Good thing the USA and Israel are sitting on Natural gas reserves, which are the least polluting energy source. Not to mention that fusion power, using only a reaction of metals, with no waste or danger has already been demonstrated.

Mr Fusion, here we come.

Your tax dollars at waste.

Just shows the EPA don't have anyone with more than half a brain. They will now waste years, and tax dollars, "measuring" methane from reservoirs (probably no more accurately than a rough estimate anyway). Nobody will even stop to ask where does that carbon come from. It comes from plant material which recently absorbed every atom of that carbon from the atmosphere anyway.
So, no additional carbon then. Oops, I just made those EPA consultants redundant.

Interesting. Isn't the real problem just people? Without people there is no need for manmade energy for man. Eliminate people and the problem goes away automatically. The dams will eventually deteriorate and just wash away, everything goes back to normal. OR, someone could pick the plants from around the dams and find a way to utilize them to create energy that we can actually use.

I got a knock on the door the other night, two young ladies from Puget Energy, my power company in Washington State. They wanted me to sign up for the Green Energy Program where for only a 12% increase on my bill I could have only green power. They explained they would buy green energy from someone else for me but it costs a little more. They talked about the oil and coal plants and how they pollute. I told them I thought we had all hydropower, so what does oil and coal have to do with increasing my bill 12%? They gave me a business card and told me the info is all on their website. I didn't sign up.

"Nuclear by-products", please, not "nuclear waste". The latter is a semantic corner into which we have been driven by people who wanted to apply negative labels to anything 'nuclear'. Nuclear by-products can be important sources of fuel for thorium liquid-salt reactors (which in turn produce different by products - ones with a shorter half-life). Calling these by products 'waste' is a political label, not an accurate one.

Jan

Wow! methane produced by the decay of plants in a moist environment. Think of the methane being produced by rain forests! We better pave them all over before global warming destroys the planet.

It may have been meant in a different context, but -- "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

So they are just starting to analyze this. So that means lots of jobs paid by taxpayers to study the problem forever.. It is still all about the money.

blarman, you can relax. The article is meaningless as it based on a false premise- that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect.

As far as I'm concerned the EPA and UN are full of methane. Maybe they should measure the gas coming out of their respective bathrooms which is vented into the atmosphere.Then they'll be forced to wear proctol tubing to capture their own methane in bag knapsacks. Then when they attempt to go home for the day they'll float away into the upper atmosphere and then get struck by the extremely high electrostatic discharges, there-by becoming evening fireworks.

My reading of the SA article is they do not know yet how much (maybe all) of the emissions reduced by hydro power are offset by this methane.

I think you're right that we'll just have to deal with the costs as they materialize.