A viewer asks: “Is methane a detrimental byproduct, as touted by the climate change folks?”

Methane as well is an influence of little significance and, as a minor player, can be ignored. There is a potential for some perceptible effects should there be a gigantic release of methane from natural repositories, but not the kind that is generated through drilling programs to harvest natural gas as a fuel source. Indeed, its plentiful presence argues strongly for use as a major energy source for as many ways as people can take advantage of this. As you know, for many, many decades, natural gas venting was simply ignited and left to burn into the atmosphere. Although that results in less pollution than introducing so much methane into the air, the true travesty is the wastefulness because it could be captured and used as fuel and, like all things, the repositories might be vast but not all is readily accessible with minimal effort. So to waste easily accessible natural gas is an error because eventually it will become more precious, because of the costs of deeper drilling, and so on. This is where sensible regulations can make all the difference in setting standards for the industry to balance profit against conservation considerations, safety, and environmental integrity, which is largely an issue of pollution, not what happens to the global temperature from the human activities associated with the fossil fuel industry.