A new report by the Clean Technica business magazine suggests that rich countries could afford to be generous with the planet: by cutting their CO2 emissions sharply in the next decade the world could meet its growing CO2 emissions targets while ensuring dramatic cuts in another polluting alogen: methane.
If rich countries cut their methane emissions 50% in the next decade, Clean Technica calculations suggest, two-thirds of all other climate mitigation strategies – including expensive efforts to block the release of CO2 by building more energy-efficient buildings and cars – could be entirely paid for by slashing methane emissions.
Methane is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. But a knock-on effect from methane is that it is usually much easier to contain than CO2. This year’s report is the first to look at what cutting methane emissions would cost, say its authors.
A point to consider, said the Clean Technica researchers, is that money spent to cut CO2 emissions releases greenhouse gases as well as methane and other gases. The extra CO2 emissions would have to be offset or compensated for by carbon taxes.
One hope, said the report, is that the drop in agricultural productivity that has already been made through greenhouse gases would, over time, lead to feedm-feeding financial support to farmers rather than a shift to more damaging fertilisers.
There would be things, of course, that the world simply couldn’t afford to do. Cutting methane emissions from pig and poultry farming, for example, would save the lives of 10,000 people a year, but would cost some $US100 billion – about the same as the health budget for Singapore.
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