Methane Insanity
We’ve been warned of inconvenient truths. A movie was made about society’s unspoken agreement to ignore science and reality and the current U.S. regime is making that movie’s head-in-the-sand approach of science denial official policy. Meanwhile, the very real impacts of our changing climate are becoming harder to ignore. Polls are showing that a good portion of the U.S. population now realize that the situation is serious even while their government is telling them it doesn’t exist.
I’d be curious how many of those 48% of people know what methane is? Do they know natural gas is methane? We need to make sure they know these things because as more people become concerned and scared as they accept reality they will want to know what we can do. And the science is pretty clear that the most important thing we can do is rapidly reduce methane emissions. We also have the tools to do that on a global scale and we have never had that option before so its pretty amazing we have the tools we need to avoid disaster right as we really need to do something. So why is the U.S. pushing policies to try to get the world to use a lot more methane and claiming it is actually a clean fuel and climate solution? We live in truly insane times.
Pull the Emergency Brake
Scientists make it clear that our best and perhaps only hope of keeping global warming below catastrophic levels is to quickly reduce methane emissions. Professor Rob Jackson of Stanford University states that reducing methane is the “best—and perhaps only—lever we have” to try to achieve our climate goals.
Martina Otto from the UN Environment Programme, which hosts the Global Methane Pledge stated, “Reducing methane emissions this decade is our emergency brake in the climate emergency.”
In 2021 the Royal Society published an article with a question in the headline, “Rising methane: is there a methane emergency?” and the conclusion could be summarized as, “there is indeed a methane emergency.” That all seems pretty clear. And yet not only are methane emissions rising, since 2021 we have seen a very successful public relations effort by the industry to convince the world that methane is clean energy and that liquefied methane aka liquefied natural gas (LNG) will be the basis for the global energy industry for the next 30 years and, in general, they hope to use a lot more of it. We know we are facing a methane emergency. People are worried about the climate. We have the technologies to replace methane in our energy systems and they are better economic choices. And yet the industry, politicians and the media all happily ignore the science and repeat known lies endlessly. It is insane.
LNG Industry Will Unleash Methane Climate Bomb
The science is quite clear that the process of producing and distributing methane in the form of LNG results in high methane emissions. Dr. Bob Howarth’s research shows that, even with conservative estimates for upstream methane emissions from the oil and gas fields where the methane is produced, LNG is worse than coal from an emissions standpoint. If you want to see evidence of why that is the case, watch this video.
We are facing a methane emergency and reducing methane emissions may be our only hope of avoiding catastrophic warming and the United States is trying to get the rest of the world to agree to use methane (aka natural gas) by importing LNG. This will be like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Who is the worst in the world when it comes to releasing methane from oil and gas operations? The U.S.
Economics Are On Our Side
Sadly, the U.S. was not a very science-based community even before the current clown show. However, while we have little use for science, we worship money and confuse wealth for intelligence which has contributed greatly to our country being run by the super-rich. It will likely be our undoing but there is one bright side to it. Clean energy is now a better choice if you want to make money. It is why the Texas oil industry is being powered by renewable energy. Sure, the petrofascists in charge of Texas are trying to pass laws to force Texans to use more expensive gas power but that is a fight they will lose. Texas has to try to mandate the use of gas because no one would choose to use gas now. How can we tell? The U.S. is building a lot of new power generation capacity and most of it is renewables. In the first two months of 2025, 98% of it was from renewable sources. If gas doesn’t make economic sense in Texas, it doesn’t make economic sense anywhere as natural gas (methane) is cheaper in Texas than anywhere in the world. And compared to regular natural gas, liquefied natural gas is much more expensive. And this is why we may have a fighting chance at survival.
A review of articles this past week reveals the economic challenges facing the LNG industry. Gas Outlook reported numbers on natural gas power plant costs from major power producer NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum that are pretty easy to understand even if you haven’t been to business school.
“We built our last gas-fired facility in 2022, at $785/kW. If we wanted to build that same gas-fired combined cycle unit today…$2,400/kW. The cost of gas-fired generation has gone up three-fold.” He went on to add that renewables are, “cheaper and available right now.”
That is for a gas power plant in the U.S. where there isn’t the additional cost of paying for imported LNG. In those countries the math is even easier. From Bloomberg this week:
"China’s LNG demand has softened while domestic production and imported piped gas, mainly from Russia, remain strong. The country also relies heavily on cheaper alternatives, including coal and renewables."
More from Rolling Stone (article available here without subscription), where they quote LNG analyst Sam Reynolds from IEEFA.
"the cost of generating electricity from imported LNG is 'orders of magnitude more expensive than renewables.'” In many cases, “there simply is no economic case to use LNG as a bridge fuel."
Also this week from Seb Kennedy at EnergyFlux
"In essence, the market is indicating a possible return to Covid-era pricing of 2020 — a Black Swan year when lockdowns crashed commodity prices and pushed US LNG firmly out of the money."
And more from Bloomberg.
"Indian energy importers are switching from pricey liquefied natural gas to cheaper oil products...."
LNG is a very expensive fuel and that is tough to lie about but that won’t stop the industry from doing it anyway. However, lucky for us it’s a lot harder for people to believe lies about money and what things cost than lies about science and invisible gases. The president can say egg prices have gone down but everyone who buys eggs knows he is lying. Hell, CNN even reported that. This is the current situation with LNG. It is likely hopeless to try to get the world to reduce methane emissions based on the science. CNN is unlikely to run headlines stating, “LNG is worse than coal.” But more and more of the press is admitting that LNG is “pricey” and is having trouble competing with “cheaper alternatives.”
Cheaper Alternatives
The industry told us we needed gas because renewables were intermittent and it was generally accepted that any functioning grid would always need a significant portion of gas power to back up intermittent renewables. Five years ago I wasn’t happy with this argument but I saw it had its merits. However, the rapid growth of batteries resulting from the huge drop in costs is changing everything. Wired just published a great overview of how storage is a game changer. And it’s just getting started.
Reuters reported on Europe’s solar success this week with the headline, “Europe on track to smash solar power output record in 2025.” China continues its solar buildout at a stunning pace.
Solar plus storage (batteries) is dominating growth in world power generation. The main obstacles to the world moving towards a sane energy system are the oil executives and their puppets in government willing to lie to the world about science and economics. They will not go quietly but the numbers are really not in their favor. Their big idea is to bring back coal. The same thing they tried in 2016. In 2016 gridscale battery storage was mostly a dream. Now it will be the basis for the new world energy system. If coal couldn’t mount a comeback in 2016, it won’t happen in 2025.
Paying Extra for Extinction
The reality of the current U.S. policies designed to hook the world on LNG (aided and abetted by countries like Japan, Saudi Arabia and Russia) is that it asks us all to pay more for electricity that will hasten our demise when there are cheaper technologies to produce electricity. And those cheaper sources don’t have methane emissions. Choosing to pay more to destroy ourselves is insane. However, most of the world is waking up to this fact and there was an encouraging response to the current U.S. efforts to demonize renewables from a U.K energy industry figure that was reported in Politico:
“That went down like a fart in a phone box.”
We are running out of time. The only sane thing to do is rapidly stop producing so much methane and switch to renewable power. We must pull the only emergency brake we have and the first step in that plan is to stop the expansion of LNG.
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