With less than six weeks until COP26 in Glasgow, President Biden is holding a second meeting on climate change this Friday in Washington, the New York Times Reports. The meeting will be attended by the Major Economies Forum, which consists of the majority of major GHG emitters. It is not known if China will be attending.
The US and the UK plan to announce at the meeting that they have signed on to a “global methane pledge” to reduce methane emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030 based on 2020 levels. Countries in attendance at Friday’s virtual meeting will be asked to sign the pledge.
“We’re trying to get people to join into a global effort to try to cope with methane,” John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s climate change envoy, said in an interview over the weekend, adding, “It’s hugely destructive. It accelerates the rate of global damage.”
Despite the fact that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a longer period of time, it is methane that packs the more deadly punch, responsible for “trapping 25 times as much heat.” It accounts for approximately ½ degree of warming.
"Rapidly reducing methane emissions may be the single most effective strategy to keep the 1.5-degree limit in reach, in terms of near-term actions one can take," the senior administration official
told CNN.
According to
Charles Koven, a lead author of the UN climate change report, “If the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, global temperatures wouldn't begin to cool for many years because of how long the gas stays in the atmosphere. Reducing methane is the easiest knob to turn to change the path of global temperature in the next 10 years, he said.”
Methane is the main component of natural gas, which powers close to 40% of the US electricity sector. It can enter the atmosphere through leaks from oil and natural gas wells, natural gas pipelines and the processing equipment itself.
According to data from the US Energy Information Administration, the US has thousands of active wells for natural gas, millions of abandoned oil and gas wells, about two million miles of natural gas pipelines, and several refineries that process the gas.
www.cnn.com/...
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