White House releases strategy on methane reductions

New York Times : On 28 March, the White House issued a statement revealing its strategy for dealing with domestic methane emissions. Methane, which accounts for 9% of greenhouse gases in the US, is more than 20 times as efficient at trapping Earth’s thermal emission as carbon dioxide. The strategy covers several areas of methane emissions. It requests that the Department of the Interior develop new standards for emissions from oil and gas production on public lands and that it collect public input on the capture and sale of emissions from coal mines on federal lands. It instructs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to propose updated standards on emissions from new landfills and to collect public input on adjusting standards for existing landfills. The strategy also included the announcement that in June the Departments of Agriculture and Energy and the EPA will release a “biogas road map” that will outline a plan to adopt methods to reduce dairy-sector greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020.