After fossil fuel and agriculture, landfill gas is the third largest human generated source of methane.[1]
That’s from this wik article.
And quoting from a CalMatters email:
As California struggles with a climate conundrum — it’s relied heavily on natural gas to keep [electricity flowing] during this week’s record-breaking heat wave, even as it doubles down on its commitment to phase out fossil fuels — more ambitious goals have been added to the state’s climate change draft roadmap at the behest of Newsom and environmental advocates [but recent events have led to changes and delay...]
...CalMatters’ Nadia Lopez reports. She breaks down the significance of some of the blueprint’s key changes, which include:
- Deleting a provision [for] construction of an additional 10 gigawatts of natural gas capacity to support California’s power grid and replacing it with a goal of developing at least 20 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2045. No offshore wind projects currently exist off California’s coast.
- Achieving 3 million climate-friendly homes by 2030 and 7 million by 2035.
- Accelerating reductions to the amount of miles Californians drive in their cars from 46.8% below 1990 levels by 2030 to 50% in the same timeframe.
- Increasing a clean aviation fuel target from 10% to 20% by 2045.
- Eliminating 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2045 through nature-based methods as well as a controversial method called carbon capture.
“The new targets are quite aggressive and the question now is, will the [ARB] have the authority and the resources to follow through...?” Michael Wara, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s climate and energy policy program, asked Nadia...
Meanwhile, no matter how those plans work out, one way or another we’re stuck with landfill gas as a <small>DIRECT</small> result of basic, necessary, daily life human activity. (Sewer gas as well, obviously.)
Some jurisdictions are considering ways of side-channeling residential and business kitchen/food waste into existing or new municipal recycling/composting programs, but that’s not going to happen quickly, if it happens at all.
We can leave fossil-fuel gas in the ground. And we’re not adding to it, after all.
But as much as we hope for the domination of relatively clean technologies —e.g., solar, and wind power, although they too have their manufacture, shipping, deterioration, waste and replacement issues to deal with— we’re inevitably continuing to build up a waste product with possible potential for helping put fossil fuels out of business, rather than letting weather emergencies sustain the death-grip of BigOil/BigGas.
A lot of voter resistence to breaking that grip has traditionally come from energy labor unions, although they’re slowly looking to making some transitions themselves to clean energy industry training and jobs. But their prime objective is to keep workers in jobs, and that matters for workers’ families at grass-roots level, and for all our shared economic ‘climate’.
Gas-fired electricity generation plants may offer scrubable, heat-controllable workplaces to transition to landfill gas and off natural gas. It seems likely there are yet more landfill gas applications that can break that natural gas death-grip here and abroad, to benefit daily life, economics, and political stability, too.
For the more than 32,000 highly skilled Californians alone who work in the gas distribution industry, landfill gas utilization may represent a technological area where crucially needed environmentalism and realworld working life labor can join forces for the wider common good.
Repel Evil by that which is better
Qur’an 41:34, Surat Fussilat 41:34 (“Explaining in Detail”) Surah Fussilat 41:34 [h/t JimHawkins1946] <small>from the fundraiser Muslims Unite to Help Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting Victims</small>
Let’s have some discussion on all this, so we come away knowing more on all the involved issues.