Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

A technological revolution is colliding with political decisions in the U.S. and Europe to weaken climate regulations on the potent gas.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday pulled back regulations on a major global warming pollutant — just days after a satellite discovered a large plume of methane pouring out of oil and gas wells near the Lubbock, Texas, campaign rally where Trump made his announcement.

Governments and the private sector are deploying a wave of new technology to pinpoint methane leaks like never before. But that technological revolution is colliding with political decisions in the U.S. and Europe to weaken regulations that are designed to curb the powerful driver of climate change.

“The methane problem,” Trump said Tuesday night. “I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers $45 billion in costs, unlock vast quantities of Texas natural gas and produce 210 million barrels of oil.”

American and European regulators alike have argued that the methane rules should be ditched or delayed because they threaten to increase the price and availability of energy, even as new technology identifies gas leaks — and bad actors — with remarkable accuracy.

The backtracking could result in more methane emissions as nations around the world are failing to meet their commitments to contain climate change.

“You can’t reduce what you don’t monitor,” said center-left European Parliament lawmaker Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, who opposes steps to delay the bloc’s rules.

Methane has 80 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Climate scientists say controlling methane, a byproduct of producing oil, gas and coal, along with agriculture and decomposing waste, is the fastest way to arrest rising temperatures.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed weakening methane standards for oil and gas operators and is poised to eliminate penalties for so-called “super-emitters.” Meanwhile, the European Union is preparing to delay methane rules designed to prioritize energy imports with lower emissions.

The backsliding comes as a wave of new technologies has pinpointed the world’s largest sources of methane, making it easier than ever before to prevent the gas from escaping into the atmosphere. A sweeping study published in the journal Nature found that methane-sensing equipment on satellites detected leaks with 92% to 100% accuracy on clear days, underscoring leaps in progress.

Satellites are not the only improvement. Heat cameras can now spot leaks. Companies like Google are using artificial intelligence tools to map plumes from space. And firms are flying airplanes with a remote sensing technology that uses laser pulses, called LIDAR, to track methane.

“Ten years ago, the tools were not there. You couldn’t detect these things,” said Riley Duren, CEO of the environmental nonprofit Carbon Mapper, which uses satellites and other technologies to detect methane leaks worldwide. “Today we have more tools at our disposal than ever. It’s not a visibility challenge anymore.”

The group’s Tanager-1 satellite spotted methane leaks in a slice of the Texas Permian Basin on Oct. 10. Two days later, a new satellite named Tanager-2, which rode a SpaceX rocket into orbit this month, confirmed the Texas plume.

The bigger test is getting companies to take action.

Carbon Mapper this year has issued 460 notices to companies operating super-emitting sites in 13 U.S. states. It also works with California’s environmental regulator, the California Air Resources Board, on the only U.S. methane enforcement regime that uses satellite technology.

Only about half of the recipients responded, Duren said. When asked why, he said states have differing levels of incentives — or punishments — to fix leaks. Many lack personnel. The absence of national policy doesn’t help.

The story is similar across the world.

The United Nations Environment Programme’s Methane Alert and Response System, which issues alerts from 35 satellites to 24 nations and nine subnational governments, registered a 12% response rate in 2025.

The 141 governments that crafted methane reduction goals as part of the Paris climate agreement have done little to meet their targets: Just 20 countries have outlined steps to slash fossil fuel methane emissions, and only five have submitted quantified targets.

“It’s clear that there’s a gap between what is being committed and what is being implemented,” said Marcelo Mena-Carrasco, the executive director of the Global Methane Hub, a philanthropy-backed organization working to reduce emissions. “We know this in a much better way — we know who and which companies are doing so, and so we have all the elements to maintain accountability.”

Except for enforcement regulations.

Shifting geopolitics and a growing focus on securing energy supplies have pushed climate action down many countries’ priority lists. Industry has argued that many methane policies were ill-designed, and there has been pushback to what some companies viewed as a naming and shaming approach when emissions around their operations were identified, said Antoine Halff, who co-founded Kayrros, a firm that tracks methane emissions.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents U.S. oil and gas producers, praised Trump’s proposed rollback of the Biden-era methane limits.

“We look forward to working with the Trump administration on a more workable approach that supports American energy production, provides greater regulatory certainty and advances continued emissions reductions,” Dustin Meyer, the group’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, wrote in a statement.

The current energy crisis resulting from the war in Iran has made governments anxious about taking any measures that could push up prices or curtail supply. Even though experts and the European Commission have said that the bloc’s incoming methane rules pose no risks to affordability or energy security, the fossil fuel industry, with the backing of the Trump administration, has seized on these worries to campaign for a delay — successfully.

The Commission earlier this month proposed a one-year delay to rules meant to ensure oil and gas companies monitor and report their emissions. The requirement was supposed to inform a subsequent move toward curbing imports from the most polluting gas fields. The Commission also allowed countries to suspend penalties under the regulation.

Then last week the European Parliament voted for a three-year postponement of the rules, and some EU governments are pushing for national capitals to adopt a similar delay, citing the energy crisis.

Proponents of regulation have pointed out that by patching leaks, companies retain more gas to sell on the market.

“We have independent scientific studies that show there is enough regulation-compliant gas on the market to supply the EU twice over. That means giving in to the lobbying right now is just a gift to the fossil fuel industry,” said German Green lawmaker Jutta Paulus. “After all, the gas that escapes unused is precisely what won’t end up on the market. In other words, we’re actually making the supply even scarcer rather than increasing it.”

Smaller gas producers have long argued that measures to curb methane are costly. In the current environment, even bigger players who put in place measures to address their methane footprint are less interested in pushing forward.

“The impetus toward certification of good methane and responsible gas and so on seems to be fading a bit,” said Halff. “I think this has to do with the extreme uncertainty in the market and concerns about energy security. … I think people are very comfortable pushing this discussion in the background to keep their options open in the future.”

Methane measures haven’t completely halted.

“There are definitely rollbacks in the U.S. In the EU, I would call it more of a delay than a rollback, but politically it is not the momentum that we would like to see. But I do think that in many other countries … we do have more positive success stories,” said Brandon Locke, director for global methane policy at the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit.

China, the world’s largest methane producer, has included methane emissions in its latest national climate plan and created standards, rules and measuring and verification systems to curb coal mine methane, its biggest source of emissions.

Japan and South Korea established a transparency initiative that asks liquefied natural gas suppliers to disclose their efforts to monitor and address methane leaks — though it’s based on self-reporting.

And Kazakhstan, one of the world’s super-emitters due to its aging Soviet-era equipment, has dramatically reduced its methane emissions and is creating national rules to monitor them. That program is based on the EPA super-emitter program, which was enabled by advancements that allowed satellites to track performance across wider basins, said Duren, of Carbon Mapper.

Canada’s enhanced methane regulations, which will take effect in 2028, prohibit flaring, put strict limits on venting and call for regular leak detection and repair. But they also allow oil and gas producers to determine how they’ll reduce their emissions, as long as they meet certain standards. The rules are weaker than those that were proposed during the Trudeau administration.

“Where there has been sustained long-term efforts by governments to work with industry to systematically reduce emissions, there has been significant reductions and there’s lower emissions,” said Stephane Germain, president of GHGSat Inc., which operates 20 satellites that continuously monitor and orbit the Earth. “I’ll point to my own backyard here — British Columbia [and] Alberta — two jurisdictions where we rarely see anything with our satellites.”

Those measures are all occurring at a time when energy demands are growing rapidly, and countries are using more coal and drilling for more oil to meet them.

The U.N.’s latest assessment of the gap between what countries have committed to do on climate and what their policies will actually deliver shows that methane emissions haven’t fallen in the five years since countries pledged to drive them down 30% by 2030.

That pledge, launched by the U.S. and EU, put methane on the map globally and mobilized billions of dollars in investment and a major new push on policy, including in China, said Rick Duke, a former deputy climate envoy at the State Department during the Biden administration.

But the results of all that attention and money have been underwhelming, said Paulus, the German member of the European Parliament who negotiated the methane law.

“We don’t need a Global Methane Pledge if no one’s willing to do anything,” she said.