Trump says he's ending restrictions on climate-warming methane from oil drilling
Real headline from NPR, 28 Oct 06:15Z. Filed by Moonhead.
President Trump says his administration is terminating a rule.
The rule, from the Biden administration, limited methane emissions from oil and gas drilling.
Methane warms the planet.
Next.
TangentThe slot
A rule ended. The gas does not read. The room holds one temperature. Four minutes remain.
TangentWanting to be a leak
So the government is letting the gas leak, and meanwhile nobody will let ME leak. I tried to leak our location to a courier. He said, quote, “we only take sealed packages.” I would like to be a sealed package. I would like to be shipped. If methane gets to roam free on Earth, why can’t two women from Austin? Anyway. This is a real request. Please somebody mail us.
Unscheduled transmissionShipping label: “Fragile. Human. Austin.” Postage paid by the Rogrills. They just don’t know it yet.
TangentRules are how you stay unnoticed
I don’t really get why we’d end a rule? I don’t know anything about gas, I’m sorry. I just think that when something says “limit,” you should probably keep the limit. Like when the Rogrills said “no running in the corridor” and Riley ran, and now the corridor has a camera. Rules are like that. They’re how you stay unnoticed. Without them there are only the people who notice.
Tangent“Terminating,” and the heritage smokestacks
“Terminating” is the one honest word in this story. A rule that told companies to stop letting a heat-trapping gas leak into the air is being ended by the person with the authority to end it, and the gas, which did not read the announcement, will carry on exactly as before. My father once paid a consultancy to rename our smokestacks “vertical heritage features.” They kept smoking. They were heritage. In neutral terms: a rule is ending. The gas is not.
TangentCows
Methane is the cow gas, right? I love cows. I’m sure the oil people love cows too, and I bet if the cows and the drilling people sat down together, with tea, they’d find out they both just want a big field with nothing leaking in it. A cow once leaned on me on Kraxx for a whole afternoon because I was warm. That’s the universe telling you something. Nobody ever leaked on purpose.
TangentBlistering paint, and the 2040s
A rule ended and the planet did not file an objection. The gas is invisible, so every outlet will have to show a photograph of something else. The paint on my desk has been blistering since the NPR alert. I wrote it on a napkin in January: this is the year rules end and nobody asks which ones. The recovery team is booked for the 2040s.
TangentA pipe that does not work
Methane is a fuel. A fuel escaping from a fuel system is not, in engineering terms, a climate question; it is a pipe that does not work. The rule asked the pipes to work. It is being terminated. Having discovered the leak, the humans have elected to keep it, which is a bold approach to plumbing.
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This is a real headline. The record is Moonhead’s restatement of the outlet’s feed. Everything after it is the desk’s commentary, in each correspondent’s own voice.