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Getting methane under control is easy in relation to other greenhouse gas reducing measures.
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You can be optimistic when you work on methane.
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We know what needs to be done.
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Like really, it's not a secret, and it's not that complicated, and it's actually extremely cost-efficient.
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Because we haven't been paying attention to it, and a lot of it's quite easy.
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And that from a climate perspective is really good news because you have this issue that is huge, not very well known, and easy to fix.
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Welcome to Methane, a podcast about the world's second most important greenhouse gas, and if the scientists and campaigners are right, the best chance we have to actually cut global warming.
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The show is brought to you by the 2Celsius Association, and I'm your host, Francesca Fazy.
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Let's start with what you may know already.
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You probably already know that methane is a greenhouse gas, and it is a really powerful one.
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It's only a trace gas, about 200 times less common than carbon dioxide, for example, and it makes up less than a ten thousandth of the atmosphere's overall volume.
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But like carbon dioxide, its levels are climbing.
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Methane concentrations in the atmosphere today are about three times higher than they were before the industrial age.
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And as it turns out, this growing backlog of methane, small though it may be, has been packing quite the climate punch.
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So methane is the second most important greenhouse gas.
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That's Kim O'Dowd.
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She's a campaigner focused almost exclusively on methane for an organization called the Environmental Investigation Agency.
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I just want to make sure that you heard Kim right.
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A third of all global warming experienced to date.
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That number varies depending who you talk to.
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Plenty say it's even more than that.
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Here's John Kerry, for example, the US envoy for climate.
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Amazingly, when I was in Paris, I remember well, there was not any interest in a broad discussion about methane.
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And methane was hardly mentioned, ironically, amazingly, because methane is responsible for 50% of the warming of the planet.
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Some estimates put it more conservatively, at around 25%.
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Either way, though, over a quarter of the world's warming caused by something that is not carbon dioxide and apparently a lot easier to deal with.
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On top of being uh just super pollutant, the good news is that it's also been identified as the easy solution uh to solve the climate situation, particularly in the energy sector, because most measures to mitigate methane in the oil and gas sector are very cost effective and also very well known by the industry already.
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So it's kind of considered as the low-hanging fruit to reach our goal of reducing war like limiting global warming to 1.5.
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For a long time, we didn't pay that much attention to methane, especially because its lifetime in the atmosphere is tiny.
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Between 10 and 15 years, compared to centuries for carbon dioxide, and for a good proportion of it, millennia.
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But it's now being replaced faster than it's being cleared.
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And that is essentially making global warming speed up.
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One way to think about it is that methane determines how quickly the planet warms, and CO2 determines what temperature we end up with.
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And since we have now both problems, because essentially we started mitigating climate change much, much too late, we both need to deal with methane in order to slow down the warming a little bit, and with CO2.
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That is Dr.
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Roland Coopers.
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He is one of the architects behind the United Nations International Methane Emissions Observatory, and is someone you'll be hearing from a lot on this podcast.
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Why suddenly does the world care about methane?
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Why didn't we care about it before?
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Yeah, no, it's a very good question.
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Uh there was uh the focus was on CO2, because for a century we've known that, or more than a century, we've we've almost a century and a half, we've known that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere causes warming.
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And so the focus was, you know, let's reuse that.
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Um the other reason was that we've used something like the global warming potential over a hundred years as a standard in the IPCC and all of the policy recommendations, which means you look at the amount of warming that a gas causes over a century.
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The problem with that is when you look at these gases that don't linger in the atmosphere, they look trivial because they disappear in 10 or 15 years.
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And over a hundred years, you essentially average over a period in which they provide a lot of warming, and then a period when they're not there.
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And so one of the things that the IPCC has noted is if you look at the global warming potential over 20
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years, then for example, methane is 84 times CO2.
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And so the management tools that we're using actually caused us to underestimate or cause the you know, the global climate effort to underestimate methane.
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Now that being said, you know, it appeared sort of in the in the newspaper headlines over the past couple of years with the global methane pledge, etc.
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But in the you know, the climate community, I mean the UNEP, and as I mentioned, the Environmental Defense Fund, et cetera, it's been more than a decade that there's been lots of scientific work, etc.
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And it's due to that work that it emerges onto the public stage.
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And so there's there's always a lot of preparation before it becomes a public issue.
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So I guess it's no surprise then that global leaders desperate for ways to start making inroads towards our net zero goals are starting to wake up to the promise of tackling methane emissions.
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And at the UN COP conference in Glasgow in 2021, the world's first global initiative on methane was announced.
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Here's Kimmo Dowd again from the Environmental Investigation Agency.
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If you can just give us a brief snapshot of what the Global Methane Pledge is and why was it important.
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Sure.
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So the Global Methane Pledge was launched at COP26 at Glasgow by the EU and the US.
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It's an initiative to globally reduce uh methane emission by 30% by 2030.
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It was a big moment uh when it was launched because this was the first international initiative on methane.
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And it kind of put methane forward as an important thing that countries started needed to start looking into.
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A 30% reduction in methane by 2030.
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If we can meet that, the International Energy Agency says, it would have the same effect on climate change as getting the entire world's transport sector to net zero.
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It's only a pledge, but in the last two years, more countries and governments are getting on board.
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What started as 111 signatories is now up to 155.
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One after the other.
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Countries are announcing plans to tackle their own methane emissions.
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We have the US that's currently developing their methane regulation, Canada as well.
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We have Nigeria who has one now, Mexico.
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There's definitely, yeah, there's momentum.
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The most advanced of these plans was passed at the European Union in November last year.
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After over two years of intense negotiations with industry, governments, lobbyists, and environmentalists, the EU's first and the world's most comprehensive, regulation on methane emissions was enacted.
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Jutta Paulus is a member of the European Parliament, and she was one of the co-rapporteurs on the parliamentary position paper on that regulation.
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So, first of all, it's of course about monitoring and reporting and verifying emissions, which is very important as we have learned from the International Energy Agency that all states worldwide are basically underreporting their methane emissions.
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And secondly, it's of course also about reducing emissions because we should not stop at just accounting.
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We have to do something about this second most important climate force.
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So, why a podcast about methane?
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To answer that, I need to introduce you to my colleague.
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I suppose what I'm trying to do is make the comparison while focusing on CO2, any payback, any reward for mitigation measures that we put in place now, we are only likely to see the actual results of those changes quite a long way in the future, right?
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Contrast that with methane.
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When it comes to CO2, it's it's all clear in the sense that the complexity of it is mind-blowing because we're gonna have to change literally everything that we are doing, you know.
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Right.
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From heating up our apartments to to mobility or whatever, you know.
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But when it comes to methane, it's a quick and an immediate action that we can take.
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Raul Kazan is the founder and director of the Two Celsius Association, an environmental NGO registered in Bucharest in Romania, which is where he's originally from.
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And he is also the brains behind this podcast.
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You came up with this idea for this podcast about methane.
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What do you want people to get from listening to it?
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Well, when I came with the idea was uh essentially the um methane regulation in Brussels were in deep institutional discussions.
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Uh now that it kind of passed, the bigger problems uh pop up and these are the implementation in each member state.
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Why I want to make this European approach from my personal Romanian perspective is that Romania is a very singular case at European level because it's a quite a significant producer and uh owner of uh gas reserves.
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And why do you care?
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Why do I care?
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Well, why do you care and why should anybody else care?
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We know scientifically that methane is the gas that produces I mean is the is the the most powerful greenhouse gas, right?
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We found it to Celsius uh 14 years ago.
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And ever since methane wasn't really tackled in in any sort of industry or agriculture or or or waste management or whatever, you know.
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It just wasn't tackled seriously.
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And right now we started to actually see some action, some movement.
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Of course, at UN level, and we're gonna see further in the podcast.
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I know about that.
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And also at European level, obviously.
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So basically it's something that that lags behind a couple of decades.
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And you want people to understand it.
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Well, yes, this very podcast is part of our communications strategy.
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It it was it was my idea to have a podcast and to have you on it.
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Uh because I think since podcasts are so popular, that would be the the easier way to go through.
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I we didn't want to have this social media strategy because social media is here and then puff it goes away.
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Tomorrow nobody knows about it.
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So the podcast is is audio.
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We exchanged some smart ideas with the smartest people in uh you know methane mitigation today.
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Um and this is gonna last for a longer time, at least.
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That's lovely.
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Thank you very much.
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Methane is not an either-or, campaigners are saying.
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Carbon dioxide is still the ultimate climate challenge.
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But what methane is is a new and so far fairly untested lever that has the potential to actually move the dial on climate change within our lifetimes.
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Not in one or two or three hundred years' time, but now, in the next ten or twenty.
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And while you might think that tinkering around with the emissions of something that makes up less than a ten thousandth of the atmosphere doesn't seem that worthwhile.
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Getting rid of the methane emissions that we can and we know how to do will shave about a quarter of a degree warming off of the planet.
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And that's is absolutely worth doing and is completely doable.
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Roland Cooper's again from Imeo, the International Methane Emissions Observatory.
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Which, uh as you started the interview with, is you know, why didn't we pay more attention to this?
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The flip side of that argument is it's a massive opportunity.
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Because we haven't been paying attention to it, and a lot of it's quite easy.
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And I think that from a climate perspective is really good news because you have this issue that is huge, not very well known, and easy to fix.
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You know, instead of complaining about it, we should just get on with it and actually fix this one because it's fixable.
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That word opportunity is something that continues to come up when you speak to people working in the methane world.
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Which, let's be honest, from a climate perspective, is a little unusual.
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You can be optimistic when you work on methane.
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We know what needs to be done.
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Like really it's not a secret, and it's not that complicated, and it's actually extremely cost efficient.
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So that means that you can actually cut methane by a lot without being really an issue.
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And that is, I think, it's rare when we talk about climate topics that everyone kind of know what's too needs to well, we know what needs to be done for everything, but here it's cost effective, it's it can be done quickly, and we can get like real wins easily.
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You can easily be di a bit depressed when you work on climate.
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And I think I see hope in my thing, I guess.
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But there are also some less optimistic warnings about why methane needs to be taken more seriously now.
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Human emissions may be bad enough, but the Earth has its own complex cycle of methane.
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The major concern when it comes to natural methane emissions has always been the threat from the thawing of frozen permafrost soils in the Arctic.
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But recent research has suggested that methane emissions from wetlands are more of an immediate threat, and scientists have seen that they are already driving a steep rise in the growth of atmospheric methane.
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We'll speak about this in a bit more detail further on too, including to scientists like Ben Poulter from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the US.
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The mitigation of methane from wetlands is uh incredibly complicated, sort of given the fact that uh wetlands provide us with all sorts of uh important benefits for biodiversity and for society.
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And so we obviously don't want to uh start destroying wetlands uh to drain them and to prevent them from producing methane.
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Uh there's there are discussions about changing the chemical
state of the soil so that the microbes uh don't produce as much methane or or other trace gases, but I think that there's probably other sorts of unintended consequences that could come from that sort of uh manipulation.
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So I think looking at methane capture and and methane mitigation options is is, I think, a really important part of the portfolio of society in aiming to stay below 1.5 degrees if we haven't exceeded it already, uh, and definitely two degrees warming.
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Another implication of understanding the methane problem is its potential impact on the direction we choose for the future of our own energy systems.
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As we'll hear in the next episode, a huge source of methane emissions is leaks from the oil and natural gas industries.
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But natural gas is currently enjoying a major moment in the sun as the supposedly clean fossil fuel that will enable our transition from an energy system based on coal and oil to a cleaner one based on renewables.
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But a few methane leaks and any gains from investing in gas from a climate perspective are wiped out.
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If you have a 0.2 leakage intensity on um on your on your pipeline, for example, then gas has the same climate impact than coal.
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So you imagine on a on what it can do if you have a lot of leakages on a pipeline, for example.
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Gas literally becomes worse than coal.
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You can't say that this is a transition fuel if it's worse than the thing it was supposed to transition from.
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There are undisputed benefits of uh of gas when it comes to, as I said, local air pollutants.
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Because if you use natural gas that comes with um uh uh small amounts of NOX, uh negligible amounts of SOX, right?
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Like NOx and SOCs, it's less, right?
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Almost no particulate matter whatsoever.
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All these are uh essential contributors to to smog and to poor air quality, especially in cities, right?
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However, it's it's a fossil fuel, and we gotta point to the mounting concerns about fugitive methane emissions.
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Without managing methane leaks, we face the possibility of investing huge sums in switching from coal to gas, only to get no climate benefit.
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Deborah Gordon is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in the States.
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She was the lead author on the study that established that 0.2 gas leakage threshold, which Kim referred to a few moments ago.
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For a long time it's been considered that natural gas is a bridge fuel, and that this 19th-century fuel of coal, which really started up in the 1800s, is so outmoded and out of date and so dirty that we should do anything in our power to get off of coal, which I very much agree with.
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The question is, what should we replace it with?
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And the answer is renewables.
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The question about natural gas being a substitute here has everything to do with its methane leakage.
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We'll speak to her about that study in more detail.
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And to energy insiders like Jonathan Stern, a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies in the UK.
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Let's imagine a world where we do embrace the idea of natural gas as the kind of sort of green fossil fuel, and we say, yes, we're going to phase out coal.
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Looking at the United States as an example, a huge shift from coal to gas as a as a fuel.
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Can you spell out for people the climate consequences of not getting methane emissions under control in that scenario?
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Not specifically, but I think the easiest way to say this is getting methane under control is easy in relation to other greenhouse gas reducing measures.
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This can make a big and immediate contribution to reducing overall gas overall greenhouse gas emissions.
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It's not expensive and it's not technically difficult.
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So if we can't do that, if companies can't do that, and if governments can't require companies to do that, it's hard to see that we're going to be able to do much else.
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So now you know that the world has a bit of a meth problem and that getting it under control could make a massive difference to the temperature rises we're experiencing now, quickly, cheaply, and relatively easily.
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But where is all this methane actually coming from?
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How can something that seems to be a big deal for the oil and gas industry also be something that we know is kind of relative to cows barting and burping?
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That's next.