The Brake
There is ample scientific and technical evidence that:
Yet so far, policymakers have failed to prioritize methane action, and even the climate movement has been slow to insist on it. It’s time to change that. Our job is to take concerted action together – governments, international organizations, industry, and NGOs – to pull the methane emergency brake.
The Global Methane Assessment compiled by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the United Nations identifies “available targeted measures” that could cut human-caused emissions by up to 45% in this decade, avoiding nearly 0.3 degrees of additional warming by the 2040s. Other experts believe we can find ways to cut deeper while also deploying emerging methane eradication technologies, so as to restore atmospheric methane to preindustrial levels by mid-century, thereby avoiding 0.5°C of warming.
But whether it’s 0.3°C or 0.5°C, we need to go after this reduction in near-term warming aggressively now. There is no lack of practical steps we can take toward accomplishing it, and the options aren’t limited to the “low hanging fruit” of plugging methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure, though that’s critically important. Additional measures we should get started on now that will also yield large methane reductions include:
Adopting a broad agenda for such methane actions and insisting on implementing it starting now is the most powerful thing the climate movement can do to mitigate global heating and avert climate tipping points in the next few decades.
Ditto for governments and international organizations, which need to adopt new policies taking emergency action on methane.
159 countries and counting have signed the Global Methane Pledge, which is an impressive start. But the Pledge is currently aspirational and lacks binding targets. Even as signatories promise to bring them down, anthropogenic and natural methane emissions continue to rise, atmospheric methane levels are at record highs and accelerating,
Some countries are rolling methane action back. The U.S. recently reconsidered methane fees for oil and gas extraction companies and other measures it had enacted that would have required monitoring and limiting methane emissions. The European Union has laws and regulations limiting methane emissions, but is currently considering relaxing them in order to import more liquefied fossil gas from the US as part of a trade deal.
Instead of relaxing or rescinding laws limiting methane pollution from fossil fuels and other sources, governments should tighten existing laws and adopt new ones. Some 100 countries have completed or are developing national methane action plans, including 37 countries participating in the Climate and Clean Air Coalition’s Methane Roadmap Action Programme. Among other methane policies, the International Energy Agency proposes wider trade measures with a strong border tax adjustment mechanism for fossil fuels, similar to the one the EU enacted. In some cases, litigation is key to defending and enforcing existing laws and regulations.
But we also need a global policy framework to help establish new requirements for aggressive, global-scale methane reductions. Beyond the Global Methane Pledge, we need a binding, enforceable Global Methane Agreement that commits signatories to verifiable reductions in methane emissions and creates rights to and obligations for such reductions under international law.
There’s a successful precedent for such an international framework in the Montreal Protocol. It rapidly eliminated production and use of chlorofluorocarbons which were depleting the ozone layer. The Kigali Amendment extended Montreal Protocol provisions to cutting hydrofluorocarbons which are powerful climate pollutants. A similar framework could also be applied to cutting methane, a powerful short-lived climate pollutant.
The science, technical tools, and policy frameworks needed to pull the methane emergency brake and stabilize the climate already exist. What we need to build urgently is a movement to insist on applying them now.