The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Methane makes up a small portion of greenhouse gas emissions in terms of quantity, but it is one of the most important drivers of climate change, as it’s over 80 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. A significant amount of the extreme warming that we will experience in our lifetimes, and the planetary tipping points that we breach, will be propelled by methane—and emissions are rising faster than ever.

Faced with this emergency, the Trump administration and the 119th Congress have systematically abolished federal controls on its cause. Their assault on climate policy is more thoroughly destructive than any previous Republican government, upending scientific research, industry self-reporting, and data collection while simultaneously dismantling the rules themselves and their enforcement.

The administration also wants to gut the information ecosystem that enables us to monitor the climate crisis. President Trump wants to burn the satellites that observe climate pollution from space and shut down the Mauna Loa Observatory, the source of the famous graph tracking the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To cap it off, Trump’s EPA is aiming to revoke the scientific finding that greenhouse gas pollution poses a risk to the public’s health and well-being, the bedrock of climate policy in the United States.

The U.S. oil and gas industry is one of the top culprits responsible for rising methane pollution worldwide, and we have more data than ever to prove it. As the Trump administration does everything it can to help the industry evade accountability, it’s worth acknowledging that the scope and severity of the methane problem far outstripped the Biden administration’s attempts to constrain it. Yet if the previous administration brought financial incentives to a gunfight against gangsters, this current administration is providing reinforcements to the bad guys.

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It will be critical for America’s remaining scientists, and their colleagues around the world, to continue to collect and publicize data illustrating how serious a threat methane emissions are to human society—and for future Democrats to be ready to go far beyond what the Biden administration did to stop them.

The largest single source of American methane emissions is the oil and gas industry. So-called “natural gas” is mostly methane, and it frequently leaks or is intentionally released from the wellhead, the pipeline network, and in buildings—sometimes leading to enormous explosions. The tech industry’s current push to rapidly build out AI data centers is creating a surge of demand for new natural gas plants, and consequently a surge of methane pollution.

“The Trump administration can deny science all it wants,” said Dakota Raynes, senior manager of research, data, and policy at Earthworks, an environmental organization focused on stopping oil and gas pollution. “The rest of the world is still going to invest in scientific data collection and use that science to make better rules around emissions.”

One of the challenges inherent to the politics of climate change is the variability of its causes and effects—some are visible, others invisible; some fast, others slow; some local, others global. While environmental degradation has no shortage of potent visuals like oil spills and razed mountains, climate change is more often represented through statistics: degrees of warming, once-in-a-lifetime storms, projected sea level rise. Disinformation finds its foothold in the translation gap between gases in the atmosphere and extreme weather on the ground. Oil and gas companies have exploited that gap for decades, even as evidence of their harms has accumulated. At this point, we know more than enough to justify unprecedented action, but as the data continues to improve, policies flowing from it have lagged far behind.

Disinformation finds its foothold in the translation gap between gases in the atmosphere and extreme weather on the ground.

We have the technology now to observe greenhouse gas emissions from space, from the air, and from the ground with handheld optical gas imaging cameras, planes equipped with special sensors, and orbiting satellites. Viewed through one of these filters, the invisible abruptly becomes visible. Plumes of planet-warming pollution continuously rise up from oil wells and processing plants and pipelines and compressor stations and export terminals and power plants.

“The technical capability has been around for a very long time,” said Kenzie Huffman, director of strategy and partnerships at Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit that monitors emissions from air and space with a focus on identifying super-emitters. In Huffman’s view, what has changed in the last few years is the amount of effort being put toward “heavy lifting on the translation” to make emissions data accessible, so people can understand what it’s saying, and understand what they can do with it.

“If people could see this with their bare eyes, none of this would be happening,” said Sharon Wilson, a fifth-generation Texan and director of Oilfield Witness, an organization that uses optical gas imaging cameras to expose the underreported pollution from oil and gas infrastructure. “They would have stopped it way back at the beginning of the fracking boom. Drilling in neighborhoods—they would have said, ‘Oh, hell no,’ and that would have been the end of it.”

When gas is fracked near your community or combusted in your stove, natural gas releases toxic chemicals known to cause cancer. A recent study found that air pollution from oil and gas causes 90,000 premature deaths in the United States every year. Natural gas is certainly not the clean-burning fuel that the industry markets it to be, and depending on the amount of methane released by oil and gas infrastructure—which constantly varies over time and geography, making methane monitoring such a challenge—its net climate impact can exceed that of coal.

Polluting Under the Radar

For years, oil and gas companies have benefited from a system where, in the absence of required emissions monitoring, they could self-report estimates of their emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency. Unsurprisingly, those tend to drastically undercount actual pollution. In 2024, a series of 30 flyovers covering 70 percent of U.S. onshore oil and gas production found that methane pollution was over four times higher than what was being reported. In the Permian Basin, a study found that natural gas pipelines released 14 times more methane than companies told the EPA.

“It’s just fraud,” Wilson commented. “If you and I did that on our taxes, we’d be in jail.”

In 2022, after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and its modelers’ assertion that the law would reduce emissions by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, I wrote for the Prospect that a problem with the emissions reductions models is that they are based on the fossil fuel industry’s self-reported emissions, which we know to be false. If we don’t actually know how much pollution is being emitted, when, where, and by whom, how certain can we be that our policies to reduce emissions will reduce them by the predicted amount? What we don’t know, can’t see, or struggle to independently verify has routinely been weaponized by an industry that seeks to greenwash its emissions while playing up the benefits of fake climate solutions like capturing carbon and certifying gas.

Raynes told me that the greenhouse gas reporting program could be improved if it involved “routine empirical observations, a database that was publicly accessible, and was transparent so that independent researchers and watchdog organizations can double-check those numbers.” Now, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has announced that he is looking to eliminate the reporting program altogether.

The Biden administration, for its part, had been taking steps toward incorporating actual measurements of emissions into its reporting program. That included a now-delayed super-emitter response program that would have collected data from approved third parties observing massive pollution events. The data could have helped inform the Inflation Reduction Act’s fee on excess methane emissions above a certain level. But according to the Biden EPA’s own estimate, the operations of most major oil and gas producers wouldn’t have triggered the fee, raising questions about the effectiveness of the fee as a deterrent. Congress has now delayed collection of the methane fee until 2034.

Ultimately, the primary challenge isn’t the visibility of the problem; it’s one of political will. That gap will endure as long as climate deniers run the government. As Wilson drily observed, “If you want to stop methane from rising in our atmosphere, you have to stop dumping methane into our atmosphere.” For all the complexity of tracking greenhouse gas emissions, and the energetic efforts of this administration to help corporations dodge accountability, ultimately the issue is simple: Fossil fuels need to be kept in the ground. As the Trump administration tries to roll back the clock on climate mitigation by decades, it’s worth considering what kind of political power it would take to leapfrog all the pitfalls on the winding road we’ve already walked.

“In order to see the change that we want to see in the world, where we’ve got a better Clean Air Act, where we’re really thinking about a just transition and a managed decline, we have to build that power on the ground to shift who is representing us in Congress,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director at Earthworks. “And that is big. Can it be done in three and a half years? I hope so.”