Why the concern over fugitive methane emissions?

Methane is the biggest component of natural gas, which we burn to heat our buildings, generate our power, and even move some of our vehicles.

So what is fugitive methane, and why do we care about it? The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has a new infographic that's helpful in grasping the problem.

Fugitive methane is what inadvertently escapes into the atmosphere during the process of getting natural gas from where it lies underground to the point at which it's burned for heat or power.

Although carbon dioxide is the biggest source of climate-disrupting, heat-trapping emissions (due to all the fossil fuels we burn, including natural gas), molecule for molecule, methane is far more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere, perhaps 25 times more potent, according to the UCS.

Up to 9 percent of the natural gas we remove from the ground escapes as fugitive methane and has very significant heat-trapping ability, so this issue really is an 800-pound gorilla that society needs to wrestle with.

The methane leaks at many points: drilling sites, storage facilities, pipelines, etc. Our power grid is aging -- and old pipes tend to leak more than new ones.

It's worrisome to note that the UCS finds that fugitive methane emissions are higher for the drilling of shale gas than for conventional natural gas drilling.

Another problem: It's quite difficult to measure the actual leakage rates, or make any reliable projections about overall leakage, from our energy infrastructure since amounts of leakage can vary largely from site to site depending on geology, specific technology employed, etc.

As UCS says, we need more research to be done. But even as the science around methane evolves, we know enough to start fixing the problem in places now.

So what's a concerned society to do? Advocate for proven, cost-effective technologies where possible to reduce the amount of fugitive emissions. We need to be squeaky wheels to make sure the feds and states are monitoring what's going on in the field, and to hold polluters accountable.


And, of course, the most serious and appropriate response is for society to move away from dependence on all fossil fuels -- including methane -- as quickly as possible, and to move to a cleaner, more efficient economy that relies on truly renewable energy. 

There's no such thing as "fugitive" emissions from solar panels, wind turbines, or geothermal heating/cooling systems.

Now we have another reason to leave fossil fuels behind. As if we needed one.

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in Philadephia. She tweets @joybergey.

A nasty circle: A warming atmosphere and diminished power reliability

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has issued its second important report within a month. "Power Failure: How climate change puts our electricity at risk—and what we can do about it" raises some important questions. As science has been telling us for years, extreme weather events due to climate disruption will increase over time. And "global weirding" (as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman refers to global warming) seems to already have visited too many of us in the Mid-Atlantic.

Concerns about climate change are not new. But the UCS report connects some dots in a way that spells big trouble ahead: The country's infrastructure for distributing electricity from power plants to homes and businesses (a.k.a. the grid) is aging. And its age increases its vulnerability to extreme weather events.

A few examples from the report:

• Power plants are vulnerable to water-related risks. Because fossil fuel and nuclear power plants rely on copious amounts of water for cooling, they are invariably located on rivers or bays. Many of these plants are ancient, relatively speaking, and were not engineered for warmer water.
• Sea level rise threatens coastal power facilities in particular. Climate Central reports that about 100 power plants and substations are within four feet of local high tide. And with science predicting likely sea level rises of 1.6 to 6.6 feet above 1992 levels by 2099, we'd better be making some new plans.
• Heat waves are a double whammy: reducing efficiency at power plants while simultaneously increasing demand ("Honey, it's too hot in here! Turn up the A/C.")

This is where it hits home for me, literally. I experienced days-long power outages from  Superstorm Sandy in late October 2012 and again this past winter, the third snowiest on record for Philadelphia.

So what's to be done? We need to find the collective will to "harden" our electricity infrastructure—burying power lines and building sea walls, that type of thing. But it's expensive. So let's really fix the problem and move toward a cleaner energy future, where generating electricity doesn't make climate change worse, which further threatens our aging grid—a positive feedback loop we just can't accept.

See PennFuture's Clean Energy Wins report, just released in March, that offers a roadmap as to how Pennsylvania can displace fossil fuels with clean energy and energy efficiency.

Please help keep the lights on -- and the planet safer.

This offending branch that knocked out my neighborhood's power for 2+ days in February

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in Philadelphia. She tweets @joybergey.

Cable news reporting on climate change: Disappointing results.

We're happy to see that the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has been concerned enough about the accuracy or, rather, inaccuracy of cable news reporting on climate change that they have issued a new report on their findings.

UCS looked intensively at how the three top cable news networks -- MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News -- reported on climate in 2013.

If you have a hunch as to who's doing what, right or wrong, you're probably right.

Fox News portrayed climate science accurately only 28 percent of the time in 2013. But that's an, um, improvement -- gulp. In 2012, Fox News was accurate only 7 percent of the time. Memo to Fox News: Check your sources, at least more than 28 percent of the time.

CNN was accurate in 2013 about 70 percent of the time Better, but not great. The biggest problem with CNN's coverage, according to the UCS report, is that the network continues to air debates about the reality of climate change. Memo to CNN: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that the science of climate change is settled and that climate change is being caused by humans. It's happening. Join the rest of the world, CNN, and drop the unhelpful debates.

MSNBC scored highest of the three networks, found to be accurate 92 percent of the time. Interesting but, again, not terribly surprising. MSNBC's inaccuracies are due to overstatements of the effects of climate change and extreme weather. Memo to MSNBC: The situation is not helped by crying wolf, nor are your inferences that climate change is at work in particular situations when scientists tell us we can't know that for sure. Science draws conclusions from looking at broad data patterns, not individual data points.

So, readers, there you have it. Keep educating yourselves on climate change science so you can discount the exaggerations from either side of the debate.
And thanks to UCS for doing the hard work of keeping the cable news networks honest and the rest of us informed.

Joy Bergey is federal policy director for PennFuture and is based in Philadelphia.