A report from The Global Carbon Project last week notes that methane emissions are increasing faster than ever, and it's largely due to human activities.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps up to 30 times more heat than carbon dioxide, and it's rising at a rate that's setting off alarm bells around the world. While there are plenty of companies trying to track and mitigate methane all over the world, this recent report indicates that things might be worse than we had previously imagined. 

About the Report

The Global Carbon Project is an international coalition of scientists focused on slowing down human-induced climate change. The group works closely with the World Climate Research Programme, which coordinates research on pressing global climate questions.

While the “Global Methane Budget” report has yet to be peer-reviewed, it found that between 2000 and 2020, human-caused methane emissions rose by as much as 20%. That meteoric increase will make it nearly impossible for the globe to meet its climate goals, according to the report authors.

As one of the authors told The Washington Post, “These extra methane emissions bring the temperature thresholds ever closer,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project. “Warming that was once inconceivable is now perhaps likely.”

The biggest methane emitters were landfills, livestock, and increased coal mining and natural gas usage. Lakes, marshes, and wetlands also had increased methane emissions thanks to human impact, as well.

As the Washington Post points out, more than 150 countries have pledged to cut methane emissions by 2030, but so far, that’s just lip service, according to a separate report by the Global Carbon Project that has been peer-reviewed.

Methane emission measurements were taken via satellite imagery, similar to the kind that Google and the Environmental Defense Fund are using, and showed that methane emissions grew an additional 5 percent between 2020 and 2023. The largest methane polluters were China, the Middle East, and southern Asia. The EU, however, showed an improvement in its methane emissions in the last two decades.

Methane is a Big Contributor to Climate Change

As we’ve shared in this newsletter before, methane is a big deal when it comes to climate change. It’s the second most prevalent greenhouse gas that human activities emit, after carbon dioxide (CO2). It’s also responsible for around 30% of global warming.

Methane is as bad for the environment as burning coal is, and it’s the main component of natural gas. Methane is also a byproduct of oil and gas drilling, and its used in everything from cooking to transportation.

Methane also has a significantly larger impact on global warming than CO2 does. The Global Warming Potential or GWP of methane is a measure of its ability to trap heat in the atmosphere relative to CO2. Over 100-years, the GWP of methane is approximately 28-34 times more than CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Methane alone is responsible for approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of the warming that the planet has seen since the 1800s. As the Washington Post reports, one of the researchers noted that “As long as methane releases continue to grow, the world will feel dramatic and immediate temperature rise every year that methane releases continue to grow.”

That means that record heat in the summer and winter will worsen as long as we continue to emit increasing amounts of methane. The Pyrocene Era is almost certainly here.

As the International Energy Agency, or IEA, points out, “This means that one tonne of methane can be considered to be equivalent to 28 to 36 tonnes of CO2 if looking at its impact over 100 years.” Methane, which stays in the atmosphere for around 12 years, remains there for a shorter period of time than CO2 (which hangs around for hundreds to thousands of years), but it's far more efficient at trapping heat. Thus, it heats the planet faster.

While countries like the US continue to try and leverage carrot-and-stick environmental policies to curb methane emissions, this latest report from the Global Carbon Project indicates that it may be too little too late.

This is significant, as the Washington Post points out, “Observations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled since the start of the industrial revolution and are now estimated to be at their highest level in at least 800,000 years. In contrast with carbon dioxide emissions, which have plateaued over the last decade, the accelerating rate of methane production matches what would be expected in the “high emissions” scenario used by scientists to project what might happen if humanity takes no action to combat climate change.”

Climate Tech is Trying to Tackle the Problem on Multiple Fronts

While the data is dire, companies, advocates, universities, and governments are trying to solve problems for some of the biggest methane emitters, like cows.

The University of California, Davis, is teaming up with the University of California, San Francisco, and Berkeley to find a way to cut methane emissions from cows using CRISPR gene editing on the microbes in bovines’ guts. The first of those cows are now wandering around the fields of Northern California.

Biotech companies are trying to make milk without cows. Countries like Denmark and New Zealand have levied emissions taxes on livestock starting in 2030. As environmental groups advocate for humans to eat more plant-based diets, companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have made some pretty tasty meat alternatives. However, as another Washington Post story points out, human psychology is a tough thing to change.

There are some limited moves in the US to curb the oil and gas industry's methane emissions, too. The EPA, which has been largely kneecapped by recent Supreme Court rulings, has tried to regulate methane emissions for years. Yet, with the passage of President Biden's IRA plan, which included the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, plus a separate bill that included nearly a billion in grants to mitigate methane, and some hefty fines for oil and gas companies that fail to mitigate or capture their methane leaks, there's hope yet that the US may be able to bring its own methane emissions down. That is, provided that Trump does not win the election in November, as he’s repeatedly threatened to roll back the IRA and further impair and dismantle the EPA.

While these are all incremental innovations, positions, and policies, and many of the results remain to be seen, it will take a lot more than just a few experiments, government promises, and even legislation to significantly curb rising methane emissions. The bottom line is that the statistics are dire, and a lot more needs to be done if humanity wants to avoid an impending climate disaster resulting from methane emissions in the long run.

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