Nearly 90 countries join the plan to reduce methane gas emissions – VG

This is stated by a senior official in the US President Joe Biden’s administration, writes the news agency Reuters.

The new signatures in the Global Methane Pledge are expected to be officially presented during Tuesday and now contain half of the 30 largest emitting countries for this greenhouse gas.

Brazil, which is among the five largest emitting countries, is now joining the promise. Countries such as Qatar, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and South Africa must also sign.

On the other hand, China, Russia and India, which are among the five largest major emitting countries, do not.

Powerful greenhouse gas

Methane gas is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂, but on the other hand does not linger in the atmosphere for as long. Thus, cuts in methane emissions can help to rapidly reduce global warming.

A UN report released in May concluded that sharp cuts in methane emissions during this decade could stave off nearly 0.3 degrees warming by 2040.

At the same time, if one fails to cut methane emissions, the 1.5-degree target enshrined in the Paris Agreement will hang in the balance, according to Reuters.

Today, the average temperature has risen by around 1.1 degrees compared to pre-industrial times.

According to experts, the oil and gas industry has the greatest potential to contribute to such emission reductions quickly by repairing leaks in pipelines and warehouses. Many of these repairs do not cost much.

In addition, old coal mines, agriculture, not least rice cultivation, and waste storage, especially food waste, contribute a lot to methane emissions.

Both the US and the EU have plans to introduce laws to limit methane emissions during the year. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (Labor Party) has previously stated that the promise is one of the biggest advances that can be made in Glasgow.

The new tightening in the United States aims to expand the regulations to include emissions from old oil and gas pipelines instead of just new ones such as the old law from Barack Obama’s time.

– USA back

The Obama law was repealed during the Trump administration, but reintroduced by Biden as one of his first acts in January.

The tightening is a concrete signal that the United States is back in the global fight against climate change, says Michael Regan, who is director of the US Environmental Protection Agency EPA.

The old Obama law from 2016 only covered new installations after 2015. Thus, there was still no regulation of 90 percent of the US 900,000 oil and gas wells.

The new austerity measures include new requirements for sealing leaks from the US’s almost 5 million kilometers of oil and gas pipelines and cleaning up old coal mines.

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