Though it's a fair point to clarify that rice is 11 percent of methane emissions, not 11 percent of total greenhouse gasses. There is a lot of math involved here that I don't know how to begin to navigate, frankly, to try to estimate just how big an impact this (potentially) is.
- Air travel could be banned and we're still hosed
- All the cars could go electric and we're still hosed
- Kill all the cattle and we're still hosed
etc etc. It really is freerider/tragedy of the commons situation, lot of finger pointing and a lot of rational self interest. In the end I can only view this as unfettered good news, assuming we can scale it out
We're consuming and polluting more than the environment can handle (overshoot).
Our economy, consumption and pollution is growing exponentially, in a finite environment (one planet).
It would be naive that in this point one single solution would solve our problems forever.
In fact, we should repair as many things as possible in one go, to get to the equilibrium as soon as possible.
Few things that could get us on the right track:
- remove the drivers of the exponential growth (reform the financial system, degrowth, ubi)
- speed up the transition to renewables (while we have fossil fuels, peak oil is not far away)
- stop polluting everything (plastics, pfas, pesticides/herbicides ...)
- reform agriculture (leading driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss, overfishing)
- plant based diets (animal ag. is 80+% of all agriculture, free an area the size of both Americas)
- reforest/rewild freed pastures to restore forests, biodiversity and water cycle (no monocultures, multi level canopies, no harvesting, old growth)
- by reforesting animal. ag. lands alone we could store enough carbon to cause new little ice age and reverse the warming
- reform / automate plant agriculture - repair soils, stop pesticides/herbicides (insects, pollinators)
Wish we could just do these things. It’s too bad, sometimes, that it’s so hard to generate political will and societal action.
I'm kind of amazed to learn that cars are only ~12% of GHG emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
But we are on a good path...
The US, the EU, and China are all likely to have only ~30% of electricity coming from fossil fuels in 10 years, and only ~21% in 15 years, and only ~10% in 20 years.
In 20 years, it's likely less than 50% of cars on the road will be ICE.
~72% of GHG is energy. That number could easily be cut by ~50% in 20 years.
Yep. I am also very unclear that some of the sticks being wielded towards replacing existing ICE stock with new electric cars make sense. Sure my 7 year old petrol car is polluting, but building a brand new electric car to replace it is pretty horrible for the environment too?
The average electric car costs about ~9T CO2 to build.
Electricity in the US & the EU is currently ~60% fossil fuels.
Electric cars get >2x MPGe of the average ICE car.
So if you say the average car drives ~15k miles to produce ~4.6T CO2. The average electric car driven on ~100% fossil fuels for the same amount of miles would generate less than ~2.3T CO2. Since it's only 60% fossil fuels, it's ~60% of that = ~1.38T CO2.
Payoff is in about 3.33 years.
In ~20 years, when we get to ~10-15% of electricity coming from fossil fuel, the payoff would be only 2.2 years.
Sure, if you're driving a Toyota Prius now, and only putting on ~5k miles per year - you should probably just keep it til it falls apart.
Until we get to like <30% of electricity coming from fossil fuels - I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to needlessly upgrade their car to electric (unless they're getting like 12 miles to the gallon and driving 30k+ miles per year).
But, ideally, everyone would be thinking about getting at least a PHEV for their next car when they do upgrade.
Methane emissions reduction should be considered the top priority despite representing only 20% of the total anthropogenic GHG.
Methane is transient, while CO2 accumulates. Methane decays quite quickly into CO2, which is why when accounted for over 20 years methane is considered 86x more potent than CO2, and over one century "only" 28x as potent. Any CO2 emitted today we will have to deal with for centuries to come. That's not the case for methane.
So while lowering methane will yield the most benefits in the short term, thinking longer term, it's really CO2 emissions that need to be lowered urgently.
Said differently, using a very crude reasoning with a hypothetical scenario: cutting methane emissions in 2025 rather than in 2050 would have little to no effect on the climate of 2100. In both cases the methane will have mostly decayed, and thus will stop capturing heat from the sun (maybe 2100 is a bit early, but you get the idea). But cutting CO2 emissions in 2025 rather than 2050 would have a dramatic effect on the climate of 2100, as these 25 years of CO2 emissions would mostly remain right there in the atmosphere.
It's obviously over-simplified, as global warming is having irreversible effects right now, and methane decaying will not revive species gone extinct in the meantime. So I'm certainly not arguing that we should not do anything against methane emissions. But that should not be done at the expense of fighting against CO2 emissions, rather on top of it...
The phenomenon is “exponential” (or the first part of a sigmoid) precisely because of this chain reaction.
CO2 can be recaptured by forests eventually if we don’t destroy everything too quickly, thus why the immediate effect is really important.
I have a hand-wavy: This is potentially not quite 2 percent of total GHG emissions per year, but I don't know the weighted value of each type of gas and hypothetically something like 50 to 100 projects "like" this one each year for a decade gets us in the ballpark of stopping man made climate change.
Can 8 billion people produce 50 to 100 projects (each year) that move the needle this much? This works in part because it was initially a hard sell to get the farmers to agree to participate in the experiment but it went so well that halfway through the year, 10 more farmers chose to drain their rice paddies of water.
So you don't even have to talk people into taking a hit of some kind for the greater good. They will convert to this because of the higher crop yield and money in their pockets -- assuming (or as soon as) they can afford the transitional costs and a fund could be created to help with that to speed up adoption.