{"id":1056,"date":"2013-03-03T19:01:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T19:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phpstack-120539-406446.cloudwaysapps.com\/?page_id=1056"},"modified":"2018-11-21T00:08:34","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T00:08:34","slug":"methanebc-cuts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/1250now.org\/methanebc-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"methane cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"
Global Methane Initiative<\/a>, could be made more effective.<\/p>\n Some thoughtful climate scientists and policymakers have long been aware of the opportunities that methane cuts pose. Many see them as a way of ‘buying time.’ The U.S. EPA called its first such program Methane to Markets, and all of these programs have been based on similar market models. They were not initially designed to address the planetary emergency that is now unfolding, and have not been adequately altered since. Instead, they have been designed to work as well as their business models would be expected to work – and even at that, they have not proven to be stellar business successes.<\/span><\/p>\n What we need now is for the public to become much more engaged. There are two main avenues of getting better results – 1.) increasing the target sources, and 2.) speeding up the reductions of those targets. Most important is to demand that governments compress<\/em> these programs’ timelines, not see them as a cheap way to buy themselves more time. There is absolutely no reason that the methane cuts envisioned in these programs for the next twenty to thirty years (roughly totaling 130 million metric tons methane per year) could not be undertaken in less than ten. Unlike pie-in-the-sky calls to drop to zero CO2 emissions in just a few years, this is not an unreasonable goal, if the economic framework of the programs can be completely restructured, and so constitutes the easiest way to greatly improve the impacts of these programs. But this would demand a new and quite different economic framework – and that will demand pressure from YOU, the public.<\/h2>\n 1250 aims to do three things for such methane reductions \u2013 advocate, innovate and accelerate. 1250 wants to increase public attention on existing mitigation programs and their potential, in order to help build greater momentum and greater public pressure for more rapid action and for more ambitious targets. The group also aims to help inform relevant policymakers on the importance of such programs to aid in near-term climate control. 1250 also intends to explore innovative approaches for these programs to solve the inherent problems they have faced thus far. <\/p>\n Aside from speed, the other thing to explore is expansion of the emissions pool targeted for reduction. In the evolution of these methane abatement programs, there has been gradually increasing acceptance of wider sources of target methane for reduction. For example, wastewater treatment remained outside of the original four categories of the Methane to Markets program (which were landfill, coal, agricultural waste, and oil & gas sectors), but has since become accepted in current programs. Interestingly, in California’s groundbreaking Greenhouse Gas Law, AB 32, which recently came into effect, amendments for inclusion of methane from rice cultivation will be included (for credit within its cap-and-trade regulation). This suggests that the potential of near-term reductions could grow substantially, especially if both rice cultivation and enteric fermentation – i.e., measures to reduce such cattle emissions by altering cattle feed – could become more widely accepted for inclusion in larger methane abatement programs. It might be relatively easy, in such case, given that these two sectors alone make up such a large portion of total anthropogenic methane emissions, to increase the near-term target from about a 33% reduction to almost a 50% reduction. <\/p>\n