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Canary Media’s chart of the week interprets essential knowledge in regards to the clear power transition right into a visible format.
Combating local weather change is so usually synonymous with lowering carbon dioxide emissions that you just would possibly overlook all in regards to the different gasoline that’s baking the planet: methane, a short-lived however extraordinarily potent greenhouse gasoline.
World methane emissions rose final yr, in keeping with a new report from the Worldwide Vitality Company, and the U.S. — the second-biggest methane emitter after China — is a key contributor to that problematic development.
However the place precisely are the entire nation’s methane emissions coming from? The quick reply is the power sector, per new knowledge from the IEA’s methane tracker, however you possibly can examine the chart beneath for the longer reply.
Methane emissions behave in another way than carbon dioxide emissions, although each heat the planet. Methane’s warming results put on off shortly in comparison with CO2, which sticks round for hundreds of years, however what it lacks in endurance, it makes up in efficiency: Methane has about 80 instances the warming affect of CO2 over a 20-year interval. Which means it “units the tempo for warming within the close to time period,” because the Environmental Protection Fund places it.
Within the U.S., the extraction and manufacturing of oil and pure gasoline — the latter of which is actually simply methane by one other identify — generate the overwhelming majority of methane emissions. These principally stem from both the apply of deliberately “venting” methane into the environment or from methane that inadvertently leaks into the air alongside any level within the provide chain.
Exterior of the power sector, agriculture produces nearly all of human-caused methane emissions (we’ve all heard in regards to the issues introduced by cow farts), adopted by waste (as natural matter like meals scraps decomposes in landfills, for instance).
The Biden administration is engaged on rules to rein in methane emissions from the power trade specifically: In January, it proposed guidelines for an Inflation Discount Act program that will penalize massive oil and gasoline producers for emitting methane above a sure threshold. In the meantime, organizations together with the Environmental Protection Fund are sending satellites into house to higher observe methane leaks from fossil gasoline operations, as a rising physique of scientific proof finds that precise methane emissions are a lot larger than estimated.
And whereas these direct efforts to cut back methane emissions from the power sector achieve steam, renewable power is surging onto the grid and electrical autos are displacing fossil-fueled autos — traits that can, over time, assist erode the necessity for methane-spewing power infrastructure altogether.
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