In independent studies, two Princeton University research teams recently identified surprisingly large sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being leaked into the atmosphere. Pound for pound, methane causes a far greater warming effect in the atmosphere than does carbon dioxide — 86-fold more heating over 20 years, and 35-fold more over the course of a century.

In one study, a team headed by Mark Zondlo, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, looked at an area around western Pennsylvania rich with natural gas wells and found that a small number of these wells are “superemitters” of methane. The other study came from the research group…