The EPA's Redundant Methane Emission Regulations

by JASmius



Take a thorough look at the chart above.  It's a wonderful illustration of why the free market works and the many faces of socialism do not.

Look at how methane emissions over the past six years have plummeted at the same time that natural gas production has soared.  To listen to the greenstremists, you'd think this phenomenon was impossible.  Inconceivable.  "Big Oil = rampant pollution" is what we've been indoctrinated to believe for longer than my entire adult life.  How can such a counterintuition possibly be the case?

Simple: Methane IS natural gas.  And since natural gas is what the energy industry is attempting to extract, so that, yes, they can sell it, and yes, make a profit on it, guess what, boys and girls?  They have an acute economic incentive to make sure that they allow as little of it to bleed off and escape as "methane emissions" as possible.  A self-correcting problem that ought not require any regulatory reinforcement (even if the EPA was legal and constitutional), right?

Damn, right.

But the EPA is blitzing the energy industry with the regulations anyway because, "F*** you":

The Obama administration is proposing to cut methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas production by nearly half over the next decade in an unprecedented step to curb "climate change".

The administration’s target is to cut methane from oil and gas drilling by 40% to 45% by 2025, compared to 2012 levels. The move was not unexpected — officials set the same goal in a preliminary blueprint in January. Still, by moving forward with the official proposal, Barack Obama is adding to a list of energy regulations that have drawn applause from environmentalists and ire from energy advocates.

Thus pretty much putting the energy industry out of business, cutting off the bulk of U.S. energy production, skyrocketing electricity rates, and laying waste to millions of what jobs remain in this country.  And all in service to a complete fraud.

Aaaaaaaand putting out of business an industry that is already drastically reducing "greenhouse" emissions.

What does this illustrate?  That no industry can or will ever do enough to satisfy the Obama Regime, because ostensible metrics like premium rates or emissions levels are not the purpose of this fascist, vice-like regulatory straitjacket; its purpose is not practical, it is ideological.  Obamunism equates private industry with every evil in creation, and thus private industry cannot be trusted and must be punished and, ultimately, destroyed, by any means necessary.  Although O will take the process a little slower in return for a few specific "contributions" and "donations" along the way.

This is not "idiocracy," it is malevolent predation no different from a pride of lions hunting, slaughtering, and consuming a heard of zebras, but for the fact that the former is intentional and premeditated.

Or, as I've colorfully described it for years, "Government by the extended middle finger".

And where that finger is now is, assuming you can't feel it, something you probably don't want to know.