Slashing Methane Emissions Could Be Crucial For Fighting Climate Change, UN Report Warns

The New York Times reports:
A major United Nations report will declare that slashing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, is far more vital than previously thought... It also says that — unless there is significant deployment of unproven technologies capable of pulling greenhouse gases out of the air — expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement...

The reason methane would be particularly valuable in the short-term fight against climate change: While methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, it is also relatively short-lived, lasting just a decade or so in the atmosphere before breaking down. That means cutting new methane emissions today, and starting to reduce methane concentrations in the atmosphere, could more quickly help the world meet its midcentury targets for fighting global warming. By contrast, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, lasts for hundreds of years in the atmosphere... While cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions will remain urgent, 'it's going to be next to impossible to remove enough carbon dioxide to get any real benefits for the climate in the first half of the century,' said Drew Shindell, the study's lead author and a professor of earth science at Duke University. 'But if we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we'll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades,' he said...

Carbon dioxide is the biggest driver of climate change, but methane is more potent in the shorter term, warming the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide does over a 20-year period. That's bad news, but it also means that cutting methane emissions may be one of the most effective ways to immediately slow rising global temperatures... Unlike carbon dioxide or most other air pollution, methane isn't released by burning fossil fuels, but comes from leaks and other releases from oil and gas infrastructure, among other sources... Fixing those leaks in theory should pay for themselves by saving money, because capturing the gas means companies capture more product. That potential makes plugging leaks from oil and gas infrastructure the most effective and cheapest way to slow emissions, the U.N. report says...

Rolling back methane emissions would prevent more than 250,000 premature deaths, and more than 750,000 asthma-related hospital visits, each year from 2030 onward, the report finds. The lower emissions would also prevent more than 70 billion hours of lost labor from extreme heat and more than 25 million tons of crop losses a year.

One professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University tells the Times we've overestimated agriculture's role in methane while underestimating the fuel industry's role, while another researcher found that methane-reduction efforts in the top-polluting industries could slow global warming by 30 percent.

'Over all, a concerted effort to reduce methane from the fossil fuel, waste and agricultural sectors could slash methane emissions by as much as 45 percent by 2030, helping to avoid nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius of global warming as early as the 2040s, the report says.'

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