This month MethaneSAT, an $88 million, 770-pound surveillance satellite conceived by the Environmental Defense Fund and designed at Harvard to precisely track the human sources of methane being released so promiscuously into the atmosphere, was launched by SpaceX, to great fanfare.
Methane, a somewhat less notorious greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, is produced by industrial and natural processes — leaking oil and gas infrastructure, decomposing melted permafrost, the belching of cows and the microbial activity of wetlands. Weve known that methane is producing a lot of warming and that there is a lot more of it in the atmosphere now, but we didn’t have the full picture. Beginning next year, MethaneSAT will begin beaming down everything picked up by its spectrometer, providing a publicly available quick-turnaround methane-monitoring system that has filled the hearts of climate advocates and data nerds with anticipation. What will it see?
The hope is that it will see a map of climate malfeasance that doubles as a global to-do list. MethaneSAT is not the first effort to track emissions from space, but its launch has been accompanied by a wave of can-do climate optimism for four big reasons.
The first is that methane really matters. By some accounts, it explains about one-third of warming since the Industrial Revolution, with estimates steadily growing in recent years, along with the astonishing rise of its concentration in the atmosphere. The second is that actually doing something about the emissions from fossil-fuel infrastructure shouldn’t be that hard or that expensive. Human activities are responsible for about 60 percent of all methane emissions, and according to the International Energy Agency, 40 percent of industrial emissions are avoidable at no net cost, with the balance of the industrial problem solvable for the price of just 5 percent of last year’s fossil-fuel profits. The third is that those benefits would arrive quickly. Methane, unlike carbon dioxide, dissipates quickly, whereas you have to wait for centuries or even millenniums to get the full temperature benefit of zeroing out carbon dioxide, so we can clear the atmosphere of human-produced methane in about a decade. And the fourth is that all of the pretty granular MethaneSAT data will be publicly available, scrollable and shame-able for anyone who cares to scan its website for burps or flares of planet-heating gas from at least 80 percent of the world’s fossil-fuel facilities.
This probably sounds like progress, which it is, on balance. But the satellite will probably bring some bad news, too. One of the scientists who developed it described the launch as “like looking over the edge of the cliff,” and almost invariably, whenever we get a better look at methane emissions, the problem appears bigger than we’d thought. The latest example is a revelatory paper, published in Nature last week, which surveyed U.S. oil and gas infrastructure and found that the country’s fossil-fuel industry is producing three times as much methane as previously estimated by the E.P.A.
The figure is both shocking and predictable. Previous Environmental Defense Fund research suggested that annual methane emissions from oil and gas were 60 percent higher than the E.P.A. had estimated. Last year, work published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences suggested it was 70 percent higher. Globally, the International Energy Agency estimates, only about 5 percent of methane emissions were reported to the United Nations by the companies responsible. Reporting by countries was a bit better but still covered less than half of the total estimated by the agency. The Guardian documented more than a thousand superemitter events around the world in 2022. Leaks from just two fossil-fuel fields in Turkmenistan that year warmed the planet more than all the carbon emissions produced that year by Britain.
At least at first, this will probably be the message of MethaneSAT: In most parts of the world, we are doing worse than we had hoped. This should be reason to act, especially because methane is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit of the green transition.
But one of the unfortunate lessons of recent years is that such knowledge of the problem alone is rarely sufficient to drive us to solve it. Since 2021, more than 155 countries have pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030, in what was widely hailed as a major breakthrough for climate diplomacy and perhaps the most significant new global warming agreement since the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. In the years since, new pledges have been extended; if all promised cuts are made, methane emissions from fossil fuels will be cut in half by the end of the decade — a radical goal requiring a precipitous and immediate decline.
In order to keep the world in contact with its most ambitious warming targets, cuts of 75 percent would be required this decade. But methane from fossil-fuel infrastructure climbed again last year, the International Energy Agency reported last Wednesday, after climbing in 2021 and 2022. The organization believes a decline may be right around the corner, and there is considerably more global momentum for tackling methane now than in even the quite recent past. But the agency’s report noted that large leaks of the kind documented by The Guardian in 2022 grew last year by more than 50 percent. One such leak in Kazakhstan spewed gas for more than 200 days.
Though most of the attention paid to methane emissions these days focuses on that leaky industrial infrastructure and the climate risks of new liquid natural gas facilities, what worries me most is how much of it seems to be coming from natural sources, which may be responsible for 40 percent of the annual total — and the share may be growing, thanks to the effects of warming on emissions from wetlands, in particular, where higher temperatures promote more microbial activities that generate methane.
In 2020 the Covid pandemic suppressed industrial activity and reduced emissions of methane, but additional emissions from wetlands, researchers found, might have offset that industrial decline five times over. Last year a group of scientists published research documenting the exceptional surge from wetlands, which exceeded average projections from even the most pessimistic warming scenarios drawn up by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. From 2007 to 2021, wetlands emissions were already outpacing those extreme scenarios, and beginning in 2020, the rate of release roughly doubled the rate from 2000 to 2006.
This is not good. It is also another sign that over the past few years, we have somewhat left behind what the statistician Erica Thompson memorably called “model land” and begun to enter — or crash up against — a much messier climate reality.
In some ways, the news has been encouraging. As I wrote previously, perhaps the single most significant climate story of the past half-decade is the realization that extreme warming long considered the business-as-usual base line for our future is now looking much less likely.
But along other dimensions the reality has been more dispiriting than the models predicted. At the beginning of last year, it seemed unlikely that the planet would set a record for global average temperature, but by December, we had not just broken but shattered the record. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing at eye-popping rates. An annual review by the World Meteorological Organization published this week declared, “The state of the climate in 2023 gave ominous new significance to the phrase ‘off the charts.’” And off-the-charts exceptional heat across the world’s oceans continues to perplex and worry an awful lot of climate scientists. The earth’s energy imbalance, which is about the best measure of the greenhouse effect over time, roughly doubled from 2005 to 2019 (though by some measures, it recently peaked).
This, ultimately, is what MethaneSAT will see, circling the planet 15 times daily and keeping a watchful eye on human activities: that down here on the surface we are continuing to run a climatological experiment at a geologically unprecedented pace and scale. The world is warming faster than it had in tens of millions of years, and the rate of warming is accelerating. We’re adding carbon to the atmosphere at record levels, and the stuff we’ve put up there weighs more than the total of everything we’ve built on the earth’s surface. Because carbon dioxide dissipates so slowly, it will probably last much longer, too, making that planet-heating blanket of CO2 perhaps the largest monument to human civilization we’ve managed yet. In theory, we could get rid of the blanket of methane much more quickly. But will we? And if not, what does that tell us about the harder parts of the problem?