With a new piece in The Nation, environmental leader Bill McKibben upends widely held assumptions not just about President Barack Obama’s climate legacy, but about the so-called “natural gas revolution” that was once considered a “savior” in the fight against global warming.

The author and 350.org co-founder points to “an explosive paper” published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, in which Harvard researchers “concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities.”

“Fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors.”
—Bill McKibben

As Common Dreams reported at the time, the study showed that methane emissions in the U.S. rose more than 30 percent over the 2002–2014 period, and that increase could account for 30–60 percent of the global growth of atmospheric methane seen in the past decade.

This data, McKibben told Common Dreams by phone on Wednesday, “changes, in profound ways, our own conception about what we’ve being doing about climate change in the U.S.—and the answer is, not much.”

“Far from being a bridge to the future,” he said, “natural gas turns out to have been a costly detour.”

The leaks exposed by the Harvard researchers, he writes at The Nation,

Furthermore, he continues, recently announced efforts to rein in such leaks fail to address “the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking.”

In addition to polluting groundwater and undercutting the market for renewables—two of the “nasty side effects” he outlines in his piece—fracking “wipes out as much as three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming,” McKibben writes.