Every State Should Monitor Methane to Meet Climate Goals

Scientists have made it clear: To prevent calamitous climate change fallout in our lifetimes, we have to take bold action. With the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent proposed rollback on the regulation of methane emissions, it’s also clear that states can’t rely on the federal government right now to act responsibly. It’s up to us. Fortunately, states have data-gathering tools at their disposal to shape effective policy, but they have to start using them now.

Every state has the opportunity to leverage satellite and sensor
data and end the polarization around climate change.

While much of the discussion about greenhouse gases is focused on carbon dioxide, methane packs an even more powerful climate punch —trapping 28 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 100 years.

Last week, Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs (where Mark is a cofounder) announced a bold initiative to utilize satellite mapping and modeling to monitor methane emissions, starting in the world’s highest-producing oilfield, the Permian Basin. The project supports New Mexico’s goal to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. As an energy-producing state, we recognize that meeting this goal requires collaboration with the industry and the most innovative technologies available. We hope that other state and local governments will take similar actions.

Read the story from Wired by Michelle Lujam Grisham and Mark Johnson - “Every State Should Monitor Methane to Meet Climate Goals.”

Hans asks the socially, politically and economically unpalatable questions

Any processes that would make a serious dent on the advance of climate change appear to be socially, politically and economically unpalatable.

Melbourne-based
anthropologist,
Dr Hans Baer.

However, as distasteful as they may be our adherence to existing values ultimately threatens continuation of live as we know it.

The University of Melbourne’s Dr Hans Baer is another who promotes the idea of living more frugally and talks with the authority of the PhD in anthropology arguing that we need we need “de-growth” in society, rather than the relentlessly championed paradigm of growth.

Dr Baer, who is an associate professor in the university’s School of Social and Political Sciences at the Centre for Health and Society, has a history as asking the difficult question at public lectures.

He was in the audience at a recent lecture when the much-discussed very fast train for Australia’s east coast was discussed and it importance to growth was constantly referred.

He quizzed the speakers as to how the infinite growth they championed could be achieved and sustained on a finite planet and the MC for the night declared that a question for another occasion.

Later, Dr Baer felt his question, which he believed was relevant to the whole conversation, had been “deflected”.

Along with Dr Baer, I see the only workable solution to genuine climate change mitigation being de-growth.

De-growth for the developed nations must of course be associated with growth in those nations, or parts of the world, that have been exploited, or forgotten by the capitalistic drive to riches, should be encouraged to grow.

Evidence that a slower economy, an enforced de-growth, would have a positive impact on global carbon dioxide emissions emerged from the 2008 global financial crises for with less ability to spend, consumption fell, energy use dived  and for a moment we slowed the worsening of our damage to earth’s climate system.

And now, it seems, the U.S. Government has accepted the science of climate change, science it has known about for decades, and in an ABC story today headed: “White House calls for action on climate change after release of new report”, U.S. President Barack Obama, has called for “bold actions”.

Considering the seemingly unbridled power of the market enthusiasts, it is unlikely that those so called “bold actions” will include any moves toward de-growth.