It’s the Methane, Stupid: Washington Rhetoric on Climate Misses the Biggest Target

Tom Hecmanczuk, Ingenco's director of construction, talks about the process of converting the Bristol Virginia Landfill methane gas into electricity, on Nov. 19, 2015. David Crigger/Bristol Herald-Courier via AP

Commentary

There are two  aspects of the climate policies coming out of Washington and various state capitals that trouble me.

The first is that officials set ostensivsely arbitrary and ambitious deadlines with little evidence they can be achieved. I’m always stunned that politicians can march before the microphones and boldly state that “by 2030, we will reach” this climate objective or “by 2050, we will achieve” some other. I guess I should be more surprised that the climate crusaders cheer the bold rhetoric aren’t more circumspect; I certainly am. Any good manager knows the easy part is stating an objective. The hard part is meeting it—and that hope still isn’t a strategy.

The other troubling aspect of U.S. climate policymaking is that the politicians dictating all these fiats and deadlines on us mere citizens do so under a financial “sword of Damocles.” Top-down fines and sanctions are the methodology of the climate crusaders, not incentives and rewards. In New York City, for example, significant annual fines will start being imposed in 2025 for buildings that have emissions above those calculated to be “allowed.” Nationally, in 2022 and under the mother of all misnomers, the Inflation Reduction Act, impose fines in the form of “carbon offsets” that would require businesses that pollute to buy the right to do so.

Meanwhile, even John Kerry, the Biden administration’s putative “climate czar,” has admitted that all these effort are simply performative. Without similar aggressive steps by China, India, Latin America, and Africa, U.S. efforts are to keep global atmospheric temperatures within 1.5º C of the pre-industrial serve no purpose.

Welcome to Common Sense

According to the Environmental Protection Agency:

“Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic green house gas (GHG) after carbon dioxide (CO2), accounting for about 20 percent of global emissions. Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Over the last two centuries, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled, largely due to human-related activities. Because methane is both a powerful greenhouse gas and short-lived compared to carbon dioxide, achieving significant reductions [of methane] would have a rapid and significant effect on atmospheric warming potential." [Emphasis is mine.]

So methane, when burnt or “flared,” produces CO2, which is also a GHG, but to much less detrimental effect to the climate than methane.

As MIT professor Desiree Plata explains: “The disproportionate warming impact of methane makes [reducing its release] a potential game-changer.” Dr. Plata says that by “removing methane, we could potentially avoid critical climate tipping points,” like the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, which would, in turn, release even more methane, resulting in catastrophic climate risk. Her work—basically a holding action in the struggle against climate change—may slow  global warming enough to allow viable climate-mitigation technologies to emerge and be adopted so that we can meet the goal of zero emissions, albeit later than the wild-eyed, unrealistic deadlines set by America’s political class. (Forgive me if I don’t share the vision of America’s political class of  an industrial economy and major cities powered with wind mills and solar power. But sign me up for nuclear, renewable natural gas, and yet-to-be proven fusion energy.)

Others are thinking carrots, not sticks, to mitigate climate change by focusing on methane capture at the well-head and how it can be mitigated and even, possibly, commercially exploited.

A significant part of methane emissions comes from oil, gas, coal, and other other extactive industries. But it need not be so. With relatively little investment, methane emissions can be captured at the well-head and sold as fuel. In addition, according to the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Greenhouse Gas Management Institute (GHGMI):

“Biofuel plants that use agricultural or forestry waste to produce electricity also use methane: organic matter is anaerobically digested, and the resulting methane is used to produce electricity. Such biofuel projects are often considered renewable energy projects rather than methane capture.”

A Plan of Action

The United States, the European Union, Japan, Canada, Norway, Singapore, and the United Kingdom have all signed an agreement to reduce GHGs, but it’s more a statement of intent than a plan of action. Capturing free methane in the atmosphere is a technical and engineering challenge, but far more rewarding in reducing global warming than CO2 capture; it’s 80 times more damaging to the climate than CO2.

But Washington and the governments of other 150 signatory nations appear to be more heavily focused on CO2 emissions and less so, it seems, on methane. These countries need to back up their assurances and rhetoric with a Moon-shot program to make atmospheric methane capture a commercially viable industry.

Professor Plata says that Zeolites, a chemical compound already used in commercial applications like kitty litter, can be used to convert methane (CH4) into carbon dioxide (CO2) at farms and mines. There is also small-scale technology to oxidize methanol into ethanol, for which there is already an established commercial market. It needs to be scaled.

But the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year—which the Biden administration boldly calls “the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history”—offered little toward such innovation—only $1.55 billion. But that figure is larded up with an array of spending for  measuring, reporting, and mitigating methane reduction as well as more nebulous actions like “mitigating health effects in low-income and disadvantaged communities, improving climate resiliency, and supporting environmental restoration.” The kind of “moon shot” spending to effect atmospheric methane capture, commercialization, and reduction seems to have gone wanting.

Instead, the Biden administration went with the usual top-down “stick” approach to governance: imposing a carbon offset scheme whereby polluters are charged “$900 per metric ton for emissions reported in 2024, increasing to $1,200 for 2025 emissions, and $1,500 for emissions years 2026-on.” Calling the carbon-offset scheme a “perverse incentive,” the Stockholm Environment Institute said that “if methane capture and destruction projects become profitable through the sale of offset credits, there is little incentive for project owners to support legislation that would mandate capture and destruction,” or, arguably, to engage in commercial exploitation of captured methane converted to other fuels.

Summary

Mitigating methane emissions should be the principal near-term objective of ameliorating anthropogenic climate change, akin to seizing a beachhead in a war against an island adversary. It won’t end the struggle to keep global temperatures within a habitable range, but it will put the adversary—climate change—back on its heels and signal the beginning of the end of the fight. We should be flummoxed—and angry—that it was not given penultimate priority in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act or his climate agenda. Methane is not even mentioned in a White House publication, “A Guidebook to the Inflation Reduction Act’s Investments in Clean Energy and Climate Action.”

Instead, methane and carbon dioxide are treated almost as if they are equal and equivalent. They are not. Somebody in Washington should wake up to that fact.