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The Trump Administration’s tariffs and trade policies have implications for the climate change agenda, particularly with the European Union.
The EU has a policy requiring gas importers to report on “methane intensity” and imposing fees on imports that don’t meet a tight methane standard by 2027, which could affect US LNG exports to Europe.
To avoid all trade tariffs being imposed on the EU by the US, the EU is considering a methane emissions trading market that would allow high-methane gas to be labelled as low-methane by buying certificates from low-emissions producers.
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President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade policies have significant implications for climate change efforts, particularly between the United States (“US”) and the European Union (“EU”). The EU has several options to respond to potential US tariffs, including negotiation, retaliation or a combination of both strategies.
Last month, President Trump urged the EU to increase its purchases of crude oil and liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) from the US to avoid tariffs on all imports, stating that buying American oil and gas is something the EU can do quickly to resolve the issue.
Trump lifted a pause on new LNG export terminal construction on his first day in office, which was previously imposed by the Biden administration due to concerns over the “carbon footprint” of LNG exports, and as a result, the US has become the largest LNG exporter in the world.
Since 2022, the US has been the biggest supplier to Europe. The US saw a significant increase in LNG exports to Europe, with exports jumping from 15 million tonnes per year before 2022 to 55 million tonnes in both 2022 and 2023, following the suspension of most Russian pipeline flows to the continent.
But the EU has a problem, a “greenhouse gas” problem linked to the fabricated climate change agenda.
The EU has a policy starting in May requiring gas importers to report on their products’ “methane intensity,” the ratio of methane emissions to the total production of oil, gas or coal, and imposing additional fees on imports that don’t meet a tight methane standard by 2027.
As Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a gas market scholar at Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy explained: “An impending EU policy requires gas exporters to lower their methane emissions or face fees. The EU’s methane rule is designed to force global gas producers who want access to the lucrative EU market to crack down on a potent greenhouse gas – a policy at odds with the Trump administration’s planned rollback of domestic emissions regulations.”
So, the Trump administration’s tariff spat with the EU could lead to negotiations on EU methane emissions standards for LNG imports.
Ukraine, India, Japan and Taiwan are among the countries committing to buy more US LNG. Europe won’t want to be left out in the cold. Besides, “in Europe, where gas prices are the highest they’ve been in years and Russian pipelines seem unlikely to reopen anytime soon, greater imports from the US are likely no matter what Trump does,” Tim McDonnell said writing for Semafor.
EU officials have said there are no plans to exempt US gas from the methane rules. Either the EU exempts the US from their methane rules or they will need to water down their rules for all importing countries. We can but hope it will lead to them abandoning the regulations altogether. However the EU negotiates itself out of this sticky situation, it is going to have to backtrack on its eco-fascist ideology.
The solution for the eco-fascists in Brussels have come up with is to label some methane emissions as “low-methane.” To be labelled as “low-methane,” “high-methane” importers will need to buy methane credits, so to speak, from those deemed to be “low-emissions” producers We kid you not.
EU officials, in consultation with European gas companies, are hashing out a new methane emissions trading market that would allow high-methane gas to be labelled low-methane by buying a certificate from low-emissions producers somewhere else in the producing country, effectively separating the physical gas molecules from their emissions profile. This would ensure that sufficient US gas is able to reach European consumers at a reasonable price, and direct some cash back to US gas companies that have already invested in methane reduction measures.
As with the infamous carbon credit schemes, this methane credit scheme sounds like a money-making scam. And as Gunnar Steck, executive advisor to the trade group Eurogas, points out it won’t mean that LNG will reach the consumer at a reasonable price.
“The less volumes we have that are able to meet the [methane] requirements, the higher the premium [for low-methane gas] will be, so there’s a clear link to affordability, and that’s front and centre these days in Europe,” he said.
Naturally, climate change cultists don’t like the idea of changing the impending EU’s methane rules. Carlos Garcia, strategic business development manager at the environmental commodities trading firm STX Group, argues that this “book and claim” system has significant flaws, as it only targets the lowest-hanging fruit of methane emissions and lets other producers off the hook, potentially undermining the intent of the regulation.
Garcia, in collaboration with the US research and advocacy group Clean Air Task Force, is advocating for a system that allows emissions trading only between producers within the same region or those physically connected by pipelines, which would supposedly drive down overall emissions without causing prices to spike.
The final design of Europe’s methane market is still under discussion, making it a potential bargaining chip in tariff negotiations.
While the EU wastes time and taxpayers’ money designing a methane trading market that will most likely enrich a select few at the expense of the many, we would like to remind our readers what a fruitless task the EU has set itself.
We know there is no climate emergency and there will not be one. But for those who have been hoodwinked into believing there is a climate change crisis and for those who like to use it as an excuse: will the imminent EU methane regulations make any difference to the global temperature as proclaimed? Absolutely not, according to CFact which published an article in 2022 about the US imposing methane regulations under the Biden Administration.
Methane, the molecule CH4, is the main constituent of natural gas. Like water vapour (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O), methane is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas. Methane is present in minute quantities; 0.00017 per cent of the atmosphere.
“Few realise that large increases in the concentrations of greenhouse gases cause very small changes in the heat balance of the atmosphere. Doubling the concentration of methane – a 100% increase, which would take about 200 years at the current growth rates – would reduce the heat flow to space by only 0.3%, leading to an average global temperature change of only 0.2 °C,” CFact wrote.
“Even if regulations on US methane emissions could completely stop the increase of atmospheric methane (they can’t), they would likely only lower the average global temperature in the year 2222 by about 0.2 °C, a completely trivial amount given that humans have adapted to a much larger change over the past century,” CFact added.
It’s not only the EU that is failing to grasp the basics. At COP26 in 2023, the EU and the US launched the Global Methane Pledge (“GMP”) for “methane mitigation … to keep the goal of limiting warming to 1.5˚oC.” 150 nations signed the GMP without even bothering to check if the methane was man-made, Joe Nova wrote.
In her article, Nova explained that the rise in methane in recent years is not due to “fossil fuels” as claimed, but due to a rise in microbes. Quoting a study published in 2024, Nova said that even though the use of hydrocarbon fuel was rising, the atmospheric methane relating to these fuels has been decreasing for 17 years. She pointed to a Phys Org article about the study which said: “Since 2007, scientists have observed microbes playing a significant role in methane emissions, but their contribution has surged to over 90% starting in 2020.” In other words, the increase in atmospheric methane is part of a natural cycle.
As of January 2025, regardless of what the reality is, additional countries had signed up to the Global Methane Pledge. The total number of signatories now stands at 160. As the GMP is linked to the same 1.5oC goals as the Paris Climate Agreement, and the US and Argentina have stated their intention to leave the Agreement, we can expect the number of GMP’s signatories to follow the same trajectory as the methane from hydrocarbon fuels – it’s all downhill from here.
Sources for this article include:
- Trump Urges EU to Buy More US LNG, Oil Price, 21 January 2025
- Trump-EU tariff spat could put a key climate policy on the negotiating table, Semafor, 13 February 2025
- A little learning on natural gas, methane and climate change, CFact, 27 November 2022
- You don’t have to eat bugs now?! Mysterious record methane surge since 2020 was not from fossil fuels but ‘90% due to microbes’, Climate Depot, 23 October 2024
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Categories: Breaking News, World News
Methane burned off (Flaring) in the USA exists but is not the worst in the world.
https://flaring.skytruth.org/?lat=36.839&lng=26.517
https://flaring.skytruth.org/?zoom=1.69&lat=38.586&lng=4.561&view=volume
Flaring Methane CH4 turns it into CO2 that plants use to make the planet green, that makes more O2 for us to breathe!
[…] Go to Source Follow altnews.org on Telegram […]
Unbelievable! American VP Vance rips EU a new one over free speech. Euroweenies in a panic! Gives examples in UK.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/european-leaders-horrified-after-jd-vance-slams-censorship-laws-their-faces
Oh and it was one of those very special moments where I can say I’m proud to be an American. Giving 🖕🏻to the EU / WEF Is a great way to start. We will save those echo imbeciles from their twisted selves yet.
The paper by Wijngaarden and Happer (at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098) gives calculations of atmospheric heat absorption from the well-known properties of greenhouse gases like CO2 and Methane.
No modelling is used, just the Physics of gases as determined by theory and experiment over the past couple of hundred years. It’s not an easy read but the graphs they present are very clear.
Figure 5 (Page 14) shows the effects of doubling the Methane content of the atmosphere (spoiler alert: it’s insignificant).
I’m afraid that our elected and unelected leaders have allowed themselves to be converted to new religious beliefs like ‘Net Zero’ just as in old times it suited them to believe the Earth was at the centre of the Universe.
Perhaps society could be organised differently in future to make us more robust against ideological takeover.
How to increase sales of gas to Europe. Tell Europe and Germany in particular not to allow gas pipes from Russia. Then blame the pesky Russians for blowing up the pipes. Et voila! No competition! Sell lots of gas.