A report released Thursday by two United Nations (UN) agencies — the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) — concludes that unless the world cuts human-caused methane emissions by 45 percent in this decade, it may be impossible to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The report targets three specific emitters of the supposedly dangerous gas: The fossil fuel sector, which includes oil, gas, and coal; the waste sector, including solid waste and wastewater management; and the agricultural industry.
According to the assessment, there are other benefits beyond cooling the Earth to methane mitigation as well: “Because methane is a key ingredient in the formation of ground-level ozone (smog), a powerful climate forcer and dangerous air pollutant, a 45 percent reduction would prevent 260,000 premature deaths, 775,000 asthma-related hospital visits, 73 billion hours of lost labour from extreme heat, and 25 million tonnes of crop losses annually.”
“Cutting methane is the strongest lever we have to slow climate change over the next 25 years and complements necessary efforts to reduce carbon dioxide,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Anderson. “The benefits to society, economies, and the environment are numerous and far outweigh the cost. We need international cooperation to urgently reduce methane emissions as much as possible this decade.”
According to “Climate Czar” John Kerry’s Senior Advisor Rick Duke, methane accounts for close to one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, it is a high priority of the Biden administration to attack the industries associated with the gas.
“(Methane) is by far the top priority short-lived climate pollutant that we need to tackle to keep 1.5˚C within reach,” Duke said. “The United States is committed to driving down methane emissions both at home and globally — through measures like research and development, standards to control fossil and landfill methane, and incentives to address agricultural methane.”
There’s that word again — “incentives.” How exactly does the Biden administration plan to punish farmers, ranchers, and consumers for our love of meat? Sin taxes for meat? Mandatory meatless days?
Climate alarmists believe that drastic cuts to methane emissions will be a good short-term solution to keeping global temperatures down, as it has a shorter life in the atmosphere than the main climate villain carbon dioxide but is allegedly a far more potent greenhouse gas. Methane only lasts about 9-12 years in the atmosphere, while carbon dioxide can linger (quite normally and safely) for centuries.
Currently, methane exists in the atmosphere somewhere between 1.7 parts per million (ppm) and 1.9 ppm, depending on the source. Written in a percentage at the highest concentration claimed, methane represents 0.00019 percent of the atmosphere as a whole. By comparison, carbon dioxide exists at approximately 420 ppm currently — less than half of one percent of the atmosphere as a whole.
By percentages, neither methane nor carbon dioxide sounds like an atmospheric control knob for global temperature. Climate change skeptic Tony Heller of Real Climate Science recently noted that the recent jump in concern about rising methane in the atmosphere was “complete nonsense.”
“Methane makes up less than two parts per million in the atmosphere, and is so unimportant that many climate modelers don’t even bother to use it in their models,” Heller said. “The war on cattle and meat is based on mindless junk science.”
Heller also claims that the UN may be fudging a bit in its estimates of just how powerful methane is as a greenhouse gas.
“In 1995, the United Nations said that methane was twenty-one times stronger than carbon dioxide. A few years later they bumped it up to 25 times as strong, and then up to 28 times as strong. And now they’re claiming 30 times as strong as carbon dioxide,” Heller noted. “These people are simply making up scary sounding numbers for propaganda purposes.”
Besides the agricultural industry, the fossil fuel and waste management industries are also targets of the UN’s push to reduce methane in the atmosphere.
For the fossil fuel industry, the report recommends plugging the leaks in the system where methane escapes into the atmosphere and upgrading existing equipment. They also recommend using more “incentives” for energy companies to commit to using costly, unreliable and weather dependent technologies for power generation such as wind and solar.
Recommendations for the waste sector include using methane capture technology, which hasn’t been invented yet. For waste water, the report’s authors advocate for “wastewater treatment plants instead of latrines and disposal.” In other words, they want us to treat sewer water so that it can be used again.
And for agriculture, the study calls for improving the diets of livestock to cut down on flatulence, ceasing the burning of crop residues and, of course, the adoption of what the report’s authors refer to as a “healthier diet,” in which consumers “decrease intake where consumption of ruminant products (meat, cheese, milk) is above recommended guidelines.”
So, really, this new report is nothing but more climate-fear porn being pedaled to us by our friends at the UN. They can refer to the measures alluded to in the report as methane mitigation if they want, but in reality, they’re all about control and frightening people into compliance.
