished, what, 2011 14 years
ago, next month, ours was thefirst. There are now over 2000
(08:51):
papers that have been published,other peer reviewed papers. Our
study was based on, you know, afew dozen measurements which we
pulled out of Industry Reportspeople leaked to us, things of
that sort. There are now over amillion observations. And you
know, our initial estimatesactually held up incredibly
(09:12):
well. And so it's I'm notsurprised by where we are. The
only thing that surprises me isthat our initial guesstimates
were as accurate as they were,and that's because the people in
industry who were leaking thisinformation to us knew it was a
problem, and they were happy tohave us publicize it. And they
were they were right, and wewere correct in passing on to
(09:36):
the to the world those earlyestimates, which have held up
really well,
Dina Rasor (09:40):
okay. Well, also I know that you you discussed all
the new ways of trying to
Dr. Robert Howarth (09:48):
spot it, yeah, how do you measure it?
Yeah,
Dina Rasor (09:51):
yeah, I had to measure it, you know, and
everything else, because you cansee 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 anyheat weaving or anything else.
And then you put a thermalcamera up and you can see the
places leaking, like sip. Thisis, you know, if this was coal
(10:14):
smoke, you would have seen it.
And anyway, let maybe shoulddiscuss the satellites and
aircraft, and now this new tech,this new Ogi technology,
although Gregory,
Gregory A. Williams (10:28):
I just want to interject that, you know,
we're taught in school thatnatural gas doesn't have doesn't
have any smell until thecompanies actually put something
in it, so that you can tell ifthere's a gas leak, but that
means that if it's leaking orbeing vented before that that
smell has been inserted to it,you know, they can pump as much
(10:49):
as they wanted that into theatmosphere and and you would
have no way of knowing itwithout these thermal cameras.
Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth (10:56):
that's an excellent point, that the gas
you know, if you, if you walkalong the street in an urban
area, and you smell gas likewhat you're quite likely to do,
what you're smelling is not themethane gas. You're smelling the
chemical additives. They'veadded methane mercaptan, which
is a rotten egg like smell.
Methane itself has no no smell,no odor. It's invisible to the
(11:17):
naked eye. You can't see it. Sohow do we how do we visualize
it? Well, we use cameras whichare tuned to looking at the
infrared spectrum. You know,greenhouse gasses are greenhouse
gasses because they absorbradiation in the infrared
spectrum. The Earth comes down,heats the Earth's surface.
(11:38):
Radiation is rerated. In thesurface of the earth, and carbon
dioxide, other greenhousegasses, methane, critically
capture that. So there arecameras which, unlike our eye,
are tuned to see thosewavelengths. We don't see those
infrared radiations, but camerascan, and if you have a camera
that's tuned that way, it'lllook like smoke coming out of,
(12:02):
you know, leaks or out of ventsthat are that are letting it go
to the atmosphere. Purpose, whenwe can come back to that, the
technology is incredible. Youcan also use the infrared
spectrum and measure methanefrom space and satellites. And
the, you know, originally,satellites weren't designed
(12:24):
specifically to do that, butnonetheless, some smart people
figured out how to, how to tunethem and get data on methane
emissions going back, you know,15 years or so ago from now, we
now have a whole set ofsatellites that are up there
specifically to measure methaneemissions, and they they're
very, very good at at looking atthe spatial distribution across
the surface of the earth. Sobefore that technology came on,
(12:48):
what did you have to do? You'dhave to be on the ground. You'd
have to measure, you'd have tohave an instrument that
specifically measures methane.
You'd have to try and estimatehow it's interacting with the
wind and all. Usually you needpermission from the people
running facilities in order toget close enough to make these
(13:08):
measurements. Otherwise, thepolice come and ask you to move
away. So a lot of our early datagoing back, you know, 15 years
ago, are highly biased. Theycome just from places where
industry would let scientistswork. Often, the information was
funded by industry. Nonetheless,there's some very worrisome data
(13:32):
coming out, as they say, whichpeople leaked to us for our
paper, from 2011
Dina Rasor (13:37):
and so now you got this, the satellites, and then
some. I think before, beforethey really perfected the
satellites, they used a lot ofaircraft. 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 andfrom two different areas, and we
(13:57):
don't need to get into that asmuch, but I think Al Gore put
together a new organization thattakes all the all the data from
all the satellites, so you canactually go and see and that
actually worked with one of thelocal activists we had with our
that we had on our podcast. Sheknew there was a methane leak
(14:19):
near her, the plant near herhome, but she couldn't see it.
And they kept saying, no, no,the monitors show everything's
fine. And I said, Hey, go, golook at area. And she, she got
down to her Street, and there'sa red wall.
Dr. Robert Howarth (14:34):
It's incredible. There's, there's so
many satellites doing it now, alot of organizations working
out. But I think Al Gore hasdone an incredible job of
pulling that together and makingit visible. And just as an aside
to two months ago, little well,six weeks ago, I was in Davos,
Switzerland for the WorldEconomic Forum, and I I ran into
El Gore, and he and I spent 15or 20 minutes talking about
(14:57):
methane. And because he askedwhy. I was doing there. And of
course, I was trying to convincethe point 00, 1% that methane is
a problem, and he agreed withme. But so he's telling me about
what he's doing, which isfantastic. And he also started
to sort of lecture me on thebasics of methane, which he got
about 92% correct, but I gentlypointed out to him that much of
(15:21):
what he was citing back wascoming out of my research, and
he was getting a solid A minuson it, but not quite an so we
agreed to follow up.
Gregory A. Williams (15:33):
So maybe this is a good time to talk
about the distinction betweenthe potency of methane versus CO
two, and the difference betweenmethane as as a direct impact on
on the greenhouse effect versuswhat happens when methane is
burned.
Dina Rasor (15:51):
Right before you answer that, I'm sorry to
interrupt, but I had one morething, and I'm afraid there's
been allegations that thecompanies, because the
satellite, you know, satellitescan't do this through heavy
cloud cover, right? They can'tbe down on it. Yeah, there's,
(16:12):
there's been rumors floatingaround the anti methane world
that they are trying to do. Theywait until it's a cloudy day,
like reinvention in California,it's a cloudy day, and then they
vent like crazy, because the thethe thing can do it so that that
might be something where a oh, IOG, excuse me, Ogi thermal
(16:37):
camera could actually go on acloudy day. And yeah, if they're
just
Dr. Robert Howarth (16:41):
No, that's an excellent point. That's
that's where airplanes can comein too, because the airplane
flyers actually don't use theinfrared sensors. They instead
measure methane directly, okay,but it's more expensive. That's
a great point. You know, I cantell you, I trusted the oil and
gas industry, but, you know,I've been working with them off
and on, on this other issues fora long time, and, well, it
Dina Rasor (17:02):
sounds like it's becoming a cat and mouse game
now with these new satellites.
Okay, Greg, I'm sorry, go
Dr. Robert Howarth (17:07):
ahead, that's their whole strategy,
yeah. But going back to youknow, the reason Methane is a
greenhouse gas is it absorbsthis infrared radiation, and it
does so in a wavelength whichcarbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gasses don't. So forthe time it's in the atmosphere,
it's more than 100 times morepowerful than carbon dioxide.
That's the bad news. The goodnews is it doesn't stay in the
(17:29):
atmosphere for as long as carbondioxide. It's got a half life of
about 12 years. But that doesn'tmean it's gone in 12 years. It
means half of it's gone in 12years, and in 24 years, three
quarter, but it's gone and soon. So it has quite a, quite a
pronounced impact in the shorterterm, where, where does it go?
It gets oxidized in theatmosphere, and it becomes
(17:52):
carbon dioxide, and it becomeswater 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 apretty bad player, and the very
latest science from the UN'sIntergovernmental Panel on
(18:13):
Climate Change, their synthesisreport from three years ago now
says that since the start of theIndustrial Revolution, methane
has caused 1/3 of all globalwarming. And I don't think
people realize that, you know,we're not talking about a sub
player here. It's a major, majorplayer in in the warming we've
seen to date, and its short termimpact is quite high. So we
(18:37):
really need to reduce thesemethane emissions. And just one
aside, you know, the at thestart of this century, methane
emissions have been going upquickly in the 20th century, and
for the first decade of thiscentury, they actually leveled
off. They were not going up.
It's good news and good for theclimate. But since the shale gas
revolution, they've been goingup again, and they're going up
(18:59):
now as rapidly as they've everdone in the history of the
planet. And that's that's areal, real problem for the
climate.
Dina Rasor (19:09):
And you see that in refineries too. There's the
problem when they were doing therefineries that do they
contribute a lot to the methaneleakage? Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth (19:20):
you know, there's still to be 100%
transparent and honest. There's,there's a ongoing and raging
debate in the scientificcommunity as to why methane was
emissions were stable for adecade, and then why they've
been going up over the last 15years ago, but, but my research
strongly indicates that themajor cause of the increase is
(19:41):
the shale gas revolution in theUnited States. You know, we've
most of the increase in naturalgas production globally over the
last 15 years has been from theUnited States. It's mostly shale
gas. Methane emissions from thatare pretty high, and my research
suggests it's between 1/3 and.
Two thirds of all of theincrease in global methane over
that time period in theatmosphere has come from the
(20:04):
United States due to shale gas.
Gregory A. Williams (20:09):
And how much of that will you
characterize as fugitive gas?
You know, gas leaking from frompipelines and other sources. You
know,
Dr. Robert Howarth (20:19):
I'm not a real big fan of the term
fugitive, because it's not welldefined. It's a little
ambiguous. But we can talk aboutleaks and we can talk about
purposeful emissions, okay? Andleaks, 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 abetter wrench and some Teflon
(20:39):
tape, and you seal it up and ittakes care of it, right? That
that's how we deal with leaks.
And there are plenty of leakswith methane. It's a small
molecule. It's it leaks. Itleaks like a silk, particularly
in urban distribution systems,old pipeline systems. They're,
they're leaky as hell. But a lotof the methane emissions are
coming well before we get tourban and suburban distribution
(21:00):
systems, they're coming from thewell sites. They're coming from
high pressure pipelines and all.
And it's not I'm sure that thereare leaks there. There's no
doubt about it, but most of theemissions that are coming from
there are not leaks. They'repart of the purposeful
operation. So let me give you acouple of examples of that.
(21:24):
We're talking about airplaneflyovers as a way to measure
methane emissions earlier. Andone of the first efforts to do
that, I was a co author in apaper we published back in 2013
Dana Carlton, so graduatestudent at the time, was the
lead author on that, and Paulshepsen was her PhD professor.
(21:46):
He flew the airplane, and theymeasured methane from airplane
emissions, measuring real time.
One of the surprises to us,though, was that we were seeing
emissions from wells which werebeing drilled that had not yet
reached the shell formations.
And you know, we, we'd expectedno emissions from drilling
(22:07):
operations until you hit ashale. And the US, EPA, to this
day, says there are no suchemissions. And industry says
that. But we, we measure them,and then they're real and
they're large. And what seemedto be going on this was in
Pennsylvania. You're talkingabout an area with 130 140 years
worth of history of developingfossil fuel energy resources,
(22:32):
natural gas going way back, oilgoing way back, and coal, lot of
buried stuff in the ground, allof which accumulates methane.
These shale formations tend tobe deeper than that. So the
shale drillers are drillingthrough this, this history of
the Industrial Revolution overthe past 100 years. And in so
doing, they're they're findingpockets of methane gas and
(22:54):
blowing it off to theatmosphere. That's not a leak.
It's not easy to do anythingabout it, it's inherent in
drilling through this area ofhistory. So
Dina Rasor (23:07):
also on that, just for the reader to know. I mean,
everybody knows what happenswhen natural gas gets built up
in a house and you like, youturn the light switch on it It
blows, then it can leak and dothat. Isn't that also part of
the problem. And all theprocesses of methane and moving
(23:28):
it around, or refining it andeverything else, it builds up a
certain amount of energy, andthey've got to, they have to let
it out. Yeah, penalize it
Dr. Robert Howarth (23:39):
exactly. You need to maintain pressure
control. And it's you know,you're dealing with geology and
nature and weather. And it's youknow, it's not entirely
predictable. So when they'reprocessing the gas, when they're
storing the gas, when they'retransporting it through
pipelines to control pressure,they are admitting it, venting
it to the atmosphere. And also,
Dina Rasor (24:00):
when they do those flares, I know some people, when
you drive by a refinery or oilfill yourself, you see it
flaring. It's really supposed tobe burning off, most of it off,
and not letting it in theatmosphere. But I've seen those
Oh, Ogi cameras, yeah, lookingat it, and you can see the you
(24:20):
can see that it's not, it's notburning down to the top of the
pipe. It's kind of like your gas
Dr. Robert Howarth (24:27):
and a bunch of things going on there this we
can, you know, there are twoterms that the industry uses.
Venting means just letting it gooff without burning it. Flaring
is when you try to burn it, andif it's, you know, flaring is
better from the standpoint ofmethane, because you're burning
some of it and it's becomingcarbon dioxide. It's bad in
other ways, because you'reproducing a lot of local air
(24:47):
pollution, and it's bad forpeople who live near it, and it
also makes a huge amount ofnoise, and it's really visible
at night for miles around so,you know, I have friends in the
industry who say they reallydon't like to do. Flare it burn
it, because it's peoplecomplain, and when they vent it,
it's, again, it's an odorlessgas that's invisible, and people
(25:07):
don't see it, they don'tcomplain. So, yeah, so there's
that. But on top of that, thewhen you flare, you have to, you
have to light it, and the flaresgo out, and they don't
necessarily routinely go out andrelight them, and not all of the
methane that's being burned isactually burned. And
(25:28):
traditionally, industry likes tosay it's like 99.9% burned.
Well, that's nonsense undercontrolled lab conditions, it
might be 96 98% burned. But Ijust saw a new study, literally
published a couple days ago,which came as a surprise even to
me, saying that with any decentwind out there in nature, the
burning efficiencies go down to60% 60% burn, 40% vented off.
(25:53):
Because it's, you know, it'sjust blowing up faster than than
it can burn. So it's so thatthat that's one example. Another
example is that, you know, sortof routine operations. You're
moving the gas from the placewhere it's produced to market,
to high pressure pipelines, andyou have to do maintenance on
(26:15):
those pipelines now and then,and you can't just go out and
weld on a pipeline that's fullof 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 dois just literal, go to the
atmosphere very quickly. It'scalled 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'san incredible amount of methane
(26:39):
that's released, and it's notleak, you know, it's not an
accident. It's a purposeful partof the maintenance regime. And
industry likes to say, oh, we'llcut down on these leaks and
emissions. I've askedrepeatedly, what are you going
to do, other than blow downs interms of getting the gas out of
the pipeline before you domaintenance? Do you have any
(27:00):
suggestion you're going to suckit by vacuum back into a storage
facility? They don't have thetechnology to do that. They
don't have another answer. So,so they're all all of these
aspects that are just routineparts of the operation, which
are a substantial part of themethane emissions, and they're
inherent in our use of usingnatural gas.
Dina Rasor (27:26):
Okay, well, how, how do you think the industry does?
Just trying to now tell me howthe industry is responding now.
Now, how they responding now maybe a lot different than they
were before November 5, becausethey Yeah, they didn't know who
was going to, you know, whatkind of oversight they're going
to see. But how is the industryresponding? Are there? Are there
(27:48):
good, good actors and badactors? Or, you know, what are,
what's, what is the green boy?
Exactly. That's a great, great
Dr. Robert Howarth (27:55):
question.
Let me give you a littlehistorical perspective. When we
published our paper back in 2011saying that, you know, they're
probably substantial methaneemissions from developing and
using shale gas. And all theindustry response at the time
was, oh, no, we would never dothat. The gas is is too
valuable. We wouldn't waste it.
(28:16):
You know, so Well, it takesmoney to try and capture it. And
again, they don't havealternative technologies for a
lot of this stuff. So you knowthat the people who run these
industries are smart, and theythey maximize profits. They
don't The goal is not tominimize methane emissions. But
over time, they just sort ofdismissed it as happening.
Within a few years, as more andmore papers came online, and
(28:39):
more and more data that showedthat we were probably largely
correct. They sort of changedcourse 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 thelanguage for the last. You know,
several years, objective datadon't show that a satellite data
(28:59):
and all show no reduction inmethane emissions, but
nonetheless, you know, industrysays they're going down. Now we
have a, you know, new, newgovernment in in in Washington.
I was going to call itleadership, but that's not quite
the right word, a new governmentin Washington that is probably
fine with methane emissions andwants to promote oil and gas
(29:22):
interests, and the oil and gasindustries clearly energized to
just do what they want to do. Sothey're walking back from from
even pretending they're dealingwith methane, at least in the US
now they do. They want to keepour European colleagues happy,
because European Union inparticular has promulgated
(29:44):
regulations to say we shouldn'tbe taking gas from the US if it
has high methane emissions.
Dina Rasor (29:50):
Okay, is there? What is then the industry's reaction
to the satellites and stuffthey've surely based on what
I've seen. On how many timesthey've said there's nothing to
see, and then you satellite goesover and the giant red blob is
over it. What has been theirreaction to that kind of
Dr. Robert Howarth (30:10):
you know, I, I haven't seen them publicly
comment on it. It's hard torepeat the evidence. It's really
quite strong.
Dina Rasor (30:18):
They deny that the satellites capture that images
correctly,
Dr. Robert Howarth (30:23):
not the Not that I've heard, not that I've
heard. That'd be a very hardargument to make. Yeah, yeah.
Dina Rasor (30:31):
Okay, all right.
Well, what? What is your focusnow? Because obviously, you can
probably go up to the thefederal EPA, and knock on the
door for 100 hours, and they'renot going to, they're not going
to, you know, heed what you'resaying. But why? What? What?
What would you think now thisway to do it, and if you had one
(30:55):
message to convey to the public,what would that be? But then
also, how do, how to, what arethe avenues to try to fix this?
Because I'm we're always onthere. If you expose the problem
and you don't fix it, people getvery cynical.
Dr. Robert Howarth (31:11):
Yeah, no, there's, you're right, and we
can't afford to be cynical. Weneed, we need to fix it. You got
multiple questions there. Let megive you a a two part answer.
One is that, you know, theUnited States exports a lot of
of this shale gas, a lot ofnatural gas as liquefied natural
gas. You take the gas, you supercool it into liquid form, so you
(31:33):
can transport it in tankers. Andbefore 2016 it was illegal to do
that from the United States,because we were concerned about
our energy security. We wantedto hold on to our gas. But since
2016 we've we've been exportingit. The United States is now the
largest exporter of liquefiednatural gas in the world. We're
the largest producer of naturalgas in the world by far. And if
(31:58):
you look at you know natural gasproduction globally has been
stable over the last year,except from the United States,
where we've increased itincredibly. So the US is a bad
player here, and our methaneemissions are high from that and
that they're globallysignificant. So you know, the
Biden administration over thelast year, based on these sort
(32:22):
of arguments, decided not toallow any more LNG exports. Of
course, the Trump administrationhas reversed that already. I
think it's important for therest of the world to understand
that they do not want to betaking our liquefied natural
gas. The greenhouse gasfootprint of liquefied natural
gas is higher than that of anyother fossil fuel because of its
(32:44):
methane emissions and because ofthe energy intensity of taking
shale gas and making it intoLNG. So it's a climate disaster
for countries to be taking thatand beyond that. It's expensive,
and since we banned LNG exportsuntil 2016 now we're allowing
it. One could imagine, as USconsumers start to worry about
(33:07):
our own domestic needs and costsand things again in 3458, years,
that we will ban it again,right? So I personally think
it's incredibly important tomessage to the rest of the world
you don't, economically andpolitically, want to be
dependent on our gas and our gasas a climate disaster, don't
take it. And if the rest of theworld listens to that, that'll
(33:29):
have ramifications back here inthe US. It will suppress gas
production. I think it'll bereally great. But the long term
solution, sorry, no, no, goahead. The long term solution,
people say, you know, we need tofix these leaks. We need to do
this, and that, I think what weneed to do is to just move away
from fossil natural gas, Shellgas, all gas, as quickly as we
(33:54):
possibly can. In the IPCC,climate scientists of the world
tell us that we need to have aworld that's largely free of
fossil fuels by 20 years fromnow, all fossil fuels, if we're
to keep the planet from runaway,devastating feedbacks in the
(34:16):
climate system, which wouldhugely disrupt Human society,
disrupt our food production,disrupt our water supply, no
fossil fuels within 20 years.
That means we need to be movingas quickly as we can in all of
them. And natural gas is amongthe very, very worst of the
fossil fuels in terms of climatebecause of methane, liquefied
(34:38):
natural gas is the worst fossilfuel. It's far worse than coal,
and so we simply need to bemoving away from it. And I think
the whole thought that we'lljust, you know, somehow fix fix
the leak problems, fix theemissions problem, and continue
to use the fuel, maybe withcarbon capture, which is a scam,
quite frank. Quickly. You know,we just we can't afford to go
(35:01):
that way. Let's move as quicklyas we can to solar power, wind
power, hydro power, beneficialelectrification of heating with
heat pumps, electric vehicles,which use less fuels. The all of
those technologies are costeffective today, anywhere in the
world. Let's push there and notnickel and dime ourselves with
(35:24):
trying to solve the methaneemissions problems. Just get rid
of natural gas. And
Gregory A. Williams (35:34):
just to be clear, it's not that the United
States is liquefied natural gasis any worse than anyone else's.
It's just that we're making alot
Dr. Robert Howarth (35:42):
of it. We're the largest we make more than
anyone else, yeah.
Gregory A. Williams (35:47):
So you'd recommend to Europe that they
not use LNG period
Dr. Robert Howarth (35:51):
absolutely, you know, and I've published a
paper on that, precisely on thegreenhouse gas footprint. And I
actually say, you know, becauseof the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. You've got a huge shortterm challenge, but you're
better off reopening coal minesand coal burning plants in
Europe than you are importingmore LNG a the coal isn't as bad
(36:13):
for the climate, although we gotto get rid of coal too. But as a
short term fix, you already havethe infrastructure reopen it.
Don't build new infrastructureat the cost of hundreds of
billions of dollars forliquefied natural gas. That is
even worse for the climate.
Don't do it. Use those resourcesto to go with heat pumps again,
and much of Europe has done so.
(36:34):
You know, the use of natural gashas declined very, very markedly
over the last year in Europe, asthey've moved to using heat
pumps for heating, as they'veincreased wind and solar power.
Dina Rasor (36:48):
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 thingsmay not change until the midterm
elections. Just try to slow downand stop that. You're not going
to get any reform in Washington.
I'm in California, and you andGreg are in New York, and I'm
(37:10):
looking at California justpassed three really tough
methane laws in September oflast year, not just methane, but
capping low yielding oil wells,which they said, once the oil
gets low, the methane just comesroaring out, and all the toxins
come roaring out. And there's3000 low, low producing oil
(37:33):
wells in California that they'regoing to try to cap. So
California is actually doingsomething about it going along,
because we are, you know, thefifth largest economics in the
world, of it. But what would yousay economics in the world? And
you were telling me that NewYork is 10 so, yeah, yeah. And
(37:55):
so as an economic entity, by theway. Just to put it in context,
people don't realize Russia ishalf of Texas. But that is every
time I tell somebody that theygo, No, it's a big country. No,
Dr. Robert Howarth (38:18):
yeah, no, in terms of the economy,
California, Texas and New Yorkare all ahead of Russia.
Dina Rasor (38:24):
Yeah. So anyway, and looking at looking at New York,
what do you see? What you andGreg see that I'm out here
working to try to help now, helpthis. You know, California
government is going to havetheir little pro their program
of how they oversee it, but theyreally count on local people and
(38:48):
scientists and everybodyactivists to help them know
where all these gas leaks are.
And so we're, we're going tostart looking at that and all
the uncapped wells, but what'sgoing on in New York and and do
you think this is a good ideafor the states to try to move on
beyond federal money and solvethe ones who have the money try
to solve the problem in theirtheir neck of the woods? Yeah.
Dr. Robert Howarth (39:12):
Well, we have, have to do so, right? And,
you know, I think it's greatidea for California to be
capping those wells, and all weshould be doing in New York too.
But you know, we're not anywherenear as big of an oil or gas
producer here in New York as asCalifornia. And in that regard,
you know, we banned frackinghere in New York back 11 years
(39:33):
ago. And we're not big gasproducers. We are, you know, New
York uses more natural gas thanany other state in the country,
and since we banned fracking 11years ago, our use of natural
gas in New York has arisen morerapidly than any other state in
the country, as well, in part aswe displaced coal and as we
(39:55):
displaced fuel oil for forheating in New York City, uh.
And the, you know, our gas, it'scoming from Pennsylvania, it's
coming from West Virginia, it'scoming from Ohio. It's all
fracked gas has high methaneemissions, but those occur from
outside of our state. So, youknow, our we have a climate law,
the clcpa of 2019 and it itdictates many things. But among
(40:21):
other things, it dictates thatwhen we account for greenhouse
gasses, that we takeresponsibility for the methane
emissions which occur outside ofour state, for the energy we use
when we use natural gas fromhere, we are causing methane
emissions in Pennsylvania, so weshould stop using our natural
gas. You know, I sit on theClimate Action Council, which is
the group charged by law, withcoming up with a blueprint for
(40:44):
implementing that law. And we,we came up with a highly
detailed plan. What 2025, monthsago now we put it out, and the
state is supposed to befollowing our plan. They've
fallen behind that a little bit,but the plan was to cut our use
of natural gas in half by 2035relative to to current usage.
(41:07):
And I think we can do that, andI think we can do that in a cost
effective way that's good forNew York consumers. Good, good
for our economy. Good. Good forour health. And I think we've
gotten sidetracked a little bit,to be honest, over the last few
years, as as the politicalleadership in our state looked
for solutions, waited forWashington to, you know, help us
(41:29):
out. That's not going to happen.
The original law we passed backin 2019 came because the people
of New York insisted on doingsomething when there was no
political leadership from fromWashington, and here we are
using more and more gas. We needto go back to our roots in that
law and grab hold of it and andmeet its goals. And I think we
(41:50):
can do so. I think we have theeconomic capacity to do so. I
think it'll be great for theeconomy of New York, good for
the health of our citizens. Youknow, it's not just about
climate. I'm a climate I'm aclimate scientist, so I care
about climate immensely. But4000 people, we estimate, die
prematurely every year in NewYork state due to air pollution
caused by burning fossil fuels,not to mention the amount of you
(42:12):
know, people who miss school andmiss work and etc, etc, huge
economic costs associated withour to pollution from fossil
fuels. So even aside fromclimate change, moving away from
these fossil fuels would be leadto a much healthier, literally,
healthier economy, healthierpopulation. And we can do it.
I'm convinced we can do it if,if the people of New York
(42:38):
realize where we are. You know,we've had a huge disinformation
campaign from the oil and gasindustry since our clcpa was
passed in 2019 and that thatmakes politicians scared, and we
need to rise above that. ButI'm, I'm cautiously optimistic
we're going to do that. Greg.
(42:59):
Greg lives. I'd call itdownstate. He says, over in
soggy What do you think we'regoing to be
Gregory A. Williams (43:07):
able to do it? I think we will be able to
do it. I think the clcpa wascertainly a visionary piece of
legislation. There has been, asyou said, all kinds of political
tussling about whether to stickto those objectives, but I think
(43:27):
New Yorkers seem to keep votingin favor of measures like this
and and so we'll make it happen.
I agree.
Dina Rasor (43:38):
Well then on that being positive about to look,
you know, I don't know, to tellyou if you live in Texas, but
you're working on it. But ifyou're in a blue state, you
know, you could be likePennsylvania, which is purpley
blue, whatever, you know,they're still, you're you.
They're still developing it.
They're still fracking it.
(43:59):
They're still, yeah, they'relosing it. So, you know, if
you're in Pennsylvania, I knowthat 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 inLos Angeles. It's incredibly
crazy. They're fracking in themiddle of neighborhoods and then
putting all the toxic stuffbelow, they're
Dr. Robert Howarth (44:22):
doing that Pennsylvania. You know, I only
live about 40 miles from thePennsylvania border, so it's,
it's banned here. But if I drive50 miles south, you're, we're in
major fracking area. And I'lltell you, those are not
economically prosperous areas.
Whatever economic boon is comingfrom the fracking isn't spilling
over into the averageneighborhood, and the people
(44:42):
there are seeing the air andwater pollution, they don't like
it. I will, I will guaranteeyou, yeah,
Dina Rasor (44:49):
well, I'm hoping that, in the very least, we can
get people to understand thathow dangerous gas stoves are,
which is basically methanestoves, because I. I still know
people who love their big,fancy, industrial gas stove, and
they got little kids, and therates of asthma is so much
(45:10):
higher, and you've got a pilotlike constantly burning methane
in your house. So maybe if theypeople can understand that,
they'll they'll branch it outfrom G my stove, and now we're
flaring it in the air and allthat kind of stuff, or
something's going to blow up.
That's I the pipeline. Pipelineexplosions with the CO two in it
are quite spectacular. And andalso, also, just thinking about
(45:33):
some of those plants, they'reventing because the pressure is
getting too high that one ofthese plants could blow up, and
it would be a mess,
Gregory A. Williams (45:44):
exactly.
So, are there any, are there anythoughts you'd like to leave us
with tonight? Is there anythingwe haven't covered that you'd
like to talk about? What?
Dr. Robert Howarth (45:53):
No, just, just to restate, I mean, the
climate change is theexistential threat to our, our
generation, right and theyounger generations, we've
warmed the planet to levelswhere the climate scientists are
unanimous in the world thatwe're on the edge of high, high
(46:15):
risk of runaway climatedisruption, from which it might
take 1000s, 10s of 1000s ofyears to recover. And, you know,
the IPCC tells us we have abrief window. Three years ago,
they told us we had a briefwindow of a decade to solve
this. We've got seven years tosolve it. We need to move away
from fossil fuels. That's thecause. And the technologies are
(46:37):
there. They're cost effective.
You know, it's the only thingstanding in our way, or the
disinformation from powerfulinterests and the and the
political leadership that'sscared off by that. But I it's
hard to be optimistic aboutpolitics in United States in
early March of 2025 right? Andyet, I am optimistic that our
(47:00):
states will rise to thisoccasion show an example to the
world. And if we can prove wecan move away from fossil fuels
in New York and California,that'll be dramatically
important. And you know, wementioned Texas earlier, you
mentioned Texas. You know, theydon't, they don't like to admit
it, but they've moved to solarand wind far faster than either
(47:23):
California or New York, the way,the hell ahead of us. So,
Dina Rasor (47:28):
you know, they still got a lot of leaks they don't
fix.
Dr. Robert Howarth (47:30):
They do.
They got a lot of problems. Butyou know, their their energy is
moving rapidly towards thefuture as well, because pure
economics drives that. Well,
Dina Rasor (47:41):
I'm hoping the younger generation, who has lot
more of this to worry about thanwe do, really starts stepping up
and insisting, you know, thatsomething be done. Yeah,
Dr. Robert Howarth (47:55):
no, I yes, they need to. They should, and
it's they should view it as partof the, you know, the total
onslaught against theirgeneration in all sorts of ways.
Climate is part of it. It's amajor part of it, but it's just
part of the pattern of issuesthat need to be addressed.
Gregory A. Williams (48:12):
Well, thank you very much for being with us
here tonight to do our part tocombat that kind of
misinformation. And I'll repeatquote that I heard recently,
which is that perhaps the mostimportant renewable resource is
political will.
Dr. Robert Howarth (48:29):
That's a great statement. Thank you for
that.
Gregory A. Williams (48:32):
Yeah, and we'll, of course, be looking for
your your new research, and ifanything comes up that you'd
like to talk about we hopeyou'll give us a call.
Dr. Robert Howarth (48:43):
Enjoyed talking to you tonight. So thank
you. You.
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