marquee: methane. Just as we are learning how desperately we need to curb this gas, the Trump administration wants to kick the oil and gas industry’s methane standards to the curb.

First, the science.

Methane is the main gas emitted in the extraction of natural gas, which has accelerated dramatically in the United States with the development of hydraulic fracturing to get at previously unreachable reserves layered under shale. Like carbon dioxide, methane is also now present at levels in the atmosphere unprecedented in human history, with an atmospheric concentration that has more than doubled since preindustrial times.

In fact, now that gas has supplanted coal as the single biggest fuel source for American electricity, it has also surpassed coal in carbon emissions since 2015. The federal Energy Information Administration saysMaking deep cuts in methane emissions wherever possible is vital to addressing climate change.

Today in the United States, the number of states where natural gas is the top source of electricity has more than doubled, from seven in 2001 to 16 in 2017, according to the New York Times. In a similar time frame, US methane emissions were found to have shot up more than 30 percent in the last decade according to a 2016 study by researchers in Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The team found that those emissions may account for between 30 and 60 percent of the global growth in atmospheric methane observed in the last 10 years.

Not only that, a major study in the journal Science last year found that the