As a Jeopardy! category, “WE HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON” includes challenges like yesterday’s “This color is in AKAs of Aaron Chwatt, the Lakota leader Maȟpíya Lúta & a ‘Captain America’ villain.” Plot spoiler, the correct response was “What is ‘red’?” – as in the comedian with stage name “Red Buttons,” the Oglala warrior known as “Red Cloud,” and the fictional Hydra antagonist Johann S[c]hmidt (“Red Skull”). That was a reasonable $800 square, possibly more difficult than most.

Now that we’ve seen an example challenge, let’s try another: “This climate-altering molecule is produced by coal mines, dairy farms, and garbage dumps.” Yes, there’s a four-week echo happening here, because my 17 February note was also about the molecule CH₄ – methane. I apologize for mentioning it again so soon, but the last few days of my various news feeds have reinforced the need to spotlight this subject.

First: published today, a list of the “Top 25 Methane Plumes” from the UCLA Stop Methane Project filters satellite observations of 4,404 plumes at 2.489 sites to identify the worst-case emitters. Fifteen of them are concentrated in one country, Turkmenistan, with a total estimated outflow (just for these fifteen worst-of-the-worst) of eighty-five metric tons per hour. To put that in tangible terms, the project’s authors estimate that a 5 tonne/hour emitter makes a contribution to global warming that’s comparable to “one million SUVs or one large (500 megawatt) coal-fired power plant” – so that this one country’s top-fifteen methane plumes have the global-warming impact of roughly seventeen million SUVs.

Imagine either (i) everyone in Turkmenistan (population about seven million) owning and regularly driving two or three big SUVs, or (ii) the U.S. population of about 113 million SUVs being reduced by about fifteen per cent, to visualize the impact of what is – and the potential for what could be done. Note well that this is only looking at a tiny fraction of the number of sites where people were talking two years ago about “mind-boggling” leakage, which would not be merely cheap to fix: since captured methane is sellable as natural gas, mitigation of at least half of the leakage might more than pay for itself. “It’s very simple to do, it has no cost for the citizen, and for the producers, the cost is completely marginal,” said the president of geospatial consultancy Kayrros.

Second: far less obvious, due to lack of smokestacks or other effluent pipes, are methane emissions from landfills – where organic material rots in what’s often a low-oxygen environment, starting about a year after the initial dumping. The far more widely discussed greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use may, or may not, be about to peak and then begin to decline as soon as 2030, depending on which tea leaves you choose to read…

• “Analysts say that coal is now at or near its peak, while oil use will crest around 2030 and gas will top out before 2035,” according to Yale School of the Environment as of this past November, but…

• “A scenario where governments take no further action on climate, and clean tech firms face major constraints, such as a lack of financing or infrastructure…sees demand for oil and gas rising through midcentury,” according to that same source.

…but even when fossil-fuel GHG emissions eventually decline, though, “rapid urbanization in the Asia-Pacific region—combined with growing urban populations, increased consumption, and inadequate waste management systems—has led to increased solid waste generation,” notes the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in its comments on a “regional policy dialogue” conducted last month. This is not only an Asia-Pacific problem: an estimate published this week asserts that “across the United States, about 97 million metric tons of food waste are discarded each year, of which about 37 million metric tons end up buried in landfills.”

Are landfills’ methane emissions also readily fixed? It seems to be mostly a matter of motivation: this week saw the imposition of a $3 million civil fine for (mostly) methane emissions at an Oregon landfill, which penalty the operators appear to find a tolerable cost of doing business when compared to their savings from “avoiding emissions monitoring, failing to install new gas-collection wells, operating inadequate landfill gas controls and not making needed landfill cover repairs.” This does appear to be a case of needing to price an externality correctly, and it’s reported that “the state could recalculate the fine if Valley Landfills makes the improvements.”

It gets better: in Wiltshire, England, a dome covering an area of about three tennis courts is containing and collecting landfill gas to fuel the inflatable dome’s power requirements for heating, lighting, and air movement – the plan being year-round local production of foods that would otherwise have to be imported and/or warehoused. If it works, there’s room to build another hundred domes that are projected to meet four-fifths of the fruit and vegetable demand for three local towns.

Finally, there’s the coal mines and the dairy farms. These present a different kind of challenge, since the concentration of the methane in these settings is much less than what’s encountered at an oil or gas well, but modification of inexpensive catalyst materials may be a pathway to remediation techniques that work well in these conditions. The Foundation for Intelligent Life on Earth has been funding work at an MIT lab that’s actively conducting such research.

In addition to our callback to the February 17 note on methane in particular, there’s another callback to make here to the more general February 24 note on the need to focus on “emergency brakes.” As noted by ESCAP last month, “Methane is responsible for roughly 30% of today’s global temperature rise, yet it lasts only about 12 years in the atmosphere. That means methane reduction creates near instant cooling, unlike CO₂ which lingers for centuries.” Simple to do, effective quickly, cheap or even profitable, zero downside: yes, please.