The Greenhouse Gas to Watch this Decade
Our thoughts are with all the people around the world whose lives have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like COVID-19, climate change is a challenge that knows no borders and worsens the longer we wait to confront it. We have chosen to publish this article at this time to drive forward the conversation on climate change solutions since we believe it must not grind to a halt.
The Defining Decade of the Climate Fight is upon us
The latest report from the Global Carbon Project forces us to confront the reality that the last decade was one of continued global emissions increases; In 2019, global CO2 emissions rose by 0.6% to yet another all-time high. In the 2018 report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate scientists give us a deadline for large-scale emissions reduction: unless we reduce global emissions by about 45% by 2030, the global average temperature will rise more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, and disasters like the Australia bushfires will become more frequent, widespread, and intense.
There are some encouraging signals that global emissions trends are changing for the better as we enter the 2020s. According to data from the International Energy Agency, CO2 emissions from the energy industry actually flatlined in 2019 thanks to the growing use of clean energy in advanced economies. However, all economies worldwide will need to scale renewable energy production and innovate in other industries for us to reach the IPCC’s 45% emissions reduction target.
Put simply, the science is saying that the next decade is absolutely crucial in the fight to keep our planet cool. It’s our make or break moment.
There’s one gas we’re passing that no one wants to talk about
CO2 is the universally acknowledged climate change culprit. However, there is another greenhouse gas that fewer are talking about even though it might be more problematic: methane. The problem with methane is that it has a high Global Warming Potential (GWP) value. The GWP of a greenhouse gas tells how much warming that gas will cause relative to the same amount of CO2 over any given period of time. While the GWP of methane varies with time, the short-term statistics are alarming:
Over the next 20 years, every kg of methane that we emit today will have about 80 times the global warming effect as one kg of CO2 emitted today.
According to the IPCC, about 20% of global warming is caused by methane emissions. The three largest worldwide sources of anthropogenic (human-caused) methane emissions are the processing of fossil fuels (~28%), the cultivation of livestock (~27%), and landfills (~24%). Rice farming and biomass burning also account for 10–12% of methane emissions each. Methane in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing, and we’re still not totally sure why.
Although we don’t have all the answers, we know the primary sources of methane emissions, we know how potent it is, and we know we’re running out of time. We should not hesitate to write, talk, and maybe even shout about its climate impacts.
Why reducing methane emissions needs to happen this decade
When we juxtapose the climate impacts of CO2 with methane emissions, it becomes clear that any climate strategy focused on minimizing global warming in a timely manner needs to focus on reducing methane emissions as soon as possible. Whereas CO2 remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years, slowly cooking the planet all the while, methane stays in the atmosphere for only a dozen years but intensely heats the planet throughout that time. In the short term, reducing methane emissions will have a much larger cooling effect than reducing CO2 emissions by the same amount.
We have 10 short years to heed the IPCC’s warning and restrict global warming to only 1.5ºC. We cannot afford to focus our attention, funding, and innovation only on CO2; we need to be opportunistic and greedy, pursuing massive emissions reductions across all major greenhouse gases, especially those more potent than CO2. This decade, the one that will define the climate fight, needs to be known as the decade humanity got our methane emissions under control.
We’re on a mission to reduce livestock methane emissions by over 90% using seaweed. It’s going to be awesome.
At Symbrosia, we are obsessed with reducing methane emissions. Recent news that massive quantities of methane are leaking out of oil and gas rigs all around the country and that the Trump administration wants to deregulate methane emissions only leaves us more determined to make this decade one characterized by methane solutions.
We’re hard at work on a breakthrough solution to drastically reduce the methane produced by the digestive processes of livestock. Through their digestive process, called enteric fermentation, cattle produce and then burp out methane that accounts for about 8–10% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. We are working around the clock to scale production of our innovative, seaweed-based supplement that, when sprinkled on cattle feed, reduces enteric methane production by over 90% (Kinley, 2020).
Our planet cannot afford for us to wait any longer, so at Symbrosia we are attacking the problem of anthropogenic methane emissions head-on. We hope many others will join us. If you’d like to partner with us to bring the livestock industry one giant step closer to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, please get in touch.
Eli Etzioni writes for Symbrosia, a CleanTech startup reducing livestock methane emissions with seaweed.
