Great explanation on Sharon Wilson’s blog:

“The EPA has some graphs that show the dramatic spike [of methane in the atmosphere].  Go to this website and then specifically to these figures. …

As the charts show, for about 1 million years, methane levels were always between 400 and 800 ppb. Then, all of sudden at the time of the industrial revolution (1850)  when we started big time use of fossil fuels, levels of methane (and CO2) started to climb like crazy.

Today concentrations [of methane in the atmosphere] are over 1800 ppb, which means that we have essentially tripled (x3) the average concentration going back a million years.

Whether the leakage rate is 0.1%, 1%, 3%, 10%, doesn’t matter. As an analogy, think about people that are 400 pounds and really obese and suffering from heart disease. Whether they gain another 0.1, 1, 3, or 10 pounds every month moving forward doesn’t matter. Its the wrong question. They need to lose weight, not keep gaining. Translation: we need to stop poking holes in the earth to let the methane out, stop burning fossil fuels, and let nature over time bring the concentration of methane back to the 400 to 800 ppb range.

…The EPA still says natural gas operations are the leading source of methane.”  MORE…

And from NRDC staff attorney Meleah Geertsma’s blog, some other relevant information:

• EPA’s current inventory is incomplete and continues to omit significant sources of methane pollution from the oil and gas sector. …For instance, the inventory does not fully account for the huge uptick in the number of new hydraulically fractured wells (a point I noted this summer with respect to the industry study) or completions of hydraulically fractured oil wells (a significant source of methane as EPA acknowledged in issuing standards for a North Dakota reservation last year, but which is not accounted for in the inventory).

• The revisions do not reflect or explain exceedingly high rates of methane pollution documented in studies by other federal agencies. …As such, they do not explain or account for the shockingly high rates of methane pollution in certain areas documented in field studies such as that by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than EPA has previously recognized. The figures in EPA’s revised inventory use the old value for methane’s “global warming potential” (GWP) – 21. EPA  recently proposed to update methane’s GWP from 21 to 25. In other words, EPA will consider each ton of methane to have under 20% more warming force relative to a ton of CO2 than under the agency’s old and dated accounting system. And there is reason to believe methane’s global warming potential is even higher…” MORE…

And an excellent analysis of the authors’ bias (and its roots) and the Echo Chamber strategy of media parroting the nonsense at Shaleshock Media.