President Joe Biden announced the fight against methane emissions at the key COP26 climate change conference this week.

Biden encourages every country to join this effort. He said that the United States is launching a "Global Methane Pledge" with the European Union. The goal is to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030, and that 70 countries have signed the agreement.

Scientists are warning more urgently than ever that world leaders need to prevent global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.

This number is seen as a key threshold to prevent some of the worst effects of climate change.

Carbon dioxide may be the most slandered greenhouse gas, and this is for good reason. According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it accounted for 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States in 2019.

In contrast, methane accounts for 10%.

According to a 2014 study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on a global scale, carbon dioxide accounts for 77% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and methane accounts for 16%.

But there are other factors to consider when determining the severity of greenhouse gases, and the global warming potential (GWP) measurement is a good starting point.

The GWP was invented to directly compare different gases related to global warming. Compared with a ton of carbon dioxide, it measures how much energy a ton of gas absorbs in a given time.

If a gas has a higher GWP than CO2, it means that it will warm the earth more than CO2 during this period.

Since CO2 is used as a reference, its GWP is 1. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the global warming potential of methane in 100 years is between 28 and 36, which means that its effectiveness as a greenhouse gas is significantly higher than that of carbon dioxide.

It gets worse. Due to the shorter life span of the gas, the GWP of methane will become higher in a shorter period of time. In 20 years, the GWP of methane is between 84 and 87.

According to the Environmental Protection Fund, although carbon dioxide lasts longer than methane, methane "sets the pace of warming" in the short term.

On the other hand, it turns out that carbon dioxide is difficult to solve. Due to human activities, it is easily emitted. Once it enters the atmosphere, it can not only exist for hundreds of years, but also can last for thousands of years, depending on how it is transferred back to the environment.

The EPA points out that, by contrast, the life span of methane in the atmosphere is only 12 years.

The burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel used for transportation, electricity production, and industrial processes emit large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the growing population and increasing travel demand mean (despite pressing calls to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the past few years) ) US CO2 emissions in 2019 were actually higher than in 1990, although they were reduced in the mid-2000s according to EPA data.

Methane emissions have been reduced by 15% during the same period.

In order to further solve the problem of methane emissions, the global methane commitment will limit methane emissions from sources, such as oil and natural gas well sites.

According to a White House statement, these restrictions can reduce methane emissions from covered businesses by approximately 75%.

It will also seek to strengthen methane capture in landfills (a major methane contributor) and work with farmers to reduce methane emissions from agriculture.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the agricultural sector, including raising animals for food, is the largest source of methane emissions in the United States, although the White House said today that the oil and gas industry is the worst.

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