US congressman Sean Casten, a longtime champion of methane rules in Washington, recently wrote a letter urging EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen not to cave to US pressure to weaken the regulation. EUobserver asked him why he believes delay is a mistake.
Wester van Gaal
Illinois Democrat congressman Sean Casten wants the EU to hold the line on methane.
US oil and gas companies in recent months have dialled up the pressure, even turning to the White House to try to push the EU into postponing the rollout of the regulation.
In a recent letter to commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the congressman – who has spent years pushing tougher methane rules in Washington – urged her to resist pressure from “fossil-fuel interests” to weaken or delay the rules.
Methane is the main component of gas, and as a greenhouse gas it is more than 80 times as potent a driver of global warming as carbon dioxide.
“Maintaining” the rules for all suppliers, including those in the US, is “essential” for both Europe’s energy security and global climate goals, said Casten, vice-chair of Congress’ energy and environmental coalition, a caucus of roughly 100 House Democrats, who co-signed the letter with four other representatives.
The political wind in Europe, however, has been blowing the other way. Days before Casten’s letter, a Czech-led group of member states, including the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Belgium, pushed the commission to suspend the regulation’s import provisions for three years, citing legal uncertainty and supply risk.
EUobserver spoke to Casten about why he wrote the letter, the campaign to roll back the rules, and why he believes delay would be a mistake.
You’ve sponsored methane regulation in the US yourself. Why did you decide that you needed to urge the EU not to give in to pressure to delay the regulation?
There’s a fair amount of bipartisan support for methane regulation in the United States, at least when it comes to domestic gas consumption. The industry, broadly speaking, everything downstream of collection, would rather sell gas than leak it. Collection is notoriously leaky, but I think those leaks are solvable.
What’s much harder is exports. Roll the clock back 15 years and US natural gas was entirely for internal consumption. But as the US gas industry has come to depend more and more on exports, methane emissions become a much bigger problem for them.
Why is that?
Because you need 10 to 15 percent of the gas just to run the liquefaction facilities, and the ships themselves are notoriously leaky. So if Europe passes robust methane regulations, the pain lands squarely on the primary growth market for the US gas sector. That’s why we wrote this letter. The industry, particularly through the office of the president, is going to push to weaken those standards. But this is a time for everybody who cares about the science, who cares about global warming, to stand together and stand strong.
You say there’s bipartisan support domestically. Where is the opposition against EU methane rules coming from?
When I say bipartisan, I’m certainly not suggesting every member of Congress supports this. But you’ve had people like John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, who’s been supportive of it, and Democrats from oil-and-gas-heavy regions who’ve backed methane regulation too. But once you start talking about domestic production for export, rather than domestic production for domestic consumption, it becomes very partisan.
A tremendous amount of the current Republican Party overwhelmingly represents the most rural parts of America that depend most on oil and gas extraction and other extractive industries. So yes, the oil and gas industry is absolutely interested in very weak environmental rules related to extraction, including but not limited to methane.
What are the economics behind this? Why is the US oil and gas industry so committed to overturning this?
There’s a dynamic where the US oil and gas industry has seen a steady erosion of market share over the last two decades. We paint it as this huge, powerful industry, but renewables, even excluding hydro, now generate more power than coal in the United States. There’s been no growth in oil consumption in the US in 20 years. We still consume roughly 20 million barrels a day, despite a rising population and rising miles travelled, because vehicles have gotten more efficient. So you’ve got an industry losing market share because it can’t compete economically, and it’s becoming more and more dependent on exports.
Look at price-earnings ratios: renewable companies have much cheaper capital right now, because the private market is essentially saying, I don’t want to keep investing [in oil and gas]. This industry is operating from a position of fear and defence, the way dying industries always do. Right now they have people in the White House willing to shield them from competitive markets. They won’t always have that.
What was the response in Brussels and Strasbourg? Did European policymakers welcome being urged not to cave?
