https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/opinion/climate-change-methane-natural-gas.html
By Carl Pope
Mr. Pope is a clean energy policy adviser to several foundations and was the executive director of the Sierra Club from 1992 to 2010.
Excerpt: In my 50 years in the environmental movement, the decision I most regret is one I made in 2005. As the executive director of the Sierra Club, I decided the organization should largely ignore methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and focus on carbon dioxide, the most prevalent heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere and a byproduct of burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
My colleagues and I understood that methane, which comes from man-made and natural sources, would eventually have to be curbed to slow climate change. But the data suggested that it was a relatively minor contributor to global warming and could wait. And so I neglected methane for decades, as did many climate regulators, activists and negotiators.
It wasn’t until three years ago that I came to see the gravity of my mistake: that methane is an urgent problem and that one source of it is a relatively low-hanging fruit in the fight against climate change. Methane traps about 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide over 20 years. And methane emissions, which are driving estimated 45 percent of human-caused warming, are rising rapidly.
I now believe that cleaning up methane leaks from the production and shipping of oil and gas — one of the most significant sources of these emissions — is the best hope we have to avoid triggering some of the most consequential climate tipping points in the next decade. I think realistically it is our only hope.
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Oil and gas wells leak methane at the wellhead and in the processing and transport of these fossil fuels. But the gas is relatively easy and cheap to recover. When we seal leaks, the atmospheric concentration of methane declines, and we limit warming, making it one of the best bangs for our buck.
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Governments worldwide and U.S. states committed to climate action will need to sway the oil industry to protect the world from climate chaos. In exchange for sealing leaks, companies should get preferential access to markets.
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Methane emissions come from surprising places. Researchers estimate that roughly half of those in U.S. oil fields come from wells that don’t produce significant amounts of oil or gas. Their owners often rely on equipment that is in disrepair or are just trying to avoid the costs of properly sealing them and shutting them down. We need to make it worth their while to act quickly.
A big source of methane emissions is the venting and flaring of gas at oil wells that don’t have pipeline connections to capture it.
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With each passing year, extreme weather does more damage to human communities. We are in an emergency now, and we must implement the reforms that climate leaders like me should have prioritized years ago.
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Reality Check:
Physicist Dr. Tom Sheahen: ‘Methane: The Irrelevant Greenhouse Gas’ – ‘Water vapor has already absorbed the very same infrared radiation that Methane might have absorbed’– ‘The tiny increases in methane associated with cows may elicit a few giggles, but it absolutely cannot be the basis for sane regulations or national policy.’
Study: ‘Methane emissions have a negligible impact’ on climate
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Disgraced former Sierra Club chief Carl Pope says the mistake greens made about climate was focusing on CO2 rather than methane. A couple points:
1. Methane emissions are even more irrelevant to climate than CO2 emissions. https://t.co/chHLnuyPxY
2. Recall that during Pope’s… pic.twitter.com/S6ahh2MQWS
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) June 23, 2025
