To avert climate disaster, we need firm commitments on cutting methane at COP28

The key goal of the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) negotiations beginning in Dubai this week must be to limit fast-rising temperatures, to prevent runaway warming that could destabilize the global climate system and inflict devastating floods, heat waves, fires and other disastrous impacts on billions of people around the globe. While a number of other outcomes are important in Dubai, they must be subsidiary to the crucial test of slowing near-term global temperature rises and preventing climate calamity. 

In practice, this means COP28 must gain agreements for deep cuts in methane emissions — limiting methane will reduce near-term temperatures far more than any other action. Deep reductions in methane can limit .3 degrees Celsius of temperature rise by 2050, preventing three times more warming by mid-century than cutting carbon dioxide alone. Immediate methane cuts from the fossil fuel industry could also avoid nearly 1 million premature deaths by 2050. While cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are crucial for long-term climate protection, such decarbonization will only avoid 0.1 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050.  

Most importantly, leading scientists now find limiting warming over the next two decades is crucial to preventing tipping points in natural systems like Arctic Sea, the Amazon’s carbon cycle, permafrost, the Gulf Stream, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and many others. In essence, many of these natural systems are currently inhibiting temperatures increases, but once triggered by further warming they can become net warming contributors, making it tremendously difficult to reverse a steady march of devastatingly higher global temperatures.  

For all these reasons, major nations are finally recognizing the centrality of methane action to climate stability and the protection of their own populations. The U.S. and COP28 host the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have announced a first ever Methane Summit, on Dec. 2 in Dubai.  

Major methane reduction announcements at the summit should be the beginning of a dynamic process that leads toward a mandatory Global Methane Treaty, beginning with methane from fossil fuels and involving actions by all nations to prevent temperatures and the climate from spinning out of control. 

The Biden administration is poised to announce new rules at the summit that clamp down on methane from the U.S. oil and gas sector, including leaky pipelines, energy production on public and private lands, and infrastructure related to processing, transporting and storing natural gas. U.S. offshore petroleum production facilities and natural gas export facilities, not covered by forthcoming methane rules, may have also to pay for excessive methane leaks in the next few years. Meanwhile, the U.S. is creating important guidelines to distinguish low methane producers and exporters from high-emitting competitors so consumers and importers can choose cleaner fuels.  

The UAE’s Sultan el-Jaber has repeatedly claimed that nationally owned oil and gas giants — which together emit three-quarters of all methane from the world’s oil and gas industry — will commit to deep methane reductions from their oil and gas production, but has provided no proof or details. Other climate advocates have been circulating a proposed Global Decarbonization Alliance in which nationally owned and other companies would pledge to “near-zero” emissions of methane and “aim” to reduce routine methane flaring of by 2030; again there is no list of companies willing to commit. 

It is now time for Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, the UAE’s ADNOC, and more than a dozen other nationally owned oil companies to use the Methane Summit to make firm commitments to near-zero methane leakage from their oil and gas production by the end of this decade. Such commitments must also contain provisions that make them transparent, verifiable and subject to oversight — something the often secretive petro-states have long avoided.  

It’s important to recognize that the UAE’s hosting of the conference, and climate actions by major Islamic countries with large oil and gas operations, should be part of a broader effort by all sides to bring about better relations between the Islamic nations and the rest of the world. 

Many other nations must also take additional actions. This is especially true of China, Russia and India, the world’s three largest methane emitters, none of whom have joined the Global Methane Pledge backed by 150 nations to reduce total methane emissions from all sources (not just fossil fuels) by 30 percent by the end of this decade.   

China, the world’s largest methane emitter, has been grossly derelict. Beijing directly promised world leaders it would put forward a methane mitigation plan at COP26 in Glasgow but has produced nothing but empty promises for two years. This year China cynically released a methane proposal that merely involves additional monitoring, despite the fact that Chinese coal mines alone emit more than 20 percent of all methane emissions from all fossil fuels annually, producing a unique double whammy of massive carbon and methane emissions. Even after recent meetings with the U.S. produced some advances on other topics, China has merely pledged to include methane in future actions, not actually making any detailed commitment to cuts. Likewise, Russia and India have refused to make any commitments to limit their massive methane emissions. 

There has been modest progress on methane. Some U.S. gas companies and other major exporting nations, including Qatar, have committed to reaching zero methane emissions this decade. The European Union will begin promulgating regulations that would set up low methane standards for imported gas. The trend is clear — low-to-zero methane gas will benefit from a market premium, being more valuable and accepted by consumers and importers. 

But one key issue that must be resolved involves establishing definitive methane measurements and accountancy globally. Right now, false methane emissions numbers are being used as a dodge by countries like Russia and some companies and interest groups. It’s time for the International Energy Agency and U.S. Energy Information Agency to commit to producing definitive methane numbers, aided by new satellite detection technologies, so that bad actors can be isolated and high methane-leaking oil and gas can be rejected by importers. 

In the run-up to COP28, a half-dozen new major scientific studies have indicated the global average temperatures are headed toward well over 2 degrees Celsius, and even 3 degrees Celsius, that will bring about widespread climate calamity and tipping points in natural systems.  Aggressive reductions in methane emissions can help limit temperatures, and must be a key outcome of COP28, setting the stage for a mandatory Global Methane Treaty in the next few years. If heads of states and ministers from leading nations at Dubai don’t act, they will be consigning their own people, and the rest of the world, to a nightmare of climate catastrophe.   

Paul Bledsoe is professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy in Washington. He served as a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, Interior Department, and the White House Climate Change Task Force under former President Bill Clinton.