This week’s IPCC report specified by no unsure phrases how little time we have now left to get our act collectively to stop disastrous world warming. Hidden contained in the dense report is a problem for, of all industries, fossil gas producers: Step up your sport on methane.

Methane, which is way more intense a greenhouse gasoline than carbon dioxide however stays within the environment for a a lot shorter period of time, is a new alarm bell for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has historically targeted on the longer-term impacts of CO2. But as fires, floods, and storms get extra intense and damaging annually, the necessity to scale back methane is clear.

“Methane provides a short-term win,” Drew Shindell, chair of the Climate and Clean Air Council Science Advisory Committee and professor of local weather science at Duke University, mentioned throughout a press convention Tuesday. “Unlike CO2, which stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane lives for about a decade in the atmosphere. When we reduce it, we can rapidly slow warming. It’s urgent to get going quickly on methane, because the impacts of climate change are accelerating.”

The IPCC report launched this week provides us some concrete targets: To preserve warming to 1.5 levels Celsius (2.7 levels Fahrenheit), methane emissions must fall 34% by the top of this decade, along with massive reductions in CO2.

“We know what we have to do,” Shindell mentioned.

Compared to all of the main societal shifts we’d like as a way to forestall catastrophic warming, righting the ship on methane is comparatively easy. One of the largest sources of methane is from the manufacturing of fossil fuels; practically a 3rd of the world’s methane emissions are from that sector, and plenty of of these emissions are fugitive, which means gasoline that’s leaked, burned, or by chance misplaced in the course of the manufacturing course of. And we’ve really acquired options to repair chunk of these emissions. The IPCC report estimates that 50% to 80% of those emissions could possibly be fastened utilizing current applied sciences—which, by the best way, would additionally present monetary advantages to fossil gas producers, since they may promote gasoline that will in any other case be misplaced. In latest years, the trade has paid loads of lip service to fixing its methane drawback. Seems like a win-win!

Unfortunately, what the oil and gasoline trade says it’s doing doesn’t line up with its actions. The American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm for the trade, campaigned onerous final yr in opposition to a provision within the Build Back Better Act that will have put a price on oil and gasoline producers who exceed a sure threshold for methane emissions. API and different trade teams argued that the federal government ought to play good with fossil gas producers and never impose any scary charges to repair the trade’s methane drawback. Given that an evaluation printed earlier this yr estimated that worldwide methane emissions from fossil gas manufacturing are as much as 70% larger than official estimates, the trade dragging its ft on methane now could be particularly harmful.

According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is the third-largest emitter of methane worldwide. In Texas’s Permian Basin, one of many world’s largest oil and gasoline producing areas, simply over 100 websites are answerable for huge methane leaks, a research final yr discovered. Another latest evaluation discovered that the state’s regulatory physique for oil and gasoline, the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), lets loads of flaring—a strategy of dumping or burning undesirable gasoline into the environment—go un-permitted, which means that producers have carte blanche to launch as a lot methane as they need. Last summer season, the RRC, which has deep ties to the oil and gasoline trade and local weather deniers at its helm, despatched a letter to the EPA complaining in regards to the Biden administration’s plans to manage methane.

“I like to say that we don’t have to have a regulation, or a rule, or a law for oil and gas companies to do the right thing—they could step out and do that today,” mentioned Don Schreiber, a rancher in New Mexico. “They could step right up and fix these leaks.” Schreiber, on the identical press name as Shindell, was standing in entrance of one among 122 wells on his property; he described how he’s been filming methane leaks on his property since 2015, with little to no response from producers in plugging the wells.

“I can’t get any methane shutdown through a mission statement, through some sort of phase-in promises or corporate speeches,” he mentioned. “No corporate mission statement stops any oil and gas. They’ve got pumpers in the field. They could go out and start fixing those leaks today. They have all the tools they need.”

While the trade twiddles its thumbs, methane is on the rise in a scary method. In 2020, whereas we had been principally caught inside, methane ranges shot up 14.7 components per billion—in comparison with 8.5 ppb in 2018 and 10.7 ppb in 2019. There are some indicators that regulation and a focus is having a optimistic influence, and there’s been some motion internationally to get the world on monitor to halt emissions. But the oil and gasoline trade can and must be doing extra.

Fossil gas corporations like to pitch themselves as a part of the local weather resolution. So, oil execs, right here’s a problem: If you actually wish to assist, begin arguing for rules, for elevated monitoring and out of doors interference, to assist clear up this extremely simple drawback. And repair these leaking wells now.