Methane’s Global Warming Potential makes Gas worse than Coal for Climate

We just updat­ed our page on nat­ur­al gas with links to the lat­est stud­ies show­ing that methane is far more potent for glob­al warm­ing than EPA con­sid­ers it. Next time you’re hear­ing how much nat­ur­al gas is a tran­si­tion fuel or that it’s bet­ter than coal — or that land­fill gas should be burned for ener­gy (which releas­es more methane than col­lect­ing and flar­ing it!) instead of keep­ing organ­ics out of land­fills — bust out these stud­ies to show that methane isn’t just 21 times worse than CO2… it’s 86–105 times worse! That’s because we need to look at it over 20 years instead of 100 and account for the lat­est sci­ence show­ing that it’s more potent than we thought, even over the same time frames.