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Last Thursday, the EPA announced the adoption of new environmental standards that will reduce overburdensome regulations on methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations. While the climate alarmists will scream that the end is near, the EPA estimates the new regulations will increase methane emissions by only a few percent over the next 5 years. And it represents an important shift in the EPA’s stance on whether it should regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) other than carbon dioxide (CO2)

Burger King is staging an intervention with its cows. The chain has rebalanced the diet of some of the cows by adding lemon grass in a bid to limit bovines contributions to climate change. By tweaking their diet, Burger King said Tuesday that it believes it can reduce a cows’ daily methane emissions by about 33%. Cows emit methane as a by-product of their digestion, and that has become a potential public relations hurdle for major burger chains. Greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector made up 9.9% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, according to the Environmental...

For some reason, Donald Trump decided on Saturday to retweet a video of a Texas mayor who was unaware he was still wearing a hot mic when he went to the bathroom. The Twitter user Trump boosted is outspokenly anti-Trump but the President didn’t mind that because the video is hilarious. Well, if you are a conservative you will find this funny and if you are a liberal than you will call this re-tweet gross. Sometime between 7:22 am and 8:04 am Saturday morning — the times of the surrounding tweets — Trump retweeted a video from the account of...

There goes another “fingerprint”… It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels. Judging by the speech Murry Salby gave at the Sydney Institute, there’s a blockbuster paper coming soon.Listen to the speech: “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources”Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s spent time at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia. Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels...

The idea of a cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. has become all the rage. Earlier this year, 10 big American companies formed the Climate Action Partnership to lobby for government action on climate change. And this week the private-equity consortium that is bidding to take over Texas utility TXU announced that, as part of the buyout, it would join the forces lobbying for a cap on carbon emissions. But this is not, as Lenin once said, a case of capitalists selling the rope to hang themselves with. In most cases, it is good old-fashioned rent-seeking with...

Simple Chemistry and the Real Greenhouse Effect. Truths: 1. Most of the Sun’s radiation that gets to the Earth’s lower atmosphere passes through substantially unabsorbed. 2. Most of the radiation is then absorbed on contact with the Earth’s surface. This includes the majority water and the minority land. 3. Most of the Earth’s surface is either water or moist vegetation. Most of the radiation from the sun is converted to infrared wavelengths at or near the surface. The water molecules absorb the infrared radiation causing increased vibration within the individual water molecules. This is converted into translational energy during intermolecular...

Several groups that often are at odds over environmental rules are on the same side when it comes to easing methane regulations at oil and gas sites. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection joined major oil and gas companies, environmental groups and lawmakers from both parties last week in urging the Trump administration not to go through with its proposal to eliminate methane control requirements from well sites and pipelines across the country. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back rules adopted in 2016 that require companies to identify and stop methane leaks from new and modified...

A New Mexico climate change task force released its first report Thursday, citing progress that has been made to combat the “climate crisis” and recommendations for the state climate strategy. Among other findings, the task force said New Mexico produced more than 66 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 – about 1% of the national total. The state is home to about 0.6% of the nation’s population ... Overall, New Mexicans produce 31 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per person per year, the report found. The national average is 18 tons per person. “It is not hyperbole...

NASA’s Curiosity rover returned some seriously surprising data to Earth earlier this year, with readings of elevated methane levels that were hard to explain. Subsequent tests attempted to pin down the cause of the higher-than-expected readings but scientists have yet to come up with a definitive answer. Now, as questions about methane continue to swirl, scientists studying the behavior of gasses on Mars have noticed that oxygen on the Red Planet also acts much differently than it does on Earth. The observations were made in the Gale Crater, which the rover has called home since it landed there back in...

SANTA FE, N.M. — Methane sensors will be put on planes, trucks and atop towers in the West Texas and southeastern New Mexico desert in a new effort to gauge the extent of greenhouse gas emissions from surging oil and natural gas production, advocates with the Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday. The yearlong project in the Permian Basin petroleum production region involves researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wyoming, and low-flying planes from a Colorado-based atmospheric research company. The new methods will be used because traditional estimates of methane emissions have not kept up with the rapid...

The Boknis Eck Observatory might've been "forcibly removed" from a bay in Germany, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel said. Data transmission from the underwater sensors suddenly cut out one night in August, GEOMAR said. When divers went to investigate at the observatory site, they found nothing but a shredded cable that once anchored it. The observatory, planted in Kiel's Eckernförde Bay in 2016, consists of two "desk-sized" racks: One acts as a power source, tethered to the coast by a cable, and the other contains the sensors that transmit data back to shore. Both were missing...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed revoking Obama-era regulations on climate-changing methane leaks from many oil facilities, a move that environmental groups said was meant to renounce the agency’s overall legal authority to regulate the gas in the fight against global warming. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the proposed rule followed President Donald Trump’s directions to remove “unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry.” The step would be the latest in a series easing the previous administration’s emissions controls on the oil, gas and coal industries, including a 2016 rule regulating oil-industry methane leaks as...

A few months after detecting an "unusually high" level of methane on Mars, researchers have yet to figure out what's causing the spike. According to a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers from Newcastle University in the U.K. have ruled out that the spike could have been caused by wind erosion of rocks that had trapped the methane from fluid inclusions and fractures on the Red Planet's surface. "The questions are -- where is this methane coming from, and is the source biological?" principal investigator Dr. Jon Telling said Telling added that over the last decade, winds on Mars have...

The energy industry is waging war against climate change - and winning. Last week, the Environmental Partnership, a group of oil and gas firms dedicated to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, released its first annual progress report. The results are impressive -- and showcase what happens when an industry unites to further the public good. The Environmental Partnership launched in late 2017 with 26 members. Within 12 months, it more than doubled in size to 58 members -- including 32 of America's top 40 oil and gas producers. Today, its members account for nearly half of America's oil and natural gas...

High levels of methane could potentially be generated underground by microbes called methanogens that survive without oxygen and produce the gas as a metabolic byproduct. Project scientist Ashwin R. Vasavada told the Curiosity science team in an email that “Given this surprising result, we’ve reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment,” the Times wrote. The readings on Wednesday are over three times that of a sudden spike in 2013 that lasted several months; after first finding nothing after its touchdown in 2012, Curiosity detected approximately seven parts per billion of methane later in the year. The newest measurements are...

The discovery of more major natural gas fields in Israel since 2009 has transformed the Jewish state from an energy-dependent country into an energy supplier Polish state-controlled energy company PGNiG is considering the purchase of Israeli natural gas as it seeks to reduce its dependence on key Russian supplier, Gazprom. “We want to be the company at the crossroads of North-South and East-West... we need something to the south,” PGNiG chief executive Piotr Wozniak told Reuters last week. “So we are looking at all those places to the south of Poland very carefully... So yes, we are interested in Israel,”...

While searching for the source of methane on Saturn’s large moon Titan, researchers found a completely unexpected corridor of methane ice wrapping nearly halfway around the moon. Three orientations of Titan’s globe. The icy corridor is mapped in blue. Image via Caitlin Griffith/UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.A research team has discovered huge ice feature on Titan while trying to understand where Saturn’s largest moon gets all of its methane. Like Earth, Titan has rain, seas and a surface of eroding organic material. However, on Titan it is methane, not water, that makes up the raindrops and fills the lakes.A team...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Let’s clear the air about cow farts. In the climate change debate, some policymakers seem to be bovine flatulence deniers.

NYC Vows to Start ‘Phasing Out’ Hot Dogs to Save the Planet as Part of Their Own $14B Green New Deal Madison Dibble about 2 hours ago Hot dogs may become harder to find following the approval of New York City’s version of the Green New Deal as local politicians pick of the sword to take on climate change. On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-N.Y.) slapped his signature on his city’s blueprint for combatting climate change. Following in the footsteps of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the city passed a Green New Deal to mobilize the city’s resources to combat...

The IPCC’s AR5 estimated the global warming caused by a tonne of livestock methane would be 28 times that of a tonne of carbon dioxide. New research destroys that estimate. The war on meat has been gathering pace amongst our Western elites. The Economist makes a detailed case for “plant-based food” in the interests of quelling climate change – The FAO calculates that cattle generate up to two-thirds of the greenhouse gases from livestock, and are the world’s fifth largest source of methane. If cows were a country, the United Herds of Earth would be the planet’s third largest greenhouse-gas...