The United States and the European Union will announce a senior pledge to reduce methane emissions, according to CNN.
The announcement would come the same day President Joe Biden and other world leaders held a closed-door meeting on climate, ahead of a virtual UN climate conference in Glasgow in November. That meeting is meant to raise climate ambition ahead of the Glasgow summit, the senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday in a briefing call.
The official told CNN that we are grateful for working with the European Union and partner countries towards a collective global goal, and I'd like to underscore that it is a collective global goal to reduce methane emissions significantly.
The US and EU are expected to announce that they plan to cut methane emissions by nearly a third by 2030, based on 2020 levels, according to a Washington Post report cited an EU official.
If methane emissions are being released immediately when the Earth starts warming, why don't we reduce it? Charles Koven, lead author of the UN climate change report published in August, told CNN that this is due to methane's incredible warming power. Even though methane is stored in the atmosphere longer, carbon dioxide is a much stronger greenhouse gas trapping 25 times as much heat.
What is the reason for the reduction of Methane’s short lifespan?
Possible reduction of methane emissions could be the next easiest strategy to keep the 1.5-degree limit in reach, CNN told the senior administration official, adding that methane accounts for about half a degree of warming.
If the world had stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, Koven said, global temperatures wouldn't begin to cool for many years because of how long the gas would remain in the atmosphere. Reducing methane is the easiest knob to use 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 power industry. It can enter the atmosphere through leaks from oil and natural gas wells, natural gas pipelines and processing equipment itself.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, the United States has thousands of abandoned natural gas wells, millions of active oil and gas wells, about two million miles of natural gas pipelines, and several refineries that process the gas.
One in three Americans lives in a county with oil and gas operations, posing climate and public health risks, according to a study by the Environmental Defense Fund.