"I welcome the Commission's decision to leave the Methane Regulation intact. That should not be overlooked. Yet the recommendation that accompanies it is clearly undermining that decision. To ask member states to suspend penalties for three years, on the grounds that most of them have not yet built the penalty systems the law required of them last August, does not, in my judgement, meet the moment. It is a lasting exemption dressed as a temporary one.
"The decision now falls to national governments, and I would put it to them in the plainest terms: keep the penalty schedules you have already notified.
"Let me begin with what the Commission has got right, because it deserves saying plainly. A majority of member states pressed for this Regulation to be reopened. Washington pressed, and so did a good deal of the industry. The Commission declined, and the law stands. Having spent some years advising governments under that sort of pressure, I know what it costs to hold a line of that kind, and I commend the judgement.
"My concern is with what has been put in its place, and chiefly with its timing. The monitoring obligations begin on 1 January 2027. The suspension of penalties runs from 2027 to 2029. So the opening three years of this regime, the very years in which reporting habits are formed and companies work out how seriously the measurement is meant to be taken, would run with nothing whatever attached to getting it wrong. The single exception retained is for large-scale fraud. An unrepaired leak, a survey quietly missed, a figure reported on the low side: none of that comes close to the bar.
"I would ask colleagues to weigh the reason given for this with some care. Penalties are to be suspended because most member states have not yet established the penalty regimes the Regulation required of them by August of last year. I find that a difficult argument to follow. If the law has gone unenforced because governments have not done the work, then surely the answer is to do the work, rather than to grant three further years in which it need not be done at all.
"There is a further point I would put to any government that is anxious about security of supply. Methane is, after all, natural gas. The gas escaping from a defective valve, or flared for want of anywhere to put it, has already been paid for and could perfectly well have been sold. Repairing those losses adds to supply rather than diminishing it. In a tight market I should have thought that argument grows stronger, not weaker.
"The Regulation has survived a serious attempt to unpick it, and that is no small thing. What remains is to see that its enforcement does not quietly fall away in its stead. I urge you not to surrender the enforcement you fought so hard to secure."
Sir David King
Chair, Climate Crisis Advisory Group
Image: Methane plume observed over Turkmenistan through the TROPOMI instrument on-board ESA's Sentinel-5P
Image attribution: Singularity90, Wikipedia
