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Over 100 Nations at COP26 Pledge to Cut Global Methane Emissions by 30 Percent in Less Than a Decade

Global Methane Pledge came as the Biden EPA proposed stringent new methane controls for the oil and gas industry

Via The Washington Post

Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, tells the Washington Post that reducing methane emissions — not just carbon dioxide emissions — is crucial for staving off the worst effects of climate change. “There are two big levers out there, and we need to push down on both of them, which we have not historically done.”

Though it is less abundant and does not linger in the atmosphere as long, methane packs 80 times the global warming punch of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time span. Curbing methane emissions from livestock and natural gas infrastructure is seen as a relatively swift and simple way to make a dent in global warming.

Among the countries that did not sign up were two of the biggest — China and Russia. Hamburg said it was not surprising that Russia, a major methane emitter, had not come on board the pledge. “You’re not going to have everybody join,” he said, adding, “The fact that there’s now a large proportion of the global community signing on, that’s the real key.”

Via Inside Climate News

• https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02112021/global-methane-pledge-cop26/

In a rare moment of good news coming from this week’s Conference of the Parties climate summit in Glasgow, more than 100 nations have pledged to cut global methane emissions by 30 percent or more between now and 2030 in an effort to quickly and significantly curb global warming.

The announcement marking the official launch of the U.S.-European Union led Global Methane Pledge came as the Biden administration took a key step on Tuesday toward meeting the reduction goal with a draft of stringent new methane regulations for the oil and gas industry released by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.

“This is huge,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said of the global initiative. “If we fulfill this pledge over the next 10 years the impact is [the same as] switching … all the cars of the world, all the trucks of the world, all the planes of the world [and] all the ships of the world to zero emission technologies; [the] entire transportation sector.”

Methane is the second leading driver of climate change, having contributed 0.5 degrees of the 1.1 degrees of human-induced warming since pre-industrial times, according to the latest (6th) assessment by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On a pound for pound basis, methane is an 81 times more potent greenhouse gas over the near term than carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. Reducing methane emissions is widely seen as the best chance to quickly curb global warming due to the relatively short time the gas remains in the atmosphere.

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