Our attempts to minimize the effects of climate change have focused on carbon dioxide. The boom in natural gas was triggered, in part, by its ability to reduce carbon emissions. Thus, there has been a slight decline in CO2 emissions. But, if you accept the findings of a recent paper by Harvard researchers, we still have a problem - the leaking of methane.
Between 2002 and 2014, US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere. Why is this a problem? Methane traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. And you need not burn methane to have a problem; it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove. The situation has been aggravated by fracking.
So, what do we do now?
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