Everything You Need to Know About the White House’s New Plan to Cut Back on a Powerful Greenhouse Gas

As part of President Barack Obama’s plan to address climate change without legislation from Congress, the White House on Friday announced a new strategy to combat emissions of methane — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide — from landfills, agriculture, and the fossil fuel industry.

The announcement was less a proposal of new, sweeping regulations, and more of a pledge to study methane and set the path for potential regulations.  President Obama’s top energy and climate aide Dan Utech told reporters Friday that the Bureau of Land Management does plan on regulating methane emissions from oil and gas wells on public lands by the end of 2014 by requiring reductions in gas venting and flaring.

Regulating methane emissions from agriculture, landfills, and fossil fuel development on private lands is a bit more complicated, so Utech said the Environmental Protection Agency plans on studying whether broad regulations would be needed for those industries’ methane emissions under the Clean Air Act.  If the research shows that more regulations are needed, those would be completed before the end of 2016, when Obama leaves the White House.

Everything You Need to Know About the White House’s New Plan to Cut Back on a Powerful Greenhouse Gas