Senay Boztas – Poo power: Dutch dairy industry launches €150m biogas project

The air smells fruity, slightly alcoholic. Against the strong hum of machinery, 175 cows are eating hay. As their dung drops to the slatted floor, a machine sweeps it through and it runs underneath the barn to a futuristic dome outside. The Heegs’ 75-hectare family farm in remote Friesland, in the north-west of the Netherlands, where cows outnumber people almost …

Andrea Germanos – Methane Emissions From Fossil Fuel Industry May Be 60 Percent Higher Than Estimates: Study

As President Barack Obama heralds the ratification of the Paris climate agreement, a new study shows that methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry are far higher than previously estimated. According to the research published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, they may be as much as 60 percent greater. “Our study shows that leaks from oil and gas activities around the world are responsible for a …

Nika Knight – EPA’s Own Advisory Board Demands Revision of Deeply Flawed Fracking Report

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board, a panel of independent scientists, is calling on the agency to revise last year’s much–maligned report that declared fracking to have “no widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.” “The EPA’s own analysis shows that dirty oil and gas fracking contaminates drinking water, confirming what millions of Americans already know.” —Lena Moffitt, Sierra Club As the Washington Post reports: The …

Horses are being born without the ability to swallow — and fracking could be to blame

In New York’s Southern Tier, local newspapers are investigating the connection between a local racetrack owner’s sick foals and the fracking fluids present on his farmland. The Ithaca Journal featured a report by Tom Wilber in which he investigated the ongoing issue with foals being born without the ability to swallow — seventeen of them so far — on the breeding farm of Jeff …

Rebecca Solnit – Oil fuels war and terrorists like Isis. The climate movement can bring peace

Greed for petroleum has produced plenty of war. War can be defined narrowly, as conflict between nations, or broadly, as large-scale violence in pursuit of gain. This is why so many see the climate movement as a peace movement – especially after the recent massacres in Paris. In the fossil-fuel era, some oil corporations became powers equal to states, and …

Lauren McCauley – Bombshell Study Reveals Methane Emissions Hugely Underestimated

The amount of methane being leaked from natural gas production sites has been hugely underestimated, according to a “bombshell” new study released on Tuesday. In a paper published at Energy & Science Engineering, expert and gas industry consultant Touché Howard argues that a much-heralded 2013 study by the University of Texas relied on a faulty measurement instrument, the Bacharach Hi-Flow …

The methane apocalypse – Anil Ananthaswamy

They look like massive bomb craters. So far seven of these gaping chasms have been discovered in Siberia, apparently caused by pockets of methane exploding out of the melting permafrost. Has the Arctic methane time bomb begun to detonate in a more literal way than anyone imagined. The “methane time bomb” is the popular shorthand for the idea that the …

Ocean currents impact methane consumption

Large amounts of methane – whether as free gas or as solid gas hydrates – can be found in the sea floor along the ocean shores. When the hydrates dissolve or when the gas finds pathways in the sea floor to ascend, the methane can be released into the water and rise to the surface. Once emitted into the atmosphere, …