Canada is ramping up its climate battle by strengthening its regulations for methane, a greenhouse gas that environmental experts say has a more potent warming effect than carbon dioxide, as the country aims to reduce oil and gas methane emissions by at least 75 per cent by 2030.
Methane has 20 times the global warming effect of CO2, and it eventually decays to CO2 in the atmosphere. After a few decades iirc
It’s funny how it’s methane when they’re talking about reducing emissions, but natural gas when they’re talking about building pipelines.
I wish I had any belief in this. It sounds like complete greenwashing. Canada hasn’t reduced greenhouse emissions since the 1990s. I think most oil and gas methane emissions are poorly measured and reported. 75% reduction in 6 years lol
Our emissions have been flat since the 2000s even though our population has grown by 30% since then:
Therefore our per-capita emissions have dropped by nearly 30%:
In Ontario for example, we’ve paid dearly for this by closing coal fired plants and paying higher electricity bills so it’s important to acknowledge.
Methane is easier to reduce than CO2. CO2 is the inevitable product of combusting any carbon based molecule, such as fossil fuels or organics. Methane is basically what happens when you take an organic molecule, and fail to burn it all the way. If you take your stack exhaust and expose it to more heat and enough oxygen, the methane will react to form water and CO2. For every methane molecule you combust to CO2, you will reduce its greenhouse effect to one twentieth of what it would have been, at least for its first couple decades in the atmosphere. So it is low hanging fruit with a big impact.
CO2 emissions are harder to reduce, because in order to get rid of those you need to stop fucking burning carbon, and companies don’t want to do that. So the only way for a society to reduce carbon emissions is to transition to a model where capital does not control the economy. Whereas you can reduce methane emissions and still have capitalism if you just apply some gentle economic pressures.
