Even before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the oil industry, America was full of defunct oil wells. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of holes in the ground — no one knows how many there really are — abandoned by their former overseers when oil stopped gushing to the surface or when those overseers went broke. The holes leak methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that’s 86 times better at heating up the planet than CO2 in the short term, as well as other pollutants. In a world changed by the coronavirus, with bankruptcies among oil and gas producers rising, the problem is expected to get worse . Earlier this week, a report from Resources for the Future , a nonprofit research institution, and Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy asked whether there might be a joint solution to the economic crisis wrought by […]