While the EPA is not yet limiting emissions from these sectors, the agency said today in a statement that the data reported by the industry will “help identify cost effective ways to minimize the loss of methane.”

Starting Jan. 1, 2011, all oil and natural gas facilities that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year must report those emissions to the EPA.

The industry releases a significant amount of greenhouse gases. Some background on the industry’s emissions, via EPA:

The petroleum and natural gas industries emit methane, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and are one of the largest human related sources of methane in the United States.  Annual methane emissions from intentional venting and equipment leaks from these industries are comparable to annual emissions from more than 40 million passenger cars.

The rule impacts a number of segments of the oil and gas industry, including offshore and onshore oil and gas production, natural gas storage and oil and gas pipelines. According to the EPA, it will cost the industry an estimated $62 million in the first year to comply with the rule and an additional $19 million for every year after that. That breaks down to about $16,000 per facility for the first year and $7,000 for the following years.

Much of that is our own fault. In the ever-quickening race to scoop others, the information or the quote often trumps the insistence on identifying its source. In other words, voices in the White House and Congress are often allowed to remain anonymous because reporters decreasingly push them to go on the record. But there also seem to be more and more instances of government officials demanding anonymity as a blanket policy, even in cases when the information being relayed isn’t at all sensitive or controversial.

Yesterday’s press call on the EPA’s new mountaintop mining guidelines offers an illustrative case.

Featured in that conversation was EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who spoke 100 percent on the record. But reporters were also told at the outset that other agency experts were also on hand, and that they were to be cited only as “senior EPA officials.”

“Your participation in this call means that you’ve agreed to these terms,” an EPA spokeswoman said.

But those terms didn’t sit so well with Ken Ward Jr., the long-time coal industry reporter at The Charleston Gazette, who asked pointedly, “Why won’t you allow your staff to also speak on the record?”

The response from EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy won’t do much to excite those who thought the Obama administration would usher in a new era of White House transparency after eight years of reticence and veiled sourcing under the Bush administration.

“We have very little precious time with the administrator today,” Andy said, “and we’re going to continue having her answer questions about mountaintop mining, on the record.”

Which, of course, acted only to reintroduce the question.

Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents related to Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers’s relationship — most notably, unearthing the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire and Obama’s review of Ayers’s book on the juvenile court system.

I don’t know many conservatives who’d argue, in hindsight, that more citizen journalism about Bill Ayers (whose Weather Underground days were so mysterious that you can Netflix an Oscar-nominated documentary about them) was what the Right needed in 2008. But Malkin reminded me of Zombie’s other influential work: a lengthy essay titled “The Left’s Big Blunder,” about how the polls were biased, people were lying about their support for Obama, and the media was complicit. He used (among other examples) the test case of a German performing horse, Clever Hans.

Much of the media analysis, and even the strategies of the campaigns themselves, is based on the ongoing poll results indicating voter preferences state-by-state and nationwide. But I suspect that we are observing the Clever Hans Effect on a massive scale, and that the polls are in fact unreliable. Worse than “unreliable,” actually: they are inaccurate because to some degree they reflect not the honest feelings of the respondents but rather what the pollers want to hear. Since, as discussed above, most poll-questioners are likely to be Obama supporters, and since the Clever Hans Effect tells us that they likely slant their questions and/or provide subtle clues as to what the “correct” answer is whether or not they’re trying to be neutral and fair, the end result is that the poll results end up being tilted in favor of Obama. Pundits and journalists and campign directors are deriving supposed “information” from the poll results, and basing their actions on them — even though the polls merely reflect (to a certain degree) what the pollsters wanted to hear.

Barack Obama won the presidency by a 7.2 percent margin in the national vote and a 365-173 margin in the electoral college, picking off states like Indiana and North Carolina from the Republicans. Zombie updated his essay.

The effects described in this essay very likely did happen as I postulated, but not to a large enough extent to overcome Obama’s actual strength and McCain’s actual weakness. In other words, approximately 3% of people responding to polls did lie and say they supported Obama when in fact they did not (a ~9.5% predicted victory on average vs. a 6.5% actual victory).* It’s just that McCain was not close enough in real support for the Hans/Asch/Bradley Effect to make the difference.

This is a… let’s call it an innovative understanding of statistics. According to Michelle Malkin, we can call it “reporting.”

*Obama’s margin grew after this, after all West Coast votes were counted.