Last week A couple weeks ago the SECOND annual meeting of parties to the
METHANE TO MARKETS treaty was held in Buenos Aires - I can't believe it's been a YEAR already,
I remember blogging it like it was just yesterday! In between various technical meetings, the partnership announced that
its membership has expanded to include 17 countries (from 14 a year ago) that together account for
60 percent of the world's methane emissions
(greater than the proportion of CO2 emissions covered by Kyoto Protocol targets!). As a highly promising international treaty to reduce emissions of a critical greenhouse gas, AND as a rare treaty that demonstrates that environmental improvement and economic growth in developing countries can go hand in hand, coverage of Methane to Markets from environmentalists as well as mainstream news sources has been
overwhelming -
OH wait, there's been like ZERO coverage of this! Maaaybe because it's not as ambitious/well-publicized as Kyoto (and these green journos don't have time to do much research), but I think also maaaaybe because it doesn't fit with their lazy narrative about how Bush/America is Destroying the Environment while the more enlightened EU is Saving the Environment. This kind of obvious political bias is a
double loser - it reveals the partisan agenda of the source, thus reducing its credibility among the independent-minded,
and it reduces the incentive for the Bush administration to make the effort to undertake useful environmental initiatives in the future. Why, politically speaking, bother doing good work if it's just going to be ignored anyway? More on that in a follow-up -
If you doubt the environmental significance and/or the political wisdom of an international partnership for methane reduction - especially compared to the CO2-centric Kyoto Protocol - consider/NOTE the following:
* CO2 emissions reduction is a long term problem requiring solutions that can be economically implemented everywhere in the world. The Kyoto Protocol is a short term treaty that sets goals for an increasingly small portion of the world that are at any rate unreachable with current technologies - if thinking of this as analogous to a frat party would help to clarify your understanding of this point, you might find
this post from last month helpful.
For more clarification, check out t
his recent post from climate pro Roger Pielke Jr. on the state of Kyoto's emission 'reductions' - the only countries that have made significant reductions are Russia and the former Soviet states, who 'achieved' these reductions through the collapse of their economies with the fall of the USSR in 1991, shortly after the very convenient 1990 baseline). The rest of Kyoto's participants have experienced a net
increase in emissions since 1990. Also note
this Reuters piece (which basically gets recycled every few months) noting that Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism - which could help developed countries get carbon credits for investing in clean energy projects in developing countries - is still bogged down in the mountains of red tape that goes with any UN program (especially one as complicated as this).
* In contrast, a variety of technologies exist that can economically reduce
methane emissions, and many of these technologies do so by capturing the methane for use as a renewable energy source (check out the
M2M site for lots of fact sheets/infoes on this). These technologies have already significantly reduced emissions in developed countries, and they have the potential to both avoid methane emissions and facilitate economic development if they can be deployed as widely in the developing world.
Consider further that
near-term methane emissions reductions could play a crucial role in preventing catastrophic climate change:
In the current edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Drs. James Hansen and Makiko Sato of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at the Earth Institute at Columbia University suggest that avoidance of large climate change requires the global community to consider aggressive reductions in the emissions of both carbon dioxide and non-carbon dioxide gases called trace gases. Humans have already increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the air from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm. If the world continues on its current trajectory of increasing carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, the likely result will be large climate change, with sea level rise of a few meters or more. Hansen and Sato point out that if methane and other trace gases are reduced, climate could be stabilized, with warming less than 1°C, at carbon dioxide levels of 520 ppm. However, if the trace gases continue to increase, carbon dioxide would have to be kept beneath 440 ppm. A cap of 440 ppm seems practically impossible to stay under due to existing energy infrastructure. However, Hansen and Sato suggest that, with the possibility of new technologies by mid-century, it is feasible to keep carbon dioxide levels from exceeding approximately 520 ppm...
OK, so 1) focus on critical, yet feasible methane reductions in the short term and 2) make sure we stay on track to develop technologies that can make a big dent in CO2 emissions in a couple of decades (which is OK, b/c CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 100 years, compared to a 10-year lifespan for methane - thus, reductions today have a relatively small effect on the total atmospheric concentration). Sounds like a pretty workable, realistic long term plan, given what we know about climate (which may be substantially revised between now and then, natch), especially when we compare it to Kyoto, which is neither effective nor feasible. Green journos and other public/bloggic commentators concerned about climate change should not only criticize the Bush administration when they think it deserves criticism; they should praise it when it deserves praise. Methane to Markets
deserves praise.