Methane Expert Rob Jackson Of Global Carbon Project Talks Solutions

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Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Rob Jackson, scientist, author, and director of the Global Carbon Project to talk cow burps, landfills, and shale oil, all in aid of the very big global warming problem that is methane. This is the second half of our conversation, lightly edited. The first half is available here.

 

Michael Barnard (MB): Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech, sponsored by TFIE Strategy. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. I’m returning for the second half of my conversation with Rob Jackson, chair of the Global Carbon Project, senior fellow at the Woods Institute, State Environment, a Guggenheim fellow in the center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, and Out of the Blue, a Djerassi program artist in residence. He’s also the author of two books, most recently Into the Clear Blue Sky, available now in your preferred digital and even dead wood formats.

You mentioned something about agriculture, and I think it’s important to talk about the other anthropogenic emissions because there are a lot of them. This is probably a good time to talk about the Global Carbon Project and your budgets. You just released another one for methane, and it’s like kind of a trigger, in part for this discussion. So tell us about the Global Carbon Project and the budgets that come out of that.

Rob Jackson (RJ): Yeah, the Global Carbon Project I’m fortunate enough to chair is an international group of hundreds of scientists who gather together and tally up all of the sources of emissions for greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. We’re doing our first hydrogen budget now. We produce information on the sources. We study what the atmosphere tells using isotopes for what the sources might be from, say, biological or fossil sources. We use the atmosphere to tell us where emissions are happening latitudinally. Is it industrial areas? Is it the tropics? Because of increasing warming and higher methane emissions? We release this information on a yearly basis, and it’s a tally, if you will, of how we’re doing on greenhouse gas emissions. And emissions of no greenhouse gas have stabilized yet globally, let alone started downwards.

RJ: But methane is rising faster than any other greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. That’s another reason why I tend to emphasize it in my work. It’s potent. It’s rising at levels that are more closely tracking a 3-degree sea warming world and are inconsistent, completely inconsistent with a 1.5 or 2-degree sea world. So we’re not where we need to be and we’re farther from where we need to be for methane than for any other greenhouse gas.

MB: Yeah, and it’s that multiplier effect. Every additional ton is like 90 additional tons of carbon dioxide. And so the sheer volumes are increasing. And so that’s the Global Carbon Project. How long has that been in operation?

RJ: That’s been in operation about 20 years now. The Global Carbon Budget, our CO2 release, gets the most attention every year. We release that during the COP, the climate meeting, the conference of the parties, and we tally up fossil fuel emissions from industrial activity. We tally deforestation and land-based emissions for additional sources of carbon dioxide. We try to understand how much of the carbon dioxide that’s released into the air from fossil systems goes into our oceans and is acidifying the water. How much goes into land and healthy forests that are growing a little faster. Because carbon dioxide is a food for a plant. So we try to put all those pieces together and understand the metabolism of the earth.

MB: Yeah, it’s a big job, and I’m glad you guys are doing it. To the methane thing we’ve talked about. The interesting thing is that we’re using methane in our homes. It’s running in leaky pipes under our streets. It’s coming from shale oil and unconventional extraction of oil technologies, which the United States built and funded after the OPEC oil crisis. That was a Gerald Ford initiative that led to the fracking and shale oil booms, which are now expanding around the world. Both China and India have unconventional oil and fracking technology efforts underway. I was reading a paper on China on effective fracking techniques and avoiding doing stuff to make it worse. Recently we talked a bit about methane in transportation, commonly used in ships. But even yesterday, I saw a delivery van that was proudly saying, Powered by LNG.

There’s a lot of vehicles that are roaming the streets. But then there’s the nature side of things. So why don’t you step through all the places where methane is coming from because of human action in our world?

RJ: Okay. The report that we just released last week, led by my colleague Mariel Sonois in France, we estimate that two-thirds of all methane emissions globally now come from things that we do. The place you would expect and that we’ve spent the most time discussing is fossil fuel use, and that contributes almost a third of anthropogenic, or human-caused emissions. That’s about 100 million tons of methane released to the air a year. But agriculture is nearly twice as large. The largest agricultural sources are cows or ruminants. A cow burps about a bathtub’s worth of methane a day, and its manure and waste products release methane. Maybe I should back up and mention that there are two sorts of flavors of methane in the environment. There’s a fossil flavor that is the result of biological activity in the past.

So microbes underground chewed through carbon rich sediments and produced methane as an end product. So that’s what fossil fuels are. And really, you can think of gas as the ultimate endpoint for oil and coal deposits. If the microbes keep chewing away, they eventually get to producing methane. So that’s the fossil side. But then there’s the current day biological sources. And in that sense, methane is formed by microbes in waterlogged, low oxygen environments. And microbes release methane in wetlands, in rice paddies. And in the stomach of a cow is like a walking wetland. It’s sloshy, it’s wet, it’s warm, it’s low oxygen. So that’s where the methane comes from in the cow’s breath. So almost two-thirds of human emissions come from agricultural activities. Then the residual sources are primarily landfills in particular.

Again, you think of a landfill as bringing a bunch of organic matter into one place. You sort of seal it up. You create a low oxygen environment, and microbes, again, go to work on that biomass. That’s a good reason to compost and keep compostable material out of our landfills, because you cut methane emissions by doing that. So those are the main sources in the environment. There are some other small sources, like fires that release a bit of methane every time the plant material is burned. There are some natural geologic sources and termites and other things, but that’s down in the weeds. It’s basically fossil fuel use in agriculture and waste.

MB: Yeah, it’s interesting. Let’s nerd out a little bit about aerobic versus anaerobic decomposition, because it’s good to explore that a little bit, just because I think it’s an underappreciated piece.

RJ: Aerobic, oxygenated, anaerobic, low or no oxygen, when microbes decompose things, or microbes might include fungi, for instance, there are critters, organisms that chew through decaying plant material. And that’s a good thing because otherwise plant litter would just pile up in the environment around us. When oxygen is present, microbes chew through plant material the same way we chew through food, and they release carbon dioxide when they do that. That’s the natural cycle for carbon dioxide on earth. It starts in the air. A plant consumes that carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, fixes it, and builds leaves and roots and another biomass. Then that plant dies, and something needs to return that carbon to the air, and microbes are that something. So in an oxygenated environment, microbes decompose organic material and produce CO2 in a low oxygen or no oxygen environment. That isn’t what happens, though.

Those microbes use different enzymes and different pathways. They produce methane. So a low oxygen environment, as I’ve already mentioned, is the sediments of a wetland, perhaps a rice paddy, the stomach of a cow, where oxygen is limiting and those microbes produce methane. One of the biggest places on earth where we’re worried about this is the Arctic. Everyone’s heard about permafrost thawing and understands, I think, in principle, why that’s important. There are thousands of years of plant organic matter built up in the soils and sediments there, frozen away as peat. And if and when that material thaws as the Arctic warms, if it thaws in a dry environment, then that carbon will go to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, which is really bad, because there’s half as much carbon in peat in the Arctic as there is in the atmosphere.

So there’s a lot of carbon to be added. But if it’s waterlogged and you sort of have slumping and water that accumulates over this warming area, then that carbon goes to the air as methane, and that’s potentially catastrophic. And I don’t use that word very often as a scientist, but there’s a lot of carbon up there. If a lot of that carbon goes to the air, the CO2, it’s bad. If it goes to the air as methane, it’s terrible for the planet and for the climate.

MB: And there’s a lot of interesting sources of anaerobic decomposition. You mentioned landfills which have, like everything else now that we’re actually measuring them, we’re finding they’re leaking more, creating more and leaking more than we thought they were. But dairy barns, all those cows. But manure piles, on the outside they’re decomposing aerobically, on the inside they’re decomposing anaerobically. Anywhere there’s large piles of animal waste or agricultural waste on the inside, methane is being generated. That’s easy to avoid. You just simply turn the piles over to expose them to oxygen. But nobody does that because it’s not important. Hog manure pods are a source, which is interesting. And that’s once again a simple mitigation. Put bubblers underneath them to bubble air up through them and you reduce 90% of the methane emissions. So, yeah, we’ve got this massive thing across this.

And one of the things that I’m doing is a seminar series for India’s electrical utility professionals under the auspices of the India Smart Grid Forum, closing off this week with why hydrogen is mostly a distraction, and we shouldn’t be paying attention to it as a climate solution. But in talking with India, one of the things that obviously is top of mind are all their rice farming and all their rice paddies, as is the case with China. The amount of rice as a percentage of the diet in Asian cultures is very high. And flooding of rice paddies creates the conditions for anaerobic decomposition. And luckily, there are actually solutions for that emerging now.

For the last half hour or so, it would be nice to go back almost the next step, one more step, but go back and step through what the solutions are in all those spaces. Before we do that, there’s another underappreciated aspect of global warming potential for greenhouse gases. It’s that direct versus indirect aspect. And it’s become much more important recently as we looked at hydrogen, which is all indirect. And so maybe for methane, you could articulate the differences between the direct and indirect global warming potential. Because I think it’s confusing people.

RJ: It is confusing. It’s confusing for everyone, and it’s confusing for the scientific community as we try to understand the lifetime of methane, because these direct and indirect effects feed back on each other. The direct effects, and I’ll put our nerd hats on for a minute, the direct effects are what we think of when we define greenhouse gases. Molecules like methane that I mentioned before, the carbon at the center of this triangular pyramid with four hydrogens sticking out, greenhouse gases sort of wobble and rotate and vibrate in the presence of long wave radiation. They absorb that radiation and they emit some of that radiation back as heat. So that’s what a greenhouse gas is in a direct sense.

MB: I’d like to articulate the specific thing to avoid one piece of confusion. The infrared comes up from the ground and would normally go into space. It hits these molecules, they vibrate, they create heat, which goes out in any direction instead of just continuing off into space. So it’s not like there’s a little space blanket, although that’s a nice metaphor. You know, those ultra thin mylar blankets reflect infrared back in. It’s not like that. It’s an absorb and readmit, but it’s absorbing and re-emitting in any direction that people tend to miss.

RJ: Yeah, so, well put. So that’s a direct effect. And it comes from this vibration and rotation that the molecules possess, is the reason that CFCs and their replacements, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, are such potent greenhouse gases. It is because they have a lot of bonds and they wiggle and turn, and they’re thousands of times more potent. Carbon dioxide, there’s more to warming than that direct absorption, though. There are indirect effects that affect the lifetime of other gases in the atmosphere. We can start with methane, but hydrogen, I think, is an easier example, and I’ll come to that in a second. Methane doesn’t just warm the planet because of this infrared or long wave radiation. It forms or interacts with ozone, which is itself a greenhouse gas.

So every time you emit more methane into the air, you tend to create ozone, particularly lower in the atmosphere. And so that is independent of the mass of methane that’s in the air. You’re also boosting the concentration of ozone that we breathe. That’s harmful for our health. So that’s an additional warming effect. That’s what we in the scientific community call an indirect effect, because it isn’t arising literally, from the methane molecule that you’re measuring today. It’s happening because of the breakdown of that methane in the atmosphere and its knock-on effects through chemistry.

MB: So let me test this, because I looked at this five years ago or four years ago, and so my memory is I’ve looked at a lot of things since then. One of the things that methane breaks down in the atmosphere, I thought it broke down into carbon dioxide as well.

RJ: It does. It breaks down into carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is its ultimate fate in the air, and every molecule of methane that we emit will eventually turn into carbon dioxide. That’s another way of thinking why methane is worse than CO2. It’s far more potent while it’s methane. And then even when it’s gone, it’s still lingering in the air as carbon dioxide.

MB: That’s why burning it and flaring and stuff is better than just emitting it. But to hydrogen, briefly, hydrogen has all indirect effects.

RJ: Yeah, that’s right. Generally speaking, two-atom molecules, like hydrogen, like nitrogen and oxygen, the dominant constituents of our air. N2 and O2, they are not greenhouse gases. They don’t have this ability to wobble and rotate in the same way that these more complicated molecules do. So hydrogen is itself not a greenhouse gas. But what hydrogen does is lengthen the lifetime of methane in the air. The more hydrogen we put in the air, the longer it takes methane to disappear. And an imperfect way of describing this is to think about doing your dishes on a Thanksgiving day after a big meal. So you fill up your sink with warm water, you put soap in that water, and if you keep adding more and more dishes that you clean with that soapy water.

Eventually you’ve got to replace the soap to be able to clean the dishes. And the atmosphere is kind of like that. The soap in this case are the radicals, like hydroxyl. Oh, and chlorine that scrub methane from the air naturally. Oh, this is the most important one. Globally, it’s our detergent. So when we add extra hydrogen into the atmosphere, it’s like adding extra dishes, dirty dishes, into the soapy water of your sink. It uses up OH in the air that would otherwise have destroyed methane. And so that’s why hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas with the power of sort of 30 or 40 times carbon dioxide on a 10- or 20-year timeframe, and 12 times more powerful than CO2 on a century timescale.

It’s not because the hydrogen is changing the radiative heat balance in the atmosphere. It doesn’t do that. It’s because it makes methane live longer or last longer in the air.

MB: So it’s comparable in that regard. An analogy I’ll draw is to oceanic biochemistry. The carbon dioxide comes in, forms carbonic acid, which interacts with carbonate ions. And so you get carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One from the carbonate ion creates two bicarbonate ions, locks away the carbon, but it also removes the carbonate ions the shellfish need. The shellfish in this analogy are the things that are removing methane from the atmosphere, and their shells get more brittle. There’s this interesting, nerdy analogy to be made that no one will understand, because it’s just too nerdy and abstract in both directions.

RJ: Everyone has climate solutions that they’re in favor of, and they like less than others. I’ve come to believe that we will all have to accept climate solutions that aren’t our favorite. For some people, it’s nuclear. For other people, it’s natural gas with carbon capture and storage. I am not a believer in using hydrogen in distributed systems, whether those systems are millions of miles of pipelines or millions of hydrogen vehicles we’ve been toying with for decades now, each of those millions of points will leak hydrogen into the air. I don’t think it’s a good idea to use a distributed hydrogen economy. I like large industrial sources, as I mentioned before. I think steel, maybe cement, smelting where we don’t have many options for furnaces where you need thousands of degrees of hydrogen is a great energy storage mechanism locally.

MB: I will actually disagree because I’ve done a projection of steel and iron through 2100, decade by decade, looking at all the solutions. Hydrogen as an energy carrier there is unimportant. Its chemical purposes for reduction of iron ore to make iron is something they have to resolve, but the energy can easily be provided by electricity. Separate conversation.

The question, though, the nerdy question. The nerdy precise question. One of the purported solutions was to mix hydrogen in percentages of up to 20% of natural gas and existing natural gas pipelines to reduce by 7% or so potential greenhouse gas emissions. The question is, do all leakages that are methane and hydrogen at the same time, are just two point sources and irrelevant to trigger the indirect warming potential of hydrogen with methane? Or do they just diffuse, do you think, based upon your knowledge as a climate scientist, and so do you statistically reduce as opposed to more of a problem of just that particular approach?

RJ: I think we can go back to talk about steel, but let’s not. If I interpret your question correctly, it isn’t that there’s a particularly important local chemical interaction that happens between the hydrogen and the methane in the pipeline. It’s that they both diffuse, bleed out and diffuse into the air and interact over time. Is that what you were asking me? I think that’s the question, yeah.

MB: And it’s a question of diffusion rates. Carbon dioxide in liquid form releases, as it happened, in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, creates a blanket of carbon dioxide that diffuses slowly, and that while that blanket occurs, it’s heavier than oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, so it rolls downhill and pools, makes people unconscious. And a case in Nigeria killed people. Just problematic in that regard.

But I was just wondering if, because any leaks from a methane and hydrogen system would ensure higher concentrations of both methane and hydrogen in the same place of the hydroxyls, or were they more likely to bond with hydrogen? Or they were more likely to bond with the methane in that circumstance. And probably. It’s a small thing. I’m just being very nerdy here.

RJ: Yeah, I don’t know, is the honest answer. I wouldn’t expect it to be a local phenomenon. First of all, hydrogen will diffuse faster than methane. It’s less dense, it’s lighter. So the core of the issue for me isn’t what’s happening at that particular leak when you have hydrogen and methane together. It’s that if you have millions of additional sources of hydrogen leakage into the air, along with methane leakage. You’re setting in motion a chain of events in our atmosphere that both warms the earth and alters the chemistry of ozone and NOX gases and other things, too. So it’s more the global atmospheric effect.

MB: For the last 20 minutes or so, I’d really like to pivot to solutions because I’d like to bookend this. At the very beginning, you told us the good news. If we stopped anthropogenic emissions of methane in the fossil fuel industry from transportation from home, and industrial heating from agriculture, for the most part, we eliminate excess methane from our atmosphere really quickly, like within our life. Even in the lifetime that you and I share as people who are around 60-ish, we could live to see we stop today pre-industrial levels of methane. Now it’s the solution time. Let’s go back to the beginning and say, for the homes that we started with, what’s the obvious answer for emissions from inside homes?

RJ: The obvious answer for emissions inside homes is to clean up the electric grid supplying our states and countries around the world, and to replace gas appliances with cleaner electric versions. I’ve done that in my house. Millions of other people have done that too, with no deleterious effects. I have a heat pump instead of a furnace. Now, that heat pump is nice because it also gives me a little bit of cooling in summer as well as heating in winter. That heat pump is more efficient than a furnace. I have a water heater that’s now a heat pump that uses carbon dioxide as a refrigerant instead of a hydrochlorofluorocarbon.

MB: Do you get that from Harvest Thermal, or is it from Sanden?

RJ: The company that I bought mine from is Sanden. I think they may be the only manufacturer in the US currently selling carbon dioxide cooled water heat pump water heaters. I’m not positive about that. Then, as I mentioned earlier, I replaced our gas stove with a faster, cleaner, more efficient induction stove. It gives me better control. And electric induction stoves, and electric stoves in general, emit zero benzene, zero NOX pollutants, zero carbon monoxide. And things that we know harm us outdoors. And there’s every reason to expect that they harm us when we breathe them indoors just as much. So that’s the first place to start, is in our homes, and that’s something that we can control.

If a person has enough money to be able to replace their appliances, ideally when their furnace breaks, or when their stove or water heater is the end of its lifetime, not when it’s in the middle of its lifetime. And so if a person is fortunate and has the money to do it in the middle of the appliance’s lifetime, that’s what I did because it was important to me personally. But I’ve sampled a lot of homes in lower income neighborhoods where people don’t have the money to make that transition, and certainly not early. And frankly, many people rent their homes and they don’t control what appliances are in their homes. So those folks will need some help to realize the benefits of the clean energy transition.

MB: It’s very interesting because affluent people actually have something they can really do for the less affluent. They can replace their gas stove and gas furnace with induction stoves and heat pumps to maximize the volume of the market for those technologies and the people who know how to do them to make it cheaper. And when they make it cheaper, then governmental money to assist the bottom 40% of the residential accommodations to decarbonize goes a lot further. There’s just a lot more right now in North America, our adoption of those two technologies is so low that they’re very expensive on a per unit basis. I needed to install heat pumps in my condo in Vancouver simply because we didn’t have air conditioning at all. And now it’s potentially lethal with heat waves to live in Vancouver and not have air conditioning.

The climate has changed, you might have heard, and it was quite expensive. I can afford it. I’m an outlier, but I’m making everything cheaper by buying it myself. So we can do something about that. If you have disposable income, replace those things, expand the market.

So then the next piece is. But what about all those pipes under the ground in cities?

RJ: Yeah. So just to finish the home thought, too. Just to have, you know, the solar panels and batteries that I have for my house gives me greater control and less worry about power outages and things. And there are issues with electrifying, clearly and harder in particularly cold climates. But there’s a lot that we can do that makes my home environment cleaner and helps the environment, too.

Pipelines. There’s not much that you and I can do about pipeline leakage, except turning the pipelines off. If a street electrifies and no longer needs gas, then the gas company doesn’t need to replace or run that pipeline any longer and can shut it off. So the biggest solution on the energy side, as we discussed earlier, is transitioning away from gas to cleaner electricity, and that will eliminate leakage that happens when gas is extracted in Texas or Alberta or wherever you are around the world.

It will eliminate leakage in processing plants, pipelines, facilities, and homes and buildings. That’s the fundamental core. And it will eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, of course. So the fundamental step is to transition away from gas to electricity, and fossils to electricity. That’s why I support reach codes, as we call them, in the United States. Codes that incentivize all new construction being cleaner electric than gas. That keeps us from locking in fossil fuel use for decades to come. And those are starting to happen in the US, but they’ve been challenged legally. And there are different pathways to transitioning to clean electricity that we’re seeing. So that’s really important. And then we have to get to the other sources.

MB: Let’s stay on those pipelines for a minute. Are you familiar with the Utrecht case study? Let me articulate what it is, because I’ve looked at this question globally. I always look for pockets of the future. I don’t know if you read science fiction, but William Gibson is a writer. His aphorism is the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. And so, as I look globally for climate solutions, I look for those pockets of the future and then see, can they spread? So Utrecht is that pocket of the future. It’s a very forward thinking city and metropolitan area of around 500,000 people. And what they’ve done is they’ve said, okay, here’s our gas distribution grid, here’s all of our sub isolation networks where we can turn off the gas for a neighborhood, or a street, or half a street.

Here’s a schedule for when we’re going to shut down each of those sub isolation networks intelligently over the next 25 years. Here’s the publication for that. And for everybody in those homes, we’re going to communicate with you. And here’s the incentives to move to district heating, or heat pumps, or network heat pumps, depending upon the nature of the street and the nature of the stuff. They have a deadline when the gas is going away, and then they’ve got that. And that specifically avoids the utility death spiral. As you and others replace your gas appliances, the revenues for the utility go down, but their expenses don’t for maintenance of the stuff. So they end up in a situation where everybody’s gas gets more expensive or the utility goes bankrupt. Both of those are high likelihood.

So to avoid that, you have to have that future looking that’s not an individual thing that’s working through the regulatory organizations to slowly but surely eliminate those pipelines under our streets, just flush them out, put in our gases in them, leave them in place, because they don’t matter once they’re closed off and replaced with electricity. So that’s a big wedge, but it’s a regulatory wedge and it’s a strategic wedge. Human beings make the utilities’ lives harder by getting rid of the stuff faster. But they’ve got to respond intelligently and they’re not. Utrecht. Do Utrecht, whoever’s in charge.

So then moving upstream to the oil and gas industry, you’re probably most familiar with the United States. Norway doesn’t have this problem because they require properly engineered methane leakage avoidance technologies to be built into systems from the beginning. The United States didn’t.

So that’s why we’ve got a problem in the United States. So what are the solutions in the United States for eliminating methane emissions from the natural gas we’ll be extracting for another 20 or 30 years.

RJ: Well, at the upstream level, where it comes out of the ground and in sort of the initial processing facilities, there are best practices that companies can apply. Capturing methane as drilling is happening, is done by some companies and not others. We haven’t talked about pricing enough. There is no price on methane pollution.

Well, okay, there’s a price for the waste of the bad actors. There’s not a global price on methane emissions. And there’s not a price on methane emissions in most sectors of the economy, in the US or even globally. I’m a big believer that there has to be either a price on pollution or a stick, a regulatory mandate that requires this transition.

It’s one thing for Utrecht to set a schedule of use. It’s totally another thing to see that happen in the United States or Australia or Canada, for example, particularly in the US. It would be tricky in Europe.

MB: They have a price. They have price signals and regulatory certainty. Because the European emissions trading system will include methane as a greenhouse gas in 2026, and also in the carbon border adjustment, it’ll be included as of 2026, an increase to full application of the emissions trading scheme price in 2032. And so the European Union has got clear budgetary guidance for projects that emit carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, about what those costs will be. It’s about a $200 projected budget in 2030 and about $300 in 2040. And so they’ve got that regulatory price certainty for strategic investment.

In the United States, of course, you have two greenhouse gas market mechanisms, one for HFCs, which we talked about briefly earlier. That actually came in under the American Innovation and Manufacturing act on December 27 of 2020, a bipartisan bill that actually got through Congress in the last days of the Trump administration before it was completely overshadowed by January 6.

And then you’ve got the Biden administration, which brought through the leakage on methane emissions in the United States. Yeah. And so now it’s $900 per ton of methane, which equates to $36 per ton of carbon dioxide, rising to $1,500 in 2026. I do always like to say the United States has got prices on markets for two greenhouse gases. Needs the third one.

RJ: But just to push back a little bit on the methane one, it is true that a performance standard exists now, but that is not a market-wide standard that is applied to wasteful operators. And the EPA has to determine who’s wasteful. So it isn’t at all clear what effect those new rules will have, or whether, for instance, they’ll integrate satellite-based data on emissions into determining who’s wasteful. So we do price some methane pollution here in California. We’ve got a few mechanisms, too, but we don’t price it in a systematic, substantive way.

MB: We do not. Sherry Wilson is quite derogatory about the methane price in the United States. The loopholes are quite extraordinary. The pathways to abuse it are quite high. So while it’s a good conceptual measure, and it’s nice that the United States is actually moving down the path of greenhouse gas pricing, I’d celebrate it as indication of movement.

So, yeah, we talked about electrification of power for that system. We talked about thief hatches, talked about all those, the satellite imagery and the other things to inspect them. Are you seeing one of their measures spring to mind? Is it obvious for the oil and gas industry? I mean, as we discussed, the majority of methane emissions are actually from, not the natural gas system, natural gas extraction in the United States. They’re from shale oil extraction in the United States.

Is there some obvious mechanism there to avoid that huge waste and huge emissions?

RJ: We have to be able to spend a little bit more money to reduce methane emissions. One of the ways that methane is emitted in oil and gas operations is through pressure relief systems. You can imagine if methane is in a pipe system or in an enclosed system, and it keeps building up and increasing in pressure, it becomes a safety issue. So some of these thief hatches and pressure release valves are there to do just that. When the pressure of a gas, and often that gas is methane, builds up, they pop, so that gas goes to the air and you don’t have an accident or an explosion. In a company’s operational context, safety trumps greenhouse gas emissions. But there are things we can do we can engineer better end use. We don’t even need to engineer them.

We just have to use higher capacity pressure release systems that don’t pop open so often. They have to spend a little more money to recover that methane. So there are things that we can do. But again, if the valve popping open and releasing that methane to the air is free, then there isn’t a great incentive for them to change their operations, particularly if they’re selling primarily more valuable oil. And the methane or gas is almost a distraction.

MB: Yeah. And it is remarkable to me that the United States has become the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels globally, and largest emitter of methane from its oil and gas industry, because the natural gas is unmarketable. But there are solutions. There are natural gas systems in northern Europe which don’t have any of these emissions problems. Howarth and Jacobson’s LCA for blue hydrogen from a couple of years ago was dueling with the European one, primarily in my expectation, because they were experiencing, the European one was looking at the northern European, amazing performance, and Howarth and Jacobson were looking at the United States, which doesn’t have amazing performance in this regard. And so it was just fascinating looking at those things. But moving on, landfills are an easy category. What can we do to avoid methane emissions from landfills?

RJ: I mentioned one thing earlier. The most obvious and cheapest thing is to keep organic matter out of our landfills to start with. So composting, separating trash that some cities do and others don’t, that’s the best way to reduce methane emissions from landfills. So if you don’t have organic matter building up, you don’t have the substrate that microbes chew through in these low oxygen environments where and when they emit methane. So keep compost and keep the organic matter out of our landfills. That helps not just climate, it makes the systems cheaper. Right. There are tipping fees often to take material to landfills. We build new or bigger landfills when they fill up. So everything we can do to keep material out of the landfills is a win for the environment, period. Whether we’re talking about climate or anything else.

MB: That’s like wooden chopsticks, paper napkins, kleenexes, food waste. There’s a whole range of what we call biological waste, biomass, and they all are subject to this anaerobic decomposition.

RJ: Yeah, grass clippings, if you still have a lawn and cut it every week. So none of that material should go to the landfill. Doesn’t need to. And then for whatever trash there is, there are technologies that are being deployed around the country and around the world. You can tap landfills with plastic or other material to help you collect the gas coming off it. You can gather the methane. Some cases burn it for electricity that’s fed into the grid. In other cases, use it for energy locally. There are even operations using that methane to build other things like transportation fuels, so we can reduce emissions from landfills. Once again, you have to be willing to either spend a little more to do it or have an incentive or a regulatory mandate to do it.

MB: Yeah, so, but then there’s the big one, beef and other ruminants. So you talk a lot in your book about some of the solutions that are there. So why don’t you go through the solution set for our ruminant animals that provide us with lots of tasty calories?

RJ: Yeah, I have one of the most interesting chapters for me to write in this book, intotheclear.com, was the chapter on cows and ruminants. Cows are the largest source of anthropogenic methane to the atmosphere from things that we do and their waste, a couple hundred million tons a year. In climate solutions, there are sort of two general things that we can do. One, you can reduce the number of units of whatever it is that emits to the atmosphere. That could be oil wells. It could be the billion and a half cows that are on the earth. So you can reduce emissions by reducing demand and the number of emitting infrastructure, and then you can, of course, clean up or reduce the emissions associated with however many oil wells, or in this case, cows, are left.

So in this chapter I chronicle, I interview Pat Brown, who founded Impossible Foods. His mission is to reduce the global cow and to put industrial agriculture out of business. Those are his words, not mine. So he wants to see the number of cows cut, not just for climate reasons, but for biodiversity and tropical deforestation and water quality and many other things. So the first half of the chapter deals with that, the progress that plant-based foods are making. The second half of the chapter deals with reducing emissions per unit of beef or dairy produced. And in that part. I interviewed Ermias Kebreab, who’s a scientist at UC Davis, pioneering feed additives, things like algae or chemicals that you can add to a cow’s diet at very low percentages, half a percent, a quarter of a percent.

And they can cut methane emissions anywhere from one third to 80 or 90%. So they do work. In some cases, they boost the beef production, the growth of the cow, or milk production a bit, because all that methane burped to the air is energy that the cow loses. So there’s exciting things happening with feed additives, with vaccines. One of the challenges with feed additives is that it’s fine to feed every cow in a feed lot or in a dairy every day, but a Wyoming or Saskatchewan rancher or rancher in Kenya does not feed their cows every day. So you need to keep replenishing the feed additives so for longer intervals, we can look at vaccines. There are startups and researchers doing that, even trying to engineer the microbes or change the microbes that are in the cows’ stomachs.

So there’s a lot of money going into enteric mitigation, reducing the cow burps, if you will. I’m happy to see that because it is the largest or one of the largest sources globally. Fundamentally, just like fossil fuels, there are many of us that could eat less beef and dairy, not just help the climate, but be healthier by doing it. And so reducing consumption of beef and dairy is one way. Cleaning up whatever emissions come from however many cows are left is another.

MB: Okay, so let’s just deal with rice last, and then we’ll close off. So rice is another big emissions area. All those flooded rice paddies that are feeding billions of people are seeing anaerobic digestion of biomass at their roots. What are the solutions there that you’ve seen?

RJ: Yeah, rice farming is critical to global food production. Obviously, rice paddies add 25 or 30 million tons of methane to the atmosphere every year. And farmers are experimenting with drawing down water levels temporarily. I study methane emissions from rice paddies, and farmers flood because it’s a cultural practice. They flood because it’s a way of controlling pests in the rice environment and other things. So farmers can lower water levels temporarily, that exposes the sediments and the system to the open air, to oxygen, and knocks back the methane-emitting microbes that thrive in low oxygen environments. And then even when you, if and when you rewet, the methane emissions tend to be lower. You want to be really careful that you aren’t increasing emissions of other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide.

But in principle, you can use temporary drying or intermittent wetting rather than continuous flooding or continuous wetting. You can add sulfates and minerals to the rice and sediments and rice paddies that also can reduce methane emissions. So all of these things are being explored. It’s easier for me to see us getting to a zero emissions world in the energy sector than it is in the rice sector. We’re almost certainly going to have some residual methane emissions associated with rice farming. And whether we need methane removal from the atmosphere analogous to carbon removal is a whole other discussion, and we don’t have time for it today. But there’ll be a new National Academies report out next week on challenges and opportunities for methane removal. So food. Food’s tougher than energy. That’s why I emphasize the energy industry first and agriculture today.

But it will take us longer to eliminate food-based methane emissions. Every gigawatt of wind and solar we hammer in reduces the amount of natural gas we have to extract, process, distribute, and burn, and makes us healthier.

Car and coal pollution kills 100,000 Americans a year. One in five deaths globally, 10 million people, is caused by burning fossil fuels, particulates and smog. These are needless deaths in the world with clean energy that’s available, and recognizing that there are people still living in energy poverty who need reliable electricity and don’t have it. But clean energy will help the climate, make us healthier today, not just for our grandchildren.

MB: So at the end of these sessions, I always like to have an open-ended question. We’ve talked about a lot of stuff, and this could be something we didn’t touch on sufficiently, something you want to clarify or you’ve got a large audience, thousands of people will listen to this, many of them with resources to a place to stand and lever long enough to move the world. What would you say to them?

RJ: I would say, first of all, thank you for everything you’ve already done. And we all need to do more so that climate change isn’t a problem for our grandchildren. It’s here today. The weather is weird globally. Last year was the warmest year on record. This summer was the warmest summer. The last decade was the warmest decade. And we’re already paying for that through increased storms, fires, hurricane damage, and things like that, sea level rise. So it isn’t something abstract for the future, it’s for us today. And I would hope that your listeners see clean energy and climate solutions as a health opportunity today, not just an environmental opportunity for the future. As I just mentioned a minute ago, burning fossil fuels is one of the largest sources of deaths around the world. It’s true.

Even in wealthy countries like the US and Europe, where our air is much cleaner today than it was when I was a boy, there are still hundreds of thousands, millions of people dying from breathing fossil fuel pollution. It’s true, in our homes. Get rid of fossil fuel burning in our homes and we’ll have less asthma and for our kids. So view climate solutions as a way to make us healthier today. And I think that changes the lens for action, at least in my mind.

MB: Rob, thank you so much.

RJ: Thank you, Michael. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.

MB: My name is Michael Barnard. This is Redefining Energy – Tech. My guest today has been Rob Jackson, scientist, global leader, chair of the Global Carbon Project, artist, and author of the new book Into the Clear Blue Sky, available at your preferred bookstore.