Let’s Talk About What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Methane

We talk a lot about carbon dioxide when we talk about climate change. But, in reality, methane is a much more active contributor to global warming. While less ubiquitous in the atmosphere, methane is more effective at trapping radiation. The Environmental Protection Agency says that the gas’s impact, pound for pound, is 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, while the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) says that it has “more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.”

It’s also responsible for about half of the 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming that has occurred since the 1850s, according to Scientific American.

All of this is why the European Union and the United States announced a new “Global Methane Pledge” at the end of September. So far, two-dozen countries have signed on, including nine of the world’s top emitters, indicating that they agree to reduce their methane emissions by 30 percent by the end of the decade. China, the United States, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and Mexico are estimated to be responsible for about half of all anthropogenic methane emissions, according to the EPA.

This is all well and good, but the one thing not mentioned in all this happy-talk about methane is that the people being inundated with a previously unknown amount of the gas from a ridiculous number of dangerous, abandoned oil and gas wells in the U.S. are, disproportionately, people of color.

A new report from EDF and McGill University finds that there are 81,000 abandoned oil and gas wells throughout the country, about one-and-a-half times more than an earlier estimate from the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a quasi-governmental organization, The Washington Post reports. Methane is poisonous at high levels and can lead to asphyxiation, in addition to breathing problems.

“While oil and gas operators usually seal wells at the end of their productive lives, 170 years of oil and gas development has nonetheless left scores of so-called ‘orphan’ wells across the United States — oil and gas wells that are inactive, unplugged and have no solvent owner of record,” EDF writes.

These wells pose "significant risks to human and environmental health by leaking toxic chemicals to the air, contaminating groundwater and emitting methane, the powerful greenhouse gas. And the states, federal agencies and Native American tribes responsible for their plugging and remediation often don’t have the funding needed to safely and effectively clean them up.”

On top of this, there are somewhere between 2 and 3 million unplugged wells overall in the U.S., the EPA says. The “orphaned” wells are just a subset.

EDF estimates that 9 million people live within a mile of an orphan well. They are in every U.S. state, and are concentrated in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York.

The Post reports, however, that of the 9 million Americans who live within that mile of an orphan well, 4.3 million of them are people of color, and 550,000 are children younger than 5 “who are especially vulnerable to health problems tied to air pollution.” This, despite the fact that White people composed more than 70 percent of the U.S. population in the 2019 census.

People of color, as usual, are bearing the brunt of human-caused environmental problems. Until that reality is acknowledged by the people in charge of cleaning up these messes, the inequity of climate change hurts all of us who care about our own health and that of our neighbors. How about we make this recognition a part of this new methane “pledge”? Just an idea.