Fake news and fake policy are the order of the day with Pennsylvania DEP methane emissions data and the fractivist hyperbole surrounding the just released data.

Articles at Philly.com (now controlled by the same anti-gas Haas family that is the William Penn Foundation and also funds PennFuture, the Delaware Riverkeeper, the Clean Air Council and StateImpactPA) and EnviroPolitics Blog are faking it on the issue of methane emissions. They’re doing so with clearly coordinated news making and reporting peddling fake news about a new DEP Air Emissions Inventory. They aim to support a stupid DEP policy initiative that is yet another government solution in search of a problem.

Here’s the headline from the EnviroPolitics Blog:

“Report: Fracking methane emissions up 20 percent in Pa.”

This is followed by a completely misleading analysis:

Emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, are increasing at natural gas industry sites in Pennsylvania at a rate greater than gas production, alarming some environmental groups.
That news released this week was tempered somewhat Wednesday for environmentalists when the U.S. Senate voted to block a Trump administration attempt to roll back Obama-era methane rules on federal lands, none of which are in Pennsylvania, however.
PennFuture says new data being self-reported by the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania show a 20 percent increase in methane, which is a byproduct of flaring and venting that occur during natural gas production. The data are for the years 2014 and 2015, the latest available.
At the same time, gas production rose about 12 percent, according to the Energy Information Agency.
“Any time emissions are rising faster than production, it’s clear that voluntary efforts to cut emissions are not working,” Rob Altenburg, director of PennFuture’s Energy Center, said in a statement.

This article is simply a regurgitation of a PennFuture news release which no one at Philly-com or EnviroPolitics Blog bothered to fact-check. (Frank Brill, the editor there, is usually better than this.) I did fact check it by going directly to the DEP news release and their report, which may be found here in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. What I found, first of all, was this nice little table:

My high school math teacher, Mrs. Krause, taught me how to properly calculate growth percentages, but it appears the folks at PennFuture learned something quite different. Perhaps it’s new math. Using old math, though, an increase from 107,735 to 112,128 or 4,394 is 4.1% of 107,735, not 20% as alleged by PennFuture and mindlessly repeated by its sister group and Haas house organ, Philly.com, as well as EnviroPolitics Blog. That’s about one-third the 12% increase in natural gas production PennFuture reports via the Energy Information Administration (EIA). It is most definitely not a case of emissions rising faster than production and PennFuture knows this.

Read more:

http://naturalgasnow.org/methane-emissions-decline-dep-fractivist-h...