Reducing Methane Emissions Is One of the Most Effective Ways to Avoid Climate Disaster
Here's why this super pollutant is so important
If you were to weigh all the greenhouse gasses that humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, methane molecules would only make up 3% of the total. Yet, this super pollutant has been responsible for about 30% of global warming since 1750.
This is one of the most important things to understand about methane: A relatively small amount of the potent greenhouse gas can change Earth’s climate dramatically. Over a 100-year period, one ton of methane warms the planet as much as about 30 tons of carbon dioxide.
As important as methane is to the story of climate change, it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as carbon dioxide. Governments, companies, and individuals often talk about their carbon emissions. When methane and other pollutants are measured, they are often converted into “carbon dioxide equivalents.” Environmentalists measure their carbon footprint.
But according to many climate experts, cutting methane emissions is one of the most effective ways to limit climate change, especially over the next few decades.
“If you want to keep the world from passing the 1.5 degrees C threshold, you’ll want to pay more attention to methane than we have so far,” Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate researcher told Inside Climate News recently.
Vox’s Rebecca Leber put it more bluntly in 2021 when she wrote a story titled “It’s time to freak out about methane emissions.”
Over the next few months, I plan to write a series of stories about methane. But before publishing those stories, I want to provide some context on this important source of pollution.
Atmospheric methane concentrations have more than doubled since 1750
Since the Industrial Revolution, human-activities, like fossil fuel production, have added billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere. As a result, today, there’s more than twice as much methane in the atmosphere as there was in pre-industrial times.
Three sources make up more than 90% of anthropogenic methane emissions: agriculture (40%), fossil fuels (35%), and waste (20%).
Within the agriculture sector, the big driver of methane emissions is meat and dairy production. Globally there are more than a billion cows raised for food production. Each of those cows belches about 220 pounds of methane per year. As a result, cows are one of the largest sources of methane emissions globally.
Oil, natural gas, and coal all make up about a third of the fossil fuel sector’s methane emissions.
When coal and oil companies dig and drill for fossil fuels, they often find methane they aren’t in the business of extracting or selling. Few government’s regulate this source of pollution, so companies often intentionally release it, polluting the air and warming the planet in the process.
Natural gas companies intentionally release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere, too. For example, sometimes the pressure in a drilling rig or pipeline grows to unsafe levels and a company will release gas into the air. But millions of tons of methane also leak unintentionally every year due to faulty equipment.
Waste is the third largest source of methane emissions. About 30% of all food ends up in landfills. When that food decomposes, methane seeps into the atmosphere.
Methane emissions are accelerating
Methane emissions must fall by 45% over the next decade in order to limit warming to 1.5 degree celsius. But right now methane emissions are going in the wrong direction.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), atmospheric methane concentrations grew faster in 2020 and 2021 than any year on record. The cause of the recent acceleration in methane emissions is a hotly debated topic in the scientific community.
Robert Howarth, one of the world’s leading methane researchers, recently published a paper that argues the growth of methane emissions is a result of increased natural gas production, mainly fracking. Intuitively this would make sense. According to Howarth, fracked gas is responsible for two-thirds of all new gas production in the United States and Canada over the last decade.
But many researchers disagree with this hypothesis. Methane from fossil fuels is enriched with carbon-13, a rare heavy isotope of carbon. Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuel emissions have pushed the proportion of methane isotopes with carbon-13 in the atmosphere up. But in 2007, when methane emissions began accelerating, that trend reversed.
According to Xin Lan, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA, this implies that microbial sources of methane—like wetlands, cattle, and landfills—are responsible for the bulk of the recent emissions growth. Lan recently wrote a paper showing that microbes have contributed 85% of added emissions since 2007.
Human-caused warming may be triggering natural emissions
The recent growth in methane emissions has led some scientists to suggest that anthropogenic climate change is causing natural sources of methane, like wetlands and permafrost, to emit more of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
In 2021, researchers published a paper showing that record-levels of rain in East Africa caused wetlands in the region to release huge amounts of methane. As the planet warms, many wetlands are expected to get more rain and release more methane.
Melting permafrost is also causing concern amongst climate scientists. In recent decades, the Arctic has warmed about four times faster than the rest of the planet. In this warmer environment, microbes are feasting on once-frozen organic matter and releasing methane and carbon dioxide in the process.
This dynamic, in which warmer temperatures cause the planet to release more greenhouse gasses, is often referred to as a positive feedback loop. Methane emissions carry especially large risks of triggering or accelerating these feedback loops due to the fact they cause so much warming in the short term.
Cutting methane emissions could reduce global temperatures
Cutting methane emissions wouldn’t just slow warming and reduce the risk of triggering natural feedback cycles. Counterintuitively, it would have a net cooling effect.
While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it breaks up in the atmosphere relatively quickly. This means that cutting methane emissions in half over the next decade could reduce global temperatures by as much as 0.3° Celsius by 2040.
This is especially important because most climate models predict that even if we limit warming to 1.5° or 2° C, average temperatures will “overshoot” those thresholds for a period of decades. Long periods of high temperatures could result in more severe natural disasters, biodiversity losses, and other climate damages.
Reducing methane emissions would reduce the risk of overshoot. According to a recent editorial by the scientific journal Nature, it would also buy us much needed time to reduce other greenhouse gas emissions.
The technology to reduce methane emissions is ready to deploy
Much of the technology needed to reduce methane emissions has already been invented. According to the UN, 85% of the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions could be mitigated using existing technology. Landfill emissions could be cut by 80% using existing tools.
Reducing methane emissions wouldn’t just limit climate change either. Phasing out fossil fuels would improve air quality and save lives. Eating fewer animals and more plants would improve people’s health. Throwing away less food would save people money and reduce food scarcity.
Many of the obstacles to curbing methane emissions are less about technological moonshots or expensive solutions and more about political power. The largest methane emitters—companies like ExxonMobil, Cargill, and Waste Management—spend millions every year buying political influence and fighting regulations.
In recent years, more oil and gas companies have begun to talk publicly about the importance of reducing methane emissions. But when Democrats proposed a methane fee on fossil fuel producers as a part of their historic climate bill last year, the American Petroleum Institute (API), which represents many of the largest fossil fuel companies, opposed the law.
Waste Management, Republic Services, and other landfill operators spent much of the last 8 years trying to slow down efforts to curb methane emissions.
In 2021, more than 100 nations agreed to cut methane emissions at COP 26. But due to intense lobbying by beef companies, the text of the pledge only made concrete demands of the energy and waste sectors; there was no mention of the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions: agriculture.
Still there are signs of progress. The global methane pledge, for all its problems, is already encouraging countries, like the United States and Canada, to pass methane regulations in the oil and gas sector. In 2021, the EPA implemented a rule to curb landfill emissions.
And despite the fossil fuel industry’s resistance, Democrats succeeded at getting a methane fee into their climate bill last year. It was the first time the federal government ever put a price on a greenhouse gas.
Want to support my methane reporting?
Over the next couple months, I plan to write a series of stories about methane. Like my past series on clean energy opposition, I plan to spend hundreds of hours reading through public documents, interviewing experts, and distilling everything down into engaging stories. I also plan to make a series of videos on the topic of methane for my YouTube channel.
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