Stanford Politics

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig gushed oil from the seafloor for 87 straight days in 2010, people paid attention. According to the Pew Research Center, the spill was the most covered news story for nine straight weeks, with 59 percent of American adults reporting that they were following the spill and disaster response closely.

Earlier this year, when a well in the Aliso Canyon storage facility near Porter Ranch, California, had a 112-day leak from October 23, 2015 until February 18, 2016, the response was much different. Despite the enormous amounts of associated emissions and the thousands of people displaced from their homes, most people remain unfamiliar with the disaster. Why the stark difference in response to the two environmental nightmares?

The natural gas leak in Aliso Canyon was, as disasters go, slow moving. There were no explosions and no immediate deaths. It was unexciting even by the standards of environmental catastrophes; there were no photo ops of birds weighed down by viscous oils or of forests obscured by billowing smoke. Unlike the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Aliso Canyon gas leak didn’t have the “benefit” of occurring in an internationally visible spot like the ocean.

We didn’t take this particular disaster seriously for the same reasons we do not take the much larger issue of climate change as seriously as we should. Despite the impact of the leak — both the immediate local consequences and further-reaching global ones — the disaster was, just like the clear methane it leaked into the atmosphere, rather invisible. We seem to find it hard to pay attention to the consequences of our actions or inactions when those consequences are not immediately felt. For this reason, the effects of methane leaks are generally not noticed until much damage has already been done. This attitude about methane is already dangerous, but the same attitude toward climate change will result in even more damaging impacts to our world.

The Aliso Canyon Situation

From October of 2015 to February of 2016, a single well at Aliso Canyon leaked 100,000 tons of methane, and the direct and immediate health threats caused more than 11,000 Porter Ranch residents to be evacuated from their homes. One metric suggests that the daily emissions from the well would, under standard temperatures and pressure, fill balloon the size of the Rose Bowl stadium. In terms of the climate impact, estimates suggest the single well (of more than 400 in California) comprised a quarter of the state’s daily methane emissions throughout the leaky period.

How did this happen and why did it take so long to fix? The answers to these questions are not simple. However, it is clear that loose regulation and finicky technology played a major role.

The LA Weekly article “What went wrong at Porter Ranch?” outlines the regulation problems rather succinctly. Today, the standard for working wells is such that if leak occurs, the well has to have a safety valve enabling shut off; this was not the case for the Aliso Canyon well. The facility was built in 1953 before there was much regulation of well casings, the additional layer of cement that is supposed to strengthen the well. Unfortunately, current regulations do not require updating the safety standards of existing wells — providing the public with little protection in the case of an accident. Further, records show that the offending well in Aliso Canyon hadn’t been inspected since 1976. With these structural issues, it is perhaps no surprise that the Porter Ranch experienced issues.

Making matters worse, the leak was deep in the casing of the well, meaning it wasn’t something utilities workers could just “plug.” Instead, they had to do something less intuitive: drill more wells. The additional wells then relieve the pressure on the main well, slowing the leak so that it can be permanently stopped. Not only does drilling additional wells take long time, but it isn’t a particularly easy feat. The fact that Southern California Gas Co. had to try 7 times to stop the well is indicative of the current state of technology.

Our Methane Problem

The basic concept underlying climate change is simple enough: greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide is a well-known one, but methane is another — trap heat in the atmosphere, which causes average temperatures to rise. Developed human societies produce high levels of these gases, causing a “global warming” effect. This warming then causes a range of other changes, from rising sea levels to increased magnitude and probability of extreme weather.

Environmentalists tend to focus most attention on carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for significantly longer amounts of time than methane, and according to the Environmental Protection Agency, US greenhouse gas emissions in 2014 were about 80 percent carbon dioxide (with methane coming in a distant second at about 11 percent). Furthermore, the world has historically had many coal-based economies, which emit primarily carbon dioxide.

However, as the world increasingly makes the transition to natural gas, the threat posed by methane demands more attention.

First, methane has significantly higher warming potential than carbon dioxide. The EPA tends to use the “global warming potential” of 21 for methane, meaning that methane raises temperatures 21 times more than carbon dioxide does per unit. However, international bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set the factor at 84 for the twenty years after its entrance into the atmosphere, and at 28 over a one hundred year period.

Second, accurately tracking methane emissions remains difficult and unreliable. Leaks, like the ones in Aliso Canyon, are often not immediately recognized. With this and other factors combined, recent reports have criticized the US for repeatedly lowballing our methane emissions. In fact, newer figures released by the EPA show that US methane emissions were actually 27 percent higher than previous estimates for 2013.

Turning a Blind Eye

The Aliso Canyon leak was officially stopped months ago, but its impacts remain, and we have yet to learn our lesson.

Although President Obama announced in March (with Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau) a joint commitment to begin tackling methane emissions, and although he created a task force to investigate the Aliso Canyon incident at the urging of California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, legislative response continues to be tepid at both the national and local level.

Although there are still groups working at the state level to reform and even break up the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) that regulates everything from natural gas wells to railroads to telecommunications, previous bills have been readily vetoed for being too broad-sweeping and radical by Governor Jerry Brown. The idea behind such legislation is that with a more focused agency to regulate natural gas wells, less would slip through the cracks. But because one agency oversees various public utilities that have nothing to do with one another, no one develops the necessary expertise, and things (such as the regulation of pre-existing wells) get overlooked. While the exact details of PUC reform could be further ironed out, the current lack of action leaves us vulnerable to future accidents.

Further, even the media has been relatively silent when it comes to Aliso Canyon. Mentions in media sources outside of the LA area are few and far between. One rare article (in the Fiscal Times) dubbed the event “the gas leak in California no one is talking about.” And it makes sense; although the statistics should be frightening, we simply lack the patience to try to understand numbers of such magnitude (a problem that has long plagued scientific communication about climate change).

While people forced to leave their homes might sound media-enticing, the excitement dissipates when the evacuations are drawn out over the course of 4 months and are only due to increased headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds.

Even the recent warnings of rolling blackouts during the upcoming summer in LA have done little to capture attention. By the time blackouts occur, Aliso Canyon will be five or six months back in history. Will people readily trace their lack of power back to the supply shock caused by the leak? It seems unlikely.

Although this might be too pessimistic it seems that each of these phenomena — legislative loopholes, lack of media coverage, and inability/unwillingness to connect earlier actions to ongoing negative changes — has become a hallmark of the struggle against climate change.

Legislatively, the the US government has done little to combat the warming trend. It still doles out a shocking $20 billion annually in subsidies to fossil fuel companies. Fracking, the controversial technique for extracting oil and natural gas, has long benefited from the EPA’s inability to regulate the process — as established in what is known as the Halliburton Loophole. Halliburton is one of the world’s largest oil fields services companies, and as it happens Dick Cheney — who was vice president at the time the loophole was created — is a former Halliburton chief executive.

But perhaps what might be more surprising than the lack of legislative action in a partisan, gridlocked system is the lack of media attention. 2015 was objectively a big year for climate change: it was the hottest year on record, Pope Francis issued an encyclical focused on climate change, and the COP-21 climate summit in Paris reached a landmark climate agreement (among other milestones). And yet, a study done by Media Matters for America found that in 2015, TV news coverage of climate change actually fell. Not only did the number of stories fall, but so too did the number of actual scientists asked to contribute.

Perhaps the reason the media has grown tired of climate change is the fact that nothing appears to be happening. This misconception stems from our inability to understand cause and effect chains. For example, our national security experts and military have been warning for years that climate change will pose a huge threat to national security by causing food shortages and natural disasters that cause instability and mass immigration.

And yet, in our discussion of conflicts that have already occurred from such problems, we hardly discuss the role climatic change might have played. In the Syrian conflict, for example, researchers have linked the political unrest over food shortages that arose from a drought exacerbated by climate change. To be sure, there are many other very critical factors that contributed to the Syrian conflict.But to ignore the current impacts of climate change allows us to keep dismissing it until it is always already too late.

With Aliso Canyon, we should have known that our regulatory standards were not high enough. We should also remember this fact if or when LA is hit with blackouts and soaring energy prices. But will we remember, and will we connect the dots?

I hope that the answer, with natural gas wells and climate change alike, will be yes. Much of the blame rests in government policy and media tendencies, but it also lies in us — as voters and as media consumers. I’m asking you: remember Aliso Canyon.

---

Ada Statler-Throckmorton, a sophomore studying earth systems, is a staff writer at Stanford Political Journal.