Hard on the heels of devastating floods in Pakistan and Puerto Rico, world leaders are gathering for Climate Week, at least a third of which ought to be focused on methane — because that’s how much of climate change methane is driving, and it stands to drive even more of it in the future, unless we take action now.
Methane is a super climate pollutant, at least 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. It accounts for a third of modern global warming. Total methane emissions from all sources (manmade as well as natural) are growing faster than carbon dioxide. Atmospheric methane levels are higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years (the period for which we have ice core data) and rising fast.
We’re currently in a methane emergency, and on the threshold of something worse. We now know that the Arctic is warming faster than previously thought — four times faster than the rest of the planet. This increases the likelihood of a feedback loop where higher temperatures in the Arctic cause faster thawing of sea ice, which loses its albedo, so it absorbs rather than reflects heat, raising temperatures, leading to more methane release from permafrost, raising temperatures, which releases more methane, and so on.
It’s one of the key tipping points past which we may not be able to avoid catastrophic climate change.
A new study in the journal Science shows that such tipping points are nearer than previously thought. In fact, it finds that Arctic permafrost may permanently thaw even if warming stays between 1.1°C, which is where it is now, and 1.5°C, which is the Paris agreement goal. Beyond 1.5°C of warming, losing the permafrost becomes “likely,” and we’re currently on track for 2.7°C of warming in this century. In the “likely” event the permafrost thaws, microbes would break it down and could release all its methane and CO2. If that happens, the emissions would be equivalent to 51 times all greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.
Meanwhile, the focus of the upcoming COP27 climate negotiations in Egypt is on how rich countries and big climate polluters need to make reparations for climate change “loss and damage” around the world. We’re certainly witnessing that loss and damage today. While climate disaster zones like Pakistan need and deserve international aid to recover, it’s not as if the climate losses and damages are going to stop; they’re going to keep happening and get worse.
In addition to climate reparations, the developed world also needs to put resources into climate restoration, so loss and damage don’t keep compounding beyond all possible compensation. Methane should be a primary focus of that effort. Given its outsized warming effect and its skyrocketing accumulation in the atmosphere, it’s the most powerful lever we have for lowering global temperatures and preventing some of the worst climate impacts.
Combining aggressive methane emissions reduction with methane removal has the potential to cut current atmospheric methane concentrations by more than half, restoring methane to preindustrial levels. That could reduce the rise in average global temperatures by 0.6 degrees C.
To achieve this, we need to do two things: aggressively cut methane emissions however and wherever we can and — at the same time — redress those methane emissions that we can’t stop. There are promising methane removal technologies under development that use various catalysts and adsorbent materials like zeolites to trap and oxidize emitted methane, converting it to carbon dioxide and water vapor, neutralizing most of its warming effect without needing to sequester it. This can be done both near major emissions sources like gas wells or cattle barns, and in the atmosphere.
Scaling methane removal is on the critical path to lowering global temperatures, and might also give us a way to mitigate possible large methane releases from thawing permafrost and other natural sources. And since methane is a precursor of ozone, methane removal would also help reduce ozone and its negative impacts on crop yields and human health.
There is growing bipartisan support in Washington for greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR), including $1 billion in funding in the new bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, and billions more in other pending bills. In addition to programs to monitor and cut methane emissions, the Inflation Reduction Act funds programs to “mitigate legacy air pollution from petroleum and natural gas systems.” That “legacy pollution” is largely methane that has been emitted and could be removed from the atmosphere.
In view of the methane emergency, federal GGR funding can and should be proportionally applied to R&D for methane removal as well as for carbon dioxide removal. Leading scientists, policy experts and advocates have called on governments to start funding methane removal R&D now, and advocates have asked Congress to pass legislation supporting GGR, explicitly including methane removal.
At the Department of Energy’s Carbon Negative Shot Summit this summer, Arun Majumdar, dean of Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability and chair of the advisory board to DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm, said, “[It’s] not just CO2… let’s not forget methane. If you don’t [remove both CO2 and methane from the atmosphere] at the tens of gigatons scale per year, we will be in trouble for meeting the Paris Agreement. That is well established now.”
Those suffering devastating climate impacts need and deserve compensation. In addition to compensating them, we need to act now to prevent worse impacts.
Methane mitigation and removal aren’t substitutes for decarbonization and carbon dioxide removal — we need all of them. But reducing atmospheric methane levels may be the most effective route to limiting global warming and avoiding much worse loss and damage in this century. That makes prioritizing it a moral as well as a scientific imperative.
Daphne Wysham is the CEO of the NGO Methane Action.