The stakes of this question are enormous. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over short timescales, trapping nearly 30 times more heat per molecule while persisting in the atmosphere for a much shorter period. That combination of high potency and brief atmospheric lifetime makes methane reduction one of the fastest available levers for slowing near-term warming, and it explains why the gas has become a central target for emissions monitoring programs worldwide. Scot Miller, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University and senior author of the study, emphasized that the flat trend carries both reassurance and disappointment. The good news, he noted, is that emissions have not markedly increased despite the enormous growth in natural gas production that followed the hydraulic fracturing boom. The bad news is that oil and gas operations still account for a large share of U.S. methane emissions, and the research found no detectable evidence that recent federal legislation had an impact on the total.

The regulatory backdrop against which this study unfolds is remarkable. In 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency restarted the process of developing rules to address methane emissions under the Clean Air Act, reviving an effort that had been stalled. Congress then enacted the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which went further than any previous federal measure by establishing fees on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and allocating more than $1 billion in technical assistance to help the industry detect and repair leaks. Although some of these provisions proved short-lived in practice, the researchers describe the package as an unprecedented push toward reducing one of the major contributors to climate change. The central question motivating the study was whether that push produced measurable results in the atmosphere, where it ultimately matters.

Answering that question required a methodological approach capable of seeing past the self-reported inventories that have historically dominated emissions accounting. The research team turned to space. They combined observations from Europe’s TROPOMI instrument and the GOSAT satellite, both of which measure the concentration of methane in the air at countless locations across the globe, with sophisticated atmospheric modeling. Because methane released at the surface does not simply hover above its source but is carried and dispersed by winds and other meteorological forces, the researchers developed an algorithm that traced the gas observed from orbit back to its origins on the ground. This inverse modeling framework allowed them to estimate where methane emissions from the oil and gas sector occurred across the United States and how large those emissions were, year by year, for the period bookending the legislative activity from 2019 through 2024.

The numbers that emerged paint a picture of remarkable stability. Total methane emissions from oil and gas activities across the contiguous United States remained within a narrow band, between 9.3 and 10.4 teragrams per year, throughout the study period. Emissions declined by 0.58 teragrams between 2019 and 2023, a modest dip that was partially offset by a slight rise from 2023 to 2024. Set against the backdrop of rising production, that stability is itself a finding. Ao Chen, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins and the study’s first author, stated plainly that the team does not see a detectable decrease in emissions after the Inflation Reduction Act. She was careful, however, to acknowledge the limits of such an assessment: there is no way to test the counterfactual, and it remains possible that without the legislation, methane emissions would have climbed much higher.

One metric did show meaningful movement. The intensity of emissions, defined as the amount of methane released relative to the volume of oil and gas produced, decreased by approximately 11 percent over the study period. Yet the researchers interpret this decline cautiously, describing it as the continuation of a decades-long trend rather than a sudden improvement attributable to policy. Emissions intensity has been gradually falling for years as the industry has matured, and the new data suggest the recent period simply extends that trajectory. In other words, the sector is becoming somewhat more efficient at delivering energy without leaking methane, but because production keeps growing, the absolute quantity of methane entering the atmosphere has not budged.

The gradual improvement in emissions intensity may reflect a fundamental economic shift in how the industry treats natural gas. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, was once regarded largely as a nuisance byproduct of oil extraction, something to be disposed of as cheaply as possible. When there is no pipeline to carry gas from a wellhead to market, drilling companies have little financial incentive to prevent leaks and often simply flare the gas to get rid of it. But when pipeline infrastructure became available in regions such as West Texas, that same gas moved to market, where consumers burned it for heating, cooking, powering appliances, and generating electricity. Evidence from other studies suggests that leaks decline when gas becomes a valuable commodity, because every cubic foot that escapes is revenue lost. Companies have also been updating and improving their infrastructure, replacing aging equipment and adopting better operational protocols. As Miller put it, better industry protocols and less flaring have likely helped gradually curb emissions intensity even as gas and oil production have increased.

Beneath the national averages, the study uncovered striking regional variation. Texas, home to the largest oil-producing basin in the country, recorded a 14 percent decline in oil and gas methane emissions over the same period, a drop that stands out given the state’s dominant role in American energy production. By contrast, the researchers found that California and Colorado are likely falling short of their own emissions reduction goals, suggesting that state-level commitments have not yet translated into atmospheric reality in those jurisdictions. This geographic heterogeneity underscores a key advantage of the satellite-based approach: rather than relying on bottom-up inventories that may lag or misrepresent actual conditions, the method captures what is genuinely happening on the ground, basin by basin, and can reveal where progress is real and where it remains aspirational.

The findings arrive at a moment of uncertainty for methane policy in the United States. The fee mechanism established under the Inflation Reduction Act and the EPA’s Clean Air Act rules represented the most aggressive federal attempt yet to price and regulate methane leakage, yet the atmosphere, at least through 2024, shows no clear signature of their effect. Chen warned that without long-term regulatory durability, the industry may lack the incentive to further reduce methane emissions, and she argued that while curbing emissions intensity is a step in the right direction, a reduction in total methane emissions is what is truly needed to have an impact on the climate. The study is part of a broader scientific effort to determine whether federal greenhouse gas legislation and mandates have meaningfully decreased methane emissions, and its verdict so far is sobering: stability in the face of growth is preferable to the increases many scientists feared, but holding the line is not the same as bending the curve downward.

For the growing community of researchers and policymakers focused on methane, the study demonstrates both the power and the promise of atmospheric monitoring from space. By pairing satellite observations with models that trace pollutants back to their sources, scientists can now audit national emissions claims with a degree of independence that was impossible a decade ago. As more satellites come online and inversion techniques grow more refined, the ability to verify whether policies, technologies, and market forces are genuinely reducing methane pollution will only sharpen. For now, the U.S. oil and gas sector presents a paradox worth watching closely: an industry producing more energy than ever, leaking no more methane than before, and yet still releasing roughly ten teragrams of one of the most powerful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every single year, with the total showing no sign yet of the sustained decline that climate goals demand.

Subject of Research: Satellite-based assessment of U.S. oil and gas methane emissions and the impact of federal climate policy from 2019 to 2024

Article Title: U.S. methane emissions flatline, despite increases in oil and gas production

Article References: U.S. methane emissions flatline, despite increases in oil and gas production. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: methane emissions, oil and gas, greenhouse gases, satellite monitoring, Inflation Reduction Act, EPA regulations, hydraulic fracturing, emissions intensity, TROPOMI, GOSAT, climate policy, Communications Earth & Environment

The research, led by Ao Chen and Scot Miller of Johns Hopkins University together with colleagues at several institutions, used an atmospheric inverse model constrained by satellite observations from the TROPOMI and GOSAT instruments to estimate methane emissions at a daily temporal resolution and a spatial resolution of 0.5 degrees latitude by 0.625 degrees longitude. Inverse modeling works backward from measured concentrations of methane in the air: the model simulates how emissions are transported through the atmosphere and then adjusts emission estimates until the simulated concentrations match what the satellites actually observed. The team blended the two satellite data products, using a machine-learning correction that adjusts TROPOMI retrievals to match the more accurate GOSAT measurements, and ran eight independent modeling scenarios to capture uncertainty arising from different underlying inventories of anthropogenic and wetland emissions.

The headline numbers are striking. Oil and gas methane emissions across the contiguous United States decreased by 0.58 teragrams, with an uncertainty range of 0.30 to 0.96 teragrams, from 2019 to 2023. But then, in the very years following the new federal policy, emissions increased by 0.21 teragrams between 2023 and 2024, with an uncertainty range spanning from a slight decrease of 0.06 teragrams to an increase of 0.53 teragrams. That uptick stands in sharp contrast to what the Environmental Protection Agency had projected: a 0.38 teragram reduction in oil and gas methane emissions from 2023 to 2024 from the combined influence of the Waste Emissions Charge, expected to contribute 0.15 teragrams, and the new methane rules, expected to contribute 0.23 teragrams.

The disconnect between projection and reality, the authors argue, comes down to implementation. The Inflation Reduction Act, enacted in August 2022, represented the first time Congress established a direct statutory framework and fee specifically targeting methane emissions. Its Waste Emissions Charge was designed to create a financial penalty for large emitters, and the law also created the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, allocating 1.36 billion dollars in technical and financial support for the oil and gas sector. In parallel, the EPA finalized rules in 2024 under the Clean Air Act covering both new and existing oil and gas sources. But most implementation details of the charge — conditional exemptions, monitoring requirements, and the EPA’s final regulations — remained unsettled during the study period, and subsequent political developments delayed the measures entirely, keeping the fee effectively inactive through 2026. Congress nullified the EPA’s Waste Emissions Charge rule in early 2025, and the rules for existing facilities did not come into effect until 2024, meaning states were not required to submit implementation plans until 2026.

Industry behavior compounded the regulatory limbo. While a subset of large, forward-looking operators proactively initiated enhanced monitoring and assessment protocols when the law passed, many others maintained a cautious wait-and-see posture as the technicalities of the fee and its alignment with EPA rules evolved. Even some proactive firms implemented strategic pauses in late 2023 to assess how the charge would interact with the new regulations. The authors are careful to note a caveat: they cannot rule out a counterfactual scenario in which emissions would have risen more than 0.21 teragrams in the absence of the legislation and other regulatory activity. But the data show no detectable signature of the 0.38 teragram annual reduction the EPA had anticipated.

Yet the longer arc of the data tells a genuinely encouraging story. Methane emissions intensity — total oil and gas methane emissions normalized by the combined energy equivalent of oil and natural gas production — declined by approximately 11.1 percent, with an uncertainty range of 9.3 to 13.6 percent, from 2019 to 2024, falling from 10.1 to 9.0 in units of ten-to-the-minus-four teragrams per million barrels of oil equivalent. Most of that decline occurred between 2020 and 2022, averaging 2.2 percent per year, and it happened alongside an 8.5 percent increase in production and a 3.5 percent decline in absolute emissions. The study builds on earlier work that found a 32 percent reduction in emissions intensity between 2010 and 2019, suggesting a sustained, multi-year downward trend that predates the recent federal push.

The researchers propose three explanations for why emissions stayed relatively flat even as production grew. First, earlier federal regulations — the New Source Performance Standards under Subpart OOOOa — instituted systematic leak detection and repair requirements for any facility constructed, modified, or reconstructed after September 18, 2015. These newer facilities are often built with cleaner equipment such as air-driven pneumatics and controlled tanks, yet have very high production volumes, contributing to lower overall intensity. Second, methane measurement technologies have improved dramatically over the last decade, making it easier to detect large emission events, which matter enormously because the biggest leaks account for an outsized share of total emissions. Because these advancements accumulated incrementally, they produced a gradual improvement rather than a precipitous drop in any single year. Third, rapid growth in US liquefied natural gas exports since 2019 has driven a steady increase in the outflow of Permian Basin natural gas to global markets, and the corresponding expansion of regional pipeline capacity has significantly reduced flaring and direct venting of associated gas.

The satellite-based estimates also expose a persistent gap with official accounting. Total contiguous US oil and gas methane emissions from 2019 to 2022 remained, on average, 17 percent higher than the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory, consistent with a decade of independent top-down assessments that have ranged from 12 to 100 percent above the official figures. The study concludes that the inventory captures the right directional trend in intensity but likely underestimates the absolute magnitude of emissions — capturing, as the authors put it, the right trend for the wrong reason.

Perhaps the most provocative finding concerns the states. In the three highest-emitting states with statutory greenhouse gas reduction targets — New Mexico, California, and Colorado — official oil and gas inventories aligned closely with the satellite-derived estimates, with a group average ratio of 1.0. New Mexico showed near-perfect agreement, while Colorado and California remained closely aligned. In the three highest-emitting states without such targets — Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma — inventories were substantially lower than the inverse model estimates, with a group average ratio of 3.7, reaching 5.8 in Oklahoma. States with targets tend to fund methane measurement campaigns and use custom emission factors, whereas states like Texas and Oklahoma often extrapolate emission factors from large, well-regulated facilities to smaller operators, even though low-producing wells have disproportionately high methane intensity.

But accurate accounting did not translate into faster reductions. The inverse model ensemble revealed no substantial difference in oil and gas methane emission trends between states with and without greenhouse gas targets during 2019 to 2024, with overlapping reduction rates. Texas — the largest emitting state, with no target — showed a 14 percent decline in oil and gas methane emissions, from 3.50 teragrams in 2019 to 3.02 teragrams in 2024, likely aided by new pipelines such as the Gulf Coast Express, Whistler Express, and Matterhorn Express that move Permian gas to market instead of flaring it, and by a rising gas-to-oil ratio that makes captured gas more valuable. Meanwhile California, despite its aggressive statutory mandate of a 40 percent reduction by 2030, would need to cut an additional 0.51 teragrams — dwarfing the 0.12 teragram reduction achieved over the preceding decade. The lesson, the authors suggest, is that emissions reduction is a complex process: infrastructure, technology, and economics may matter as much as the laws written on paper, and simply dividing states into those with targets and those without is insufficient for predicting who will actually cut methane fastest.

Subject of Research: Satellite-based estimation of US oil and gas methane emission trends and the impact of federal methane policy from 2019 to 2024

Article Title: U.S. oil and gas methane emission intensity declined 2019–2024 with little indication of federal policy impact

Article References: U.S. oil and gas methane emission intensity declined 2019–2024 with little indication of federal policy impact. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-04039-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-04039-0

Keywords: methane emissions, oil and gas, Inflation Reduction Act, Waste Emissions Charge, satellite observations, inverse modeling, TROPOMI, GOSAT, emissions intensity, EPA regulations, Permian Basin, state climate policy

Medicare, the US government health insurance programme covering around 68 million older and disabled people, was historically barred from negotiating medicine prices directly with manufacturers. That changed with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which authorised negotiation for a small number of costly medicines. The new Most-Favoured-Nation policy goes considerably further, aligning Medicare payments for brand-name drugs with prices in comparable high-income countries, adjusted for purchasing power. Two pricing models underpin the approach: GLOBE, short for Global Benchmark for Efficient Drug Pricing, which covers medicines administered in hospitals and clinics, and GUARD, or Guarding US Medicare Against Rising Drug Costs, which covers medicines purchased at pharmacies. In their initial phase, both models would apply to a randomly selected 25 percent of Medicare beneficiaries over a five-year period.

The study, led by Professor Thomas Hwang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, analysed 195 patented medicines that together account for 87.9 billion dollars of Medicare’s annual prescription drug spending, split between 32.7 billion dollars through GLOBE and 55.2 billion dollars through GUARD. Because manufacturers’ actual rebates and discounts are confidential, the researchers estimated Medicare’s net prices for each medicine and compared them with prices in the 19 reference countries named under the proposed rules. That list includes Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Without any exemptions, the researchers estimate the policy could cut Medicare spending by 5.2 billion dollars, or 16 percent, under GLOBE and 6.4 billion dollars, or 18 percent, under GUARD during its initial phase, which covers about a quarter of the Medicare programme. If the rules were expanded to all Medicare beneficiaries, those savings could rise to an estimated 21 billion dollars under GLOBE and 25.5 billion dollars under GUARD. The analysis found that the lowest international price used as a benchmark was on average 71 percent lower than what Medicare currently pays, with South Korea, Norway and Australia the most common countries referenced for setting prices.

The mechanism behind the projected global effects lies in the arithmetic of the benchmarking rule. Among the 138 medicines with available sales data, the estimated cut to Medicare spending was about 3.8 times bigger than that medicine’s total annual sales in the country used to set its US reference price. For about 73 percent of these medicines, 101 of 138, the estimated cut would exceed the medicine’s entire annual sales in that reference country. In other words, for most products, keeping prices low abroad would cost a manufacturer more in lost Medicare revenue than it earns from selling in that country altogether. The study concludes this creates a strong incentive to raise prices in reference countries or to make prices less visible to Medicare for referencing.

Manufacturers have several plausible tactics available, according to the researchers. They could develop different formulations of existing medicines, convert existing open discounts into confidential rebates that regulators cannot easily compare, or delay launches in reference countries altogether so that no local price exists for Medicare to benchmark against. Such behaviour would directly affect patients and health systems in the 19 reference countries, potentially delaying access to new therapies or increasing what insurers and governments pay for them. Professor Kerstin Vokinger of ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, a study author, warned that policies in the United States may impact access to medicines globally and that policymakers should ensure the availability of important medicines is not delayed as a result.

A second major finding concerns the confidential deals that multiple manufacturers have reportedly struck with the Trump administration. An initial group of 17 pharmaceutical companies, including AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Gilead, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Roche/Genentech and Sanofi, among others, reached separate agreements that reportedly include exemptions from the GLOBE and GUARD rules. These 17 companies account for 131 of the 195 medicines studied, or 67 percent of the sample. If those medicines were excluded from the pricing rules, the researchers estimate the potential savings would shrink by 71 percent, leaving just 3.3 billion dollars, or 28.7 percent, of the original savings, comprising 0.9 billion dollars under GLOBE and 2.4 billion dollars under GUARD.

The picture has shifted further since the analysis was completed. Professor Hwang noted that the latest round of deals announced on 31 August brings the reported tally to 26 companies, and that by an updated estimate, exemptions would push the share of savings lost from 71 percent in the study to nearly 80 percent. Because these agreements are not public, he argued, it is challenging for policymakers and the public to judge whether Most-Favoured-Nation pricing is delivering what was promised. ‘The Trump administration’s Most-Favoured-Nation pricing models have the potential to deliver real savings to the US federal government and taxpayers. But if manufacturers can evade participation in these models by striking side deals, most of those savings might not be realised,’ said Hwang, the study’s lead author.

The geopolitical consequences could be equally significant. ‘Referenced countries, from Germany to Japan to Australia, are facing substantial pressure from the US administration and industry to raise prices and spending on medicines,’ Hwang added. ‘But this is colliding with the reality that other countries have limited budget room to give.’ Study author Professor Aaron Kesselheim, also of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, observed that people living in the United States have long paid more for medicines than virtually anywhere else in the world, and that the Most-Favoured-Nation models were meant to address this gap, but their scope is limited by various exemptions and they will likely face legal challenges.

The authors acknowledge several limitations of the analysis. The estimates rely on modelled Medicare net prices and on international prices drawn from public databases, which may not capture other countries’ confidential discounts. The medicine list, based on historical Medicare data, may not reflect newly approved medicines or future policy changes. The study’s figures are estimates and cannot predict how manufacturers or insurers will actually respond to the new rules, including whether companies will alter their launch or pricing plans in reference countries. The findings are scheduled to be presented at the Nordic Pharmaceutical Forum Summit on 14 September 2026, and the research was funded by Arnold Ventures. Even with those caveats, the study offers one of the first quantitative portraits of how a single US pricing rule, covering a quarter of the world’s largest pharmaceutical market, could ripple through the pricing decisions, launch sequencing and access to medicines that shape health systems on every continent.

Subject of Research: Modelling of US Medicare Most-Favoured-Nation drug pricing and its global pharmaceutical market effects

Article Title: The Lancet: New US Medicare pricing policies could reshape global pharmaceutical markets, potentially driving up prices and delaying medicine launches worldwide, study suggests

Article References: The Lancet: New US Medicare pricing policies could reshape global pharmaceutical markets, potentially driving up prices and delaying medicine launches worldwide, study suggests. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Medicare, Most-Favoured-Nation pricing, drug pricing, pharmaceutical policy, The Lancet, GLOBE, GUARD, reference pricing, medicine launches, health policy, Inflation Reduction Act, global drug markets