Comment: The thing about methane is that it offers a way to slow global heating. Making substantial emissions reductions of this gas would take a miracle but we need miracles because we are like lemmings at the cliff edge.
Our own cliff requires little more than a higher sea wall compared with, say, Pakistan where climate change has made monsoon rains extreme. In 2020, floods were so severe that at least 1500 people died and 16 million children were affected. In the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, where normally four glaciers melt each summer, in recent years 16 have shed their water into Pakistan – which contributes 1 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions.
So Pakistan and many other parts of the Third World need this miracle more than we in industrialised countries who have inadvertently caused these disasters. Radically reducing methane emissions would be like reducing the flow of a hot tap to a trickle. The inexorable rise in world temperatures would continue, but at a dwindle.
Methane differs from other greenhouse gases in that its effects are extremely powerful for a very short time. Climate science puts it at between 80 and 90 times more efficient at warming the planet than carbon dioxide but only for the 25 to 30 years it hangs around the world. It then dissipates into CO2 and continues as a warming blanket for centuries.
It’s a big ask and the prospects are not good but we have to look at them.
Methane is ranked as the second most significant greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide. As measured by scientists at the Global Carbon Project, based at Stanford University in the US, these emissions have increased by 20 percent in just the last two decades.
Methane, says Rob Jackson, the project’s chair, is a climate menace the world is ignoring.
He’s not referring to methane released by thawing tundra and from wetlands and degrading tropical forests. He’s concern about methane produced by human activities. The thing about methane from this source, he says, is that unlike other fossil fuels, we could live without it.
We don’t need it for wind vanes or solar panels or to make batteries for EVs – all of which require, in one way or another, coal or oil. Methane contributes nothing to the petrochemical industries which produce those plastics we use daily. There are other ways to heat houses and cook food.
More than half of all methane emissions from human activities are reckoned to come from agriculture. Rice is the problem but if we reduced the 1.5 billion cows that graze the planet, the methane from rice fields would be insignificant.
Climate science is hard to live with – so hard that the majority of us live as if it doesn’t exist. What the science says about methane is especially hard for a country whose economy is based on the products of nine million methane-exhaling ruminants.
And whose Prime Minister believes our energy security will come in an LNG bottle.
New Zealand is a signatory to the Global Methane Pledge, established by the Biden administration and the EU in 2021. The 159 countries who signed are committed to reduce methane emissions by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. But it’s non-binding so we won’t be castigated because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade admits we’ll be pushing it to make even 10 percent by 2030.
Former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton foresaw the size of our problem. In his 2019 report Farms, Forests and Fossil Fuels, he advised dealing with methane according to its different sources. Fossil methane refers to what we know as natural gas, which is 90 percent methane and comes out of the ground. Biogenic methane is the term for that which comes out of the gut of ruminant animals.
This is the so-called split gas solution.
The important thing about biogenic methane for us is that it makes up 55 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2024 report by Simon Upton (now into his second term as parliamentary commissioner for the environment).
We can’t not address this problem. Our efforts so far have been noticed. This is from the New York Review of Books on June 11, 2026:
“… New Zealand – a Pledge signatory and one of the world’s biggest livestock and dairy producers – cut its mid-century targets for methane by half after lobbying from the agriculture industry.”
The announcement by the Government of the $51 million AgriZeroNZ public-private partnership to extend research into methane inhibitors as feed additives, including seaweed and the chemical known as 3-NOP, will no doubt be closely watched. But reducing emissions by 20-30 percent will do nothing to reduce the nitrogen in our waterways or the tropical deforestation associated with the international beef industry.
A long-term view would see that in a climate-changed world land will be a priority and hectare-for-food value will have us eating more plants. The Stanford scientists estimate that beef provides less than 1 percent of calories globally but accounts for 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Dairy and meat are non-essentials for health but have become prestigious symbols of affluence in non-western cultures where economies thrived for centuries on plant-based diets.
The thing about methane is that animal agriculture underpins our way of life. No political party dares look beyond next year’s returns on milk powder and beef, especially after recent record profits. Why does climate adaptation not allocate some of that $51m to support those farmers who are adapting their practices by reducing cow numbers, going organic or venturing into horticulture?
How severe a storm will it take? Climate science tells us we’re effecting in a couple of centuries changes equivalent in magnitude to those that occurred over millennia. Paleontologists have enabled us to conjure images of those distant eras but we stretch our imaginations with dread to picture what the world could be like in as short a time as another century.
Let’s not give up. Just give up methane.
