TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Politics & the Nation
BY TIK ROOTSix times more natural gas is
leaking into the skies of Boston
than is officially reported, new
research shows. The study, pub-
lished in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences,
also suggests that gas could be
escaping not only from distribu-
tion pipelines but from inside
businesses and homes as well —
a finding that some say may be
overstated.
Natural gas is made up pri-
marily of methane, which —
when released directly into the
atmosphere instead of being
burned first — has more than 80
times the warming potential of
carbon dioxide over a 20-year
period.
The study monitored natural
gas methane emissions in the
Boston area between 2012 and
- It found that an average of
49,000 tons of methane leaked
into the air each year. That
amounts to an estimated 2.5 per-
cent of all gas delivered to the
metro area and is equivalent to
the carbon dioxide emissions of
roughly a quarter-million cars
operating for a year.
The scientists say their esti-
mated leak rate is six times
higher than estimates based on
the Massachusetts Department
of Environmental Protection
greenhouse gas inventory. They
also found that despite efforts to
plug methane leaks in Massachu-
setts during the study period,
there was no significant decline
in emissions.
“What’s being done to address
methane emissions isn’t work-
ing. We need to look at some new
approaches,” said Maryann Ra-
cine Sargent, an environmental
scientist at Harvard University
and a co-author of the paper.
“This is a huge amount of emis-
sions and it’s ones that the state
isn’t taking into account.”
Further, urban leak rates do
not include emissions from the
production of natural gas before
it reaches a city. Previous re-
search has shown that those
emissions have also been under-
reported — a 2018 study in the
journal Science, for instance,
found that supply-chain emis-
sions were about 60 percent
higher than estimates based on
the Environmental Protection
Agency inventory.
This latest paper calculated
that, in the Boston area, up-
stream and urban emissions
combine for a total loss rate of
4.7 percent. At those levels, Sar-
gent said, the greenhouse effect
of natural gas can “become
equivalent to coal.”
Greenhouse gas inventories
often rely on bottom-up ac-
counting in which emissions
are estimated using mathemati-
cal formulas and averages, such
as leaks per mile, multiplied
across a gas network. This
study, on the other hand, mea-
sured what’s actually in the air.
“What we’re doing is a top-
down measurement,” Sargent
said. “You can’t miss anything.
It’s all going to show up in the
atmosphere.”
Robert Howarth, a professor
at Cornell University who has
studied methane leaks, said that
this paper “is the most thorough
and carefully conducted yet to
examine methane emissions
from the use of fossil gas in the
urban northeastern U.S.” The
authors say it also lines up with
what they saw in previous work
on methane emissions in urban
areas.
“They’re all giving the same
answer,” Sargent said. “There’s
something big t hat these bottom-
up studies are missing.”
The research published Mon-
day is among the longest timeperiods that anyone has exam-
ined urban emissions, said Eric
Kort, a climate scientist at the
University of Michigan, whose
work has captured the problem
over shorter periods. “They did a
really rigorous analysis,” he said.
“It’s interesting to see that the
emissions haven’t changed very
much.”
These persistent emissions
come despite Massachusetts
passing multiple laws aimed at
curbing leaking methane emis-
sions in recent years. “We’re on a
treadmill,” said Nathan Phillips,
a researcher at Boston University
who has studied methane emis-
sions in the area. As some leaks
are fixed, new ones arise and
existing ones grow larger. “That
is just not good enough,” he said.
This longer time series data
also allowed researchers to ob-serve methane levels across sea-
sons, which proved significant.
They found that emissions were
greater in the winter, when de-
mand for natural gas in Boston
was highest.
“We see this really strong
correlation between the emis-
sions from natural gas and the
natural gas that’s consumed,”
Sargent said. But, the paper says,
because the pressure in the dis-
tribution pipelines stays “fairly
constant year-round,” that
wouldn’t explain the seasonal
difference. The urban pipelines
appear to be responsible for only
about half of the observed emis-
sions, Sargent said.
Phillips, however, isn’t con-
vinced about the pressures in the
system remaining constant, call-
ing the assumption “simplistic.”
Mark Kleinginna, founder of theconsulting company Integral En-
ergy, agrees, saying “there is a lot
more variability that could cause
the leaks to be greater in the
winter time.”
Sargent acknowledges that
“this is an area where more data
reporting from the gas compa-
nies would be very useful.”
Eversource, one of the gas
companies serving Boston,
wrote in an email that “most of
the year pressures do not fluctu-
ate more than about 20% on
many of our different systems,
but during winter, with very
cold weather and high gas con-
sumption, the pressure ranges
can be considerably more than
20%."
In any case, this latest study
points to other possible contrib-
utors of escaping methane, in-
cluding end-use consumptionfr om appliances and space heat-
ing. “This very large change with
season is strong evidence for a
source post-meter,” s he said, add-
ing that more research is needed
in this area and that emissions
from buildings is “the next thing
that our group is really focused
on.”
Audrey Schulman lives in
Cambridge, Mass., and a few
years ago her house was the site
of an indoor natural gas leak so
large it prompted the emergen-
cy replacement of her boiler.
Even her new high-efficiency
furnace, she learned, belches a
little bit of methane every time
it starts up.
While methane leaking inside
a home may sound alarming —
and it’s certainly not ideal —
Schulman and Kort note that the
gas ignites only at relatively high
concentrations, far past the
point at which it would be no-
ticeable. “It should be readily
detectable by people’s noses,”
Kort said. The emissions,
though, “still matter a lot for the
climate.”
The leak at Schulman’s house
was nonetheless large enough to
require a remedy. It was also
particularly ironic, as she is the
founder of an environmental
nonprofit called the Home En-
ergy Efficiency Team. The or-
ganization has evolved from fo-
cusing on weatherizing build-
ings in the Boston area to help-
ing fix methane leaks and
advocating for a move away from
natural gas.
Given the hundreds of natural
gas leaks Schulman has seen
fixed in recent years, she would
have liked to see some signal of
emissions decline in this most
recent study — and that may still
come. But, she said, the paper
ultimately adds to the evidence
that natural gas shouldn’t be
seen as a clean fuel.
“We cannot continue to use it,”
Schulman said. “We must transi-
tion off.”
[email protected]Study: Natural gas leaks in Boston vastly underreported
LAUREN JUSTICE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Bob Ackley stops along a sidewalk in Cambridge, Mass., testing for gas leaks. The study suggests that
gas could be escaping not only from distribution pipelines but from inside businesses and homes, too.Greenhouse effect from
the ‘huge amount’ could
be ‘ equivalent to coal’BY MARK GUARINOThe Chicago City Council is
poised to vote this week on what
would be one of the nation’s
largest basic income programs,
giving 5,000 low-income house-
holds $500 per month each using
federal funding from the pan-
demic stimulus package.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) has
proposed the more than $31 mil-
lion program as part of her 2022
budget, which the city council is
scheduled to consider on
Wednesday. The one-year pilot,
funded by the nearly $2 billion
Chicago received from the Biden
administration’s American Res-
cue Plan, is supported by most of
city’s 50 aldermen. But it has
received pushback from the 20-
member Black Caucus, which has
urged Lightfoot to redirect the
money to violence prevention
programs.
Lightfoot has said the program
is motivated by her own child-
hood memories of hardship while
growing up in Ohio. “I knew what
it felt like to live check to check.
When you’re in need, every bit of
income helps,” she wrote in a
tweet announcing the plan earli-
er this month.
Basic income programs have
been spreading across the coun-
try since Stockton, Calif., started
providing monthly stipends with
no strings attached to 125 of its
residents in 2019. Those stipends
resulted in more full-time em-
ployment and improved mental
and emotional well-being among
recipients, according to prelimi-
nary findings reported earlier
this year by researchers who
helped design the program.
Michael Tubbs, who imple-
mented the program as then-
mayor of Stockton, noted that
recipients’ largest expenditure
was food, making up at least a
third of spending each month,
according to the report. “I had no
idea so many people in my area
were hungry,” Tubbs said.
Since Stockton’s program
launched, about 40 other cities
have considered or started simi-
lar efforts to target economic
insecurity within their boundar-
ies, according to Mayors for a
Guaranteed Income, including
Denver, Newark, Pittsburgh, San
Francisco, New Orleans and
Compton, Calif. A program in Los
Angeles will provide 2,000 resi-
dents with a guaranteed income
of $1,000 a month for a year.
The surge of interest has been
fueled in part by the influx of
money that cities have received
from the coronavirus stimulus
and the formation of Mayors for
Universal Basic Income, an advo-
cacy coalition that Tubbs found-
ed last year.
Critics worry that guaranteed
income programs will discourage
people from finding jobs and
drain the labor force, a particular
concern amid the record job
openings in the country this year,
said Michael Faulkender, an as-
sistant treasury secretary for eco-
nomic policy during the Trump
administration. Last week, the
National Federation of Independ-
ent Business reported that 51 per-
cent of small business owners
have job openings they cannot
fill, which more than doubles the
historical average of 22 percent.
“There are still millions upon
millions of low-skilled jobs out
there, and you have small busi-
ness owners who can’t find work-
ers to join their companies,” said
Faulkender, who teaches finance
at the University of Maryland.
Proposals like the one in Chicago
feed the “process of reducing the
willingness of people to partici-
pate in the workforce,” he said.
Opposition to federal entitle-
ment programs, such as rent
vouchers and food stamps, has
been waged for decades, but ad-
vocates like Tubbs say that today,
“the climate has changed.” Eco-
nomic blows struck by recent
natural disasters and the pan-
demic have proven that “the
economy doesn’t work for a vast
number of Americans,” he said.
The inequalities in Chicago are
particularly stark. A 2019 report
by an economic inequality task
force created by the mayor’s of-
fice found that 500,000 Chicago-
ans — about 18 percent of the
population — are living below or
at the poverty level. Nearly half
the city’s households do not have
a basic safety net to help in
emergencies or to prepare for
future needs, such as homeown-
ership or higher education. A
quarter of households have more
debt than income.
Lightfoot says the effects of the
despair can be seen in recent
drops in life expectancy among
the poorest and the current spike
in street violence throughout the
city. Harish Patel, executive direc-
tor of Economic Security For
Illinois, an advocacy group that
helped coordinate the report,
says the pandemic has made the
disparities worse.
The 5,000 recipients, who
must be adults and make less
than $35,000 a year, will be cho-
sen randomly for the program.
Chicago Alderman Gilbert Ville-
gas said the city plans to t rack therecipients’ expenditures during
the first six months and then
provide more targeted assis-
tance, such as help with paying
heating bills or for food. The costs
of supporting the program, he
said, “is well worth the invest-
ment” when weighed against dai-
ly costs of poverty in Chicago,
such as gun violence and incar-
ceration.
Chicago’s basic income propos-
al dates back two years, when a
small group of aldermen led by
Villegas proposed a resolution
that would have established a
$50 million basic income pro-
gram. The subject is particularly
important to Villegas, who con-
siders himself “a product” of sim-
ilar assistance. Following the
death of his father when Villegaswas 8 years old, his mother re-
ceived $800 in monthly survivor
benefits from Social Security un-
til he and his younger brother
turned 18. The funds supported
child-care costs and gave her the
freedom to work just one job,
rather than two, so she could be
with her sons more often.
“It allowed my mom to work
with dignity and gave her the
flexibility to work to better the
neighborhood,” he said. The sib-
lings later served in the Marines,
which Villegas says they consider
payback for the federal govern-
ment’s help. “These are the types
of human infrastructure invest-
ments we need to take a look at
when we talk about investing in
infrastructure,” he said.
Polling over many years haslargely showed the American
public does not support universal
basic income. In April, the Pew
Research Center survey found a
third of Americans say it is “very
important” for the United States
to provide universal basic income
while a fifth said it was “some-
what important.” Forty-five per-
cent said they were against.
But supporters say it is a mat-
ter of exposure. Brett Watson, an
economics professor at the Uni-
versity of Alaska Institute for
Social and Economic Research in
Anchorage, noted that in his
state, receiving a regular income
from the government is already
seen as “a birthright.”
Alaska’s nearly 40-year-old
Permanent Fund Dividend guar-
antees residents an average of$1,600 in an annual lump pay-
ment. (The fund consists of off-
shore oil lease royalties paid to
the state.) Unlike many of the
new basic income programs, it
doesn’t target specific house-
holds and requires fewer condi-
tions. The money, Watson said, is
not seen as paternalistic or de-
meaning, unlike how social serv-
ice benefits like food stamps or
rent vouchers are traditionally
perceived.
“There’s something appealing
to people about the idea that it’s
the people, more than the govern-
ment, who should decide how
best to spend the money they are
given,” he said. “For that reason
alone, it is attractive on the na-
tional scale.”
[email protected]Chicago set to create one of l argest ‘guaranteed basic income’ programs
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