There is some good news coming out of the COP26 climate conference. More than 100 nations have pledged to cut global methane emissions by 30 percent or more between now and 2030 in an effort to quickly and significantly curb global warming.
The announcement marked the official launch of the U.S.-European Union-led Global Methane Pledge as the Biden administration took a key step on Tuesday toward meeting its part of the pledge with the draft of stringent new methane regulations for the oil and gas industry released by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.
If, and this is a really big if, but if the whole world worked to achieve that goal, temperatures in the next few decades would rise 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) less than they would otherwise – and this could potentially be a huge success by keeping global warming levels below 1.5°C (2.7°F).
Cutting methane emissions will “not just address future climate change but … curb the climate change that’s happening right now,” says Ilissa Ocko, a methane expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, according to National Geographic.
“This is huge,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said of the global initiative. “If we fulfill this pledge over the next 10 years the impact is [the same as] switching … all the cars of the world, all the trucks of the world, all the planes of the world [and] all the ships of the world to zero-emission technologies; [the] entire transportation sector.”
The United States and the European Union, the world’s third and sixth largest methane emitters, respectively, announced the pledge in September. Since that time, they have added additional supporters, including Canada, Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria, among others. This will account for over 40 percent of the potent planet’s greenhouse gas emitters, according to EPA emissions estimates.
However, there are several major emitters that have not joined in the methane pledge, including Chine, India, and Russia. These three countries alone account for over 35 percent of methane emissions.
What is methane and why is it deadly?
Methane is a hydrocarbon and the primary component of natural gas. It is also the second leading driver of climate change, responsible for contributing 0.5 degrees of the 1.1 degrees of human-induced warming since pre-industrial times, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
On a pound-for-pound basis, methane is an 81 times more potent greenhouse gas over the near term than carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. Because of the relatively short time the gas remains in the atmosphere, it is believed that reducing methane emissions is the best solution to curbing global warming.
Methane gas is emitted into the atmosphere through landfills, and oil and natural gas wells where surplus methane is often burned at wellheads or vented into the atmosphere. Other ways that methane is emitted into the atmosphere include agricultural activities, coal mining, wastewater activities, and various industrial processes.
If the emissions reductions outlined in the pledge are achieved, 0.2 degrees of additional warming will be avoided by 2050 – while any cuts made to carbon dioxide today would not yield any climate benefits until after 2050.
If fulfilled, the Global Methane Pledge would “be enough to bend the curve from having increasing emissions…to actually starting to decrease, which is a really important shift,” says Kathleen Mar, an atmospheric chemist at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany.
