Robert Howarth: Rising Levels of Methane Feed Menace of Climate Change

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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Rising Levels of Methane Feed Menace of Climate Change

Posted June 8, 2016

Interview with Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

In addition to carbon dioxide, methane is a critical global warming gas. In the short term, methane is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide in warming the planet’s atmosphere. Even so, the impact of methane is often given short shrift in discussions about climate change. The global climate change activist organization, 350.org, for example, takes its name from the concept that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere must be reduced to 350 ppm from the current 400 ppm in order to stabilize the climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, states that methane is more than 100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for the first decade after emission, 86 times over a 20-year period, and 34 times over 100 years. This is why many climate activists and scientists are critical of the assertion that natural gas is a bridge fuel to future renewable energy sources.

Cornell University researcher Robert Howarth co-authored a groundbreaking report in 2011 showing that hydraulic fracking for natural gas can be worse for the climate than the burning of coal. He observes that global methane emissions have recently spiked due to the significant increase in fracking across the U.S. Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Howarth, who explains that methane comes from various sources and is released in a variety of ways, including the major leak from the Aliso Canyon storage facility in Southern California that continued uninterrupted for four months last fall and winter before being brought under control.

ROBERT HOWARTH: There are a variety of sources of methane, some of them natural and more under human control. Humans have basically increased the amount of methane going into the atmosphere by about 1.6-fold over what it used to be. The natural sources are largely from wetlands, some geological seeps, but the human-controlled sources, the biggest one is the oil and gas industry in the U.S. Coal mining produces some, landfills, sewage treatment plants, and animal agriculture is also a big source – probably right up there globally with the oil and gas industry. Within the U.S., the oil and gas industry is pretty clearly the largest source of methane emissions; animal agriculture would be a distant second, like other fossil fuels and landfills and sewage treatment plants. If we look globally at the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions and methane emissions at the moment, and compare them in terms of their immediate influence on global warming, the two gases are about equal – methane is actually a little more important in current global warming, when you do it that way. An incredibly important gas.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Natural gas is almost all methane. So what are the different ways that the methane gets into the atmosphere?

ROBERT HOWARTH: When you burn the natural gas, you're burning methane and it's converted to carbon dioxide, so burning it reduces the issue. The methane emissions are coming partly from leaks, but also from purposeful venting – it's part of the normal operations of the oil and gas industry. For instance, after you get gas out of the ground and you compress it into a pipeline, the compressors that are typically used will purposefully vent some of that gas as part of normal operation. And when you go to do maintenance on a storage tank or maintenance on a gas pipeline, the normal procedure is to vent all of the gas that's in the storage tank or the pipeline into the atmosphere, so it's both accidental leaks and purposeful venting of the gas.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Climate scientists say that methane is 86 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after release. That seems pretty significant.

ROBERT HOWARTH: We look at the period of a decade, say, after emission, current human emissions of methane equal or exceed the emissions of carbon dioxide in terms of their influence on the heat budget of the planet. But carbon dioxide and methane are very different in how they act; carbon dioxide, once it's admitted into the atmosphere, it's equilibrating some with the oceans, it's being taken up by forests, and it's equilibrating with the land surfaces of the earth. What that means is that the carbon dioxide we're putting into the air today will be with us for hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand years, into the future. Methane, on the other hand, if we reduce methane emissions now, it reduces global warming now. So, when the nations of the world came together at the U.N. COP 21 in Paris last December, they recognized we want to keep the planet well below 1.5 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline temperature, and they agreed we really must keep it well below 2 degrees Celsius. And it turns out you cannot reach that target by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because we're on a trajectory to reach 1.5 degrees in about 12 years or so from now, and to reach 2 degrees in 35 years. The only way to reach that target set by the governments in Paris is to reduce methane emissions. We need to reduce both.

BETWEEN THE LINES: But do you really think there's any possible way to keep global warming increases even below 2 degrees Celsius, much less 1.5 degrees C?

ROBERT HOWARTH: I think we need to reduce methane emissions. If you look over the last decade, there's been a fairly large rate of global increase in methane. Turns out that's been almost entirely attributable to increases from the U.S., and at least a major part of that, maybe most of it, is attributable to the shale gas revolution. We see that in the satellite data. I think we need to reverse that trend, and either stop developing shale gas or certainly get the emissions from it under much better control. That would be a huge help. If we just reverse and go back to where we were with the oil and gas industry ten years ago it would be a big help. But we can also do things to reduce emissions from animal agriculture and we should.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I don't know if you delve into politics, but I'd love to ask you about the Democratic presidential race. We won't bother with the Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders has called for a ban on fracking and for ending all new fossil fuel leases on public lands. And even though Hillary has moved toward a lot of Bernie's positions, she hasn't called for either of these moves yet.

ROBERT HOWARTH: I think Sanders' position on fracking and on fossil fuels is exactly right. He's quite strongly opposed fracking. He has for quite some time; it's not a new position of his. He's always been a critic of fracking and he's definitely been a mover among politicians in the "Keep it in the ground movement" in terms of public lands. As you say, Hillary Clinton has expressed some worries about fracking, but her positions have been more ambivalent, and actually, as secretary of state, she and the State Department worked quite hard to promote fracking abroad, so her background on that is rather colored in my view.

For more information, visit Robert Howarth's website at howarthlab.org.