"This is extraordinarily harmful," said the United Nations' advocate for sustainable energy, Rachel Kyte, who perhaps added diplomatically yet off the record that the foremost harm comes from the extraordinarily harmful U.S. president.
At issue? Said U.S. president now intends to gut the Obama-era regulation on methane emissions, the second-largest contributor to the greenhouse effect — although it is disproportionately more powerful, in the short run, than carbon dioxide.
The Obama administration required oil and gas companies to update their monitoring systems of sundry equipment, so as to more quickly remedy any methane leaks. Was there ever a more rational government policy? Or a more rational reception by affected private enterprises?
Which is to say, major oil and gas companies, such as Exxon, BP America and Shell are resisting the current, extraordinarily harmful administration's proposed annihilation of President Obama's cleaner-energy rule. (Not "smaller oil and gas companies," though, which have rebelled against the policy's cost.) The big boys do so out of self-interest. Having advertised natural gas as a more environmentally friendly source of energy than coal, you-know-who's revamped oversight of the industry — meaning none — would augur poor public-relations on oil and gas companies' part.
That this insanely harmful president intends to obliterate yet another environmental regulation — courtesy his predecessor for the good of the globe — is but an intention (expected to materialize in 2020) that dwells remotely from genuine news. The unbalanced tosspot in the White House does something surreally stupid every day, which by now has hurled the general consumer of news into a catatonia-like numbness.
What's noteworthily peculiar, however, is that the Times article from which I gleaned this narrative contains not one word of Why; that is, why would any president further harm the environment deliberately? But we already know why, which is perhaps the reason for the Times' silence. First, as noted, the president is unbalanced — most likely clinically unbalanced. And of course second is the president's narcissistic hatred of Obama and any of his laws or regulations. If either has Obama's fingerprints on it, they gotta go, in the diseased mind of today's popular-vote-losing chief executive.
As semi-comedian (I've seen his show) Yakov Smirnoff would say: What a country!