Biden Inflation Act Provides the EPA New Weapons to Pursue their Climate Change Jihad

This proposed EPA action is based on easily shown VERY bad ‘science’.

In the lab, in a standardized completely dry atmosphere, methane is 86 times more potent GHG than CO2. BUT in the real world where specific humidity averages about 2% (range much less than 1 Sahara, Antarctica) to more than 4 (tropics)) it is not a GHG at all. It’s IR absorption bands are completely overlapped (hence smothered) by water vapor. This is just a Biden EPA attack on oil and gas production.

Same is true for ruminant produced methane. Irrelevant in the real world. Just an attack on beef and dairy by vegans and global warming idiots. I note in passing that a Venn diagram of those two sets of people shows a significant subset are both. And a subset of that subset are the ones who now superglue themselves to things in protest. Best we let them just stay glued that way rather than use acetone(fingernail polish remover in its pure form) to unglue them.

Whilst there are clearly risks with sudden leaks, I guess the best solution is to set fire to them: indeed most oil and gas installations have a flare that does just that, reducing the penalty to a much lower CO2 tax.

Looking at reported methane emissions at various point sources in the UK I found typical figures for an offshore platform of 1-400 tonnes per year, perhaps 1,000 for a major onshore gas processing facility, although major CCGT plants, LNG regas terminals and refineries come in at under 100 tonnes. Sometimes well under. It looks like more of a nuisance for paperwork filing with a costly fee rather than being completely debilitating. 1 ton of methane is ~50MMBtu, so $1,500/ton is about $30/MMBtu, which is only 10% of the price reached during the great Texas freeze in 2021, and about a third the current prices in Europe.

Perhaps industry will be able to obtain methane credits by draining wetlands. Degrading wildlife habitat seems to be a small price to pay tor reducing marsh gas emissions. A bounty on termites could provide further opportunities for offsets. As for Unicorn farts …. oh, but don’t you need a virgin to entice a unicorn into captivity?

I’ve found that most people are clueless to the fact that after 1933 under FDR’s “New Deal” America has piece of legislation to piece of legislation for decades under both Democrats and Republicans become an Economic Fascism (Corporatism) America and you can include that into just about every country in their own ways are today. It is false that Fascism requires a “Dictator” when a congress or parliament can legislate the ideologies of Fascism. Fascism was always an Economic Methodology for funding government off of industries to small business owners by means of taxation, subsidizing winners to create losers, along with burdensome regulations, standards, licensing, tariffs, duties, fees and permits as means of taxation that is passed to the consumers as the prices they pay for products or services they require, want or need or mandated to have by laws and regulations set by the government. Every time some new burden is created by the state, it increases the cost of production that increases the individuals cost of living, that more taxes are collected at different levels of the government. Subsidies to businesses for spending on products – like solar panels – creates revenue as taxes, well as employment increases that creates more individual income taxes collected as revenue, new energy is needed in the creation for the solar panels that is taxed for government revenue, and so on… = Corporatism.

Quite simply the Death of “Capitalism” as Marx termed our Free Market Enterprise began in America under “The New Deal” and the Frog has been incrementally boiled to death, because once precedents are set by legislation that goes unchallenged in the courts, it allows the government to keep pushing those limits to do new things. Even the most Conservative (Classical Liberals) have voted to allow legislation that should have been stopped. But it’s worse when a political party has a controlling majority to overrule the other party like happened during the 12 years of FDR’s “New Deal” reign, LBJ’s 8 years of “The Great Society” with all its Socialist Programs during the “Oil Embargo” and the birth of “Alternative Energy” to Obama’s “Fundamental Changes” first 2 years of “Obama Care” that infected the whole country in more ways than healthcare costs increases, subsidizing of “Green Energy” and “Open Borders”

   Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an icy world whose atmosphere is
nitrogen (about 95%) and methane (about 5%, at least at its surface), with
small amounts of many other carbon-rich compounds, many of which form a
Sun-obscuring golden haze. No one has any idea where that methane is coming
from, but its presence has been confirmed by various measurements, including
direct measurements by spacecraft visiting Titan. And it is exactly the same
methane we have here in our atmosphere. That 5% methane is usually belittled
as “small amounts mixed with mostly nitrogen” by most woke, climate-change
intellectuals nowadays because they don’t want anyone’s brain to get worked
up about it too much (but notice that that’s not how they treat CO2 in our
atmosphere at 0.04%). In any event, let’s start to think about that 5%
methane in Titan’s prodigious atmosphere, since United States authorities are
beginning to make such a fuss about it here in earth’s atmosphere (at parts
per billion), and to think about its potential to warm Titan by the putative
“Greenhouse Effect” [GHE].

   Titan is about three times colder than the earth on the Kelvin scale and
that means it has about three times more molecules per unit volume of
atmosphere than the earth has at the same pressure. But its pressure is
actually more than 1½ times that of earth’s and its atmosphere, as an
approximation, is about 4 times thicker than the earth’s (due to its lower
gravity). This gives an overall factor of about 18:1 in terms of the number
of molecules in its atmosphere any radiation would have to go through to pass
from two places in its atmosphere compared to that same radiation passing
from the same two equivalent places in the earth’s atmosphere. And we will
assume, from this approximation, that it is those individual gaseous
molecules that are the culprit in any global warming scenario invented in the
minds of the Greenhouse Effect global warming geniuses.

   Furthermore, according to various Greenhouse Effect aficionados, gases
like methane have “Global Warming Potential” [GWP] equivalents to CO2 in our
(or any other world’s) atmosphere that can be given a numerical value.
Methane’s GWP is 25. That raises that ratio to 450:1, again assuming it’s
the molecules and their properties doing the “global warming” through the
GHE. And, at 5% presence in Titan’s atmosphere, the ratio of molecules of
methane versus molecules of CO2 goes up, just from this increased
concentration, and as far as the GWP is concerned, to 5:0.04, or 125:1, which
makes the total ratio of methane’s GWP on Titan relative to CO2’s GWP on
Earth 56000:1! I guess the temperature of Titan must be around 10,000°F,
right? Not quite.

   It doesn’t help to point out the reduced heating effect of the Sun on
Titan’s surface. Sunlight’s energy, per unit area, irradiating the upper
atmosphere of Titan is 100 times less than earth’s and the satellite’s haze,
let’s say, reduces that heating effect another tenfold (this is generous,
since that haze would not be expected to block longwave infrared radiation
very much, either going up or going down, and that is precisely the type of
radiation that is supposed to be the chief culprit in the GHE). So that’s
still 56:1 greater GHE warming on Titan than Earth, just from the methane
molecules in its atmosphere. Tilt! Maybe we can get Dominion Voting Systems
to work on this.

   Again, I repeat, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT. Both
Arrhenius and Al Gore were wrong. It’s not that methane is not a greenhouse
gas. Nothing is a greenhouse gas and for some of the sort-of-same reasons
that some previous contributors mentioned above about methane in particular.
But, as far as the “overlap” with water vapor absorption lines is concerned,
it cannot happen on Titan because it doesn’t have any water vapor in its
atmosphere to begin with. And notice, it still doesn’t have a Greenhouse
Effect. We have nothing to fear from the Greenhouse Global Warming Effect of
methane here on Earth as the Titanians need not fear it on their world, even
without water, nor do either of us nor any other LGM [little green men] have
to worry about any other gas in our atmospheres in this respect.

David Solan