Methane Leaks, World Peace & Bicycles
A thought about saving life on earth
Methane Leaks
As you’ve all probably seen, some mysterious military (um, Russia?) blew up the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
The broken pipes are hemorrhaging methane gas, which is bubbling up to the surface and getting burped into the atmosphere. From the sky, it looks like this:
Methane is really, really scary. It causes intense global warming almost immediately after escaping into the air, and it stays highly-potent for at least 20 years before beginning to fade. Scientists calculate that the climate impact of methane is about 80x worse than carbon dioxide. So thanks to the “colossal amount” of methane being leaked from the Nord Stream, which was just named the worst methane leak ever reported anywhere in the world, summer 2023, summer 2024 – and about twenty summers after that, and all their subsequent hurricane seasons – are going to be that much more hell-ish all over the planet.
We need to do something about this leak!
Hey, why isn’t anyone doing something?! Hello, anybody??
Can’t we “catch” that methane, or neutralize it, to prevent it from causing climate-change? We can see exactly where it’s coming from, after all. The methane isn’t super-diffused into the air yet (which would make it much harder to catch or neutralize) – no, the gas is highly concentrated in those bubbles hitting the surface.
There are a few technologies that effectively capture methane or transform it into something more benign, at least in laboratories. When I read about those technologies, I think:
What about a fleet of drones or helicopters that spray some kind of chlorine-solution or zeolite-solution onto the bubbles?
What about a kind of foam full of methane-eating bacteria or microalgae that can float on the surface of the water at the site of the bubbles?
What about a floating platform, or floating barrier, that can flare the methane, lighting it on fire to transform it into carbon dioxide (still bad, but 80x less bad)?
These may be ridiculous ideas. I don’t know, I’m not an expert. But given the extreme danger to humanity, we ought to be trying some far-fetched things.
So why are we not even trying these wacky ideas (or other, better ideas)?
One of the problems is that it’s not clear who would pay for the clean-up of sudden, one-time methane leaks, like the one right happening now in the Baltic Sea. A government? Big companies?
If I had a startup that had invented a way to capture that methane, and we could get permission from the Danish and Swedish governments to deploy it (because the leaks are technically in the Danish and Swedish parts of the sea), where would I send the bill?
There is an emerging market of carbon-removal-credits in which private companies, like Stripe and Google, pay for greenhouse gas cleanup. But that market is based on predictable, ongoing payments that can be planned in advance; I’m not sure whether those budgets are agile enough to respond quickly to a sudden methane leak.
Because the buyer of a working solution is unclear (a solution that, by the way, doesn’t exist yet), it’s even more unclear who should finance the R&D work that is necessary to invent that working solution in the first place. Somebody needs to finance dozens, or hundreds, of attempts to find a solution, to pay for the testing of the wacky ideas, in the hopes that at least one will actually work.
I don’t think startup venture capital is working on the problem of sudden, one-time methane leaks, at least not in a significant way. I only know of one startup, Frost Methane, that is working on a related problem. They are financed by some of the new climate-focused VCs, and they also seem to have received some small amount of funding from the US Government (via the ARPA-E program). Are there others? If you readers know of any other startups, academic labs, or big companies working on this, I am interested, please let me know.
Sudden, one-time methane leaks is one of the scariest things facing humanity. In the coming years the earth’s permafrost, mostly in Siberia, will probably melt (because of global warming) and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. This will almost certainly have an irreversible, massively accelerating impact on global warming.
The last time something similar happened was 250 million years ago, in an event that scientists call “The Great Dying” (not a joke), the largest mass extinction of species ever. Some theorize that methane released from Siberia caused intense climate change, and that the temporarily-hellish climate was bad enough to kill off most life on earth. Not even the cockroaches survived; it took millions of years for life to recover.
So, all I’m saying is, it would be nice to have some kind of tool for responding to methane leaks. Now is a good time to invent it.
This seems like a problem well-suited to an X-Prize. If any readers are involved in planning X-Prizes, consider this my suggestion.
World Peace
The Nord Stream blowup is the latest climate catastrophe of the Russia-Ukraine war, but it is not the first. The ongoing climate impact of the war is devastatingly massive.
I have only read one thoughtful analysis of the climate impact of the war. The human impact – the death and suffering and destruction – is, of course, more important, more urgent, and demands more of our attention. So I think journalists have made fewer efforts to talk about the climate impact of the war, for (justifiable) fear of seeming unconcerned with the families and towns on the front-lines, not to mention the highly-consequential geopolitics of the whole thing.
But if we allow ourselves to think about it for a minute: all of those explosions and plumes of smoke, the thousands of destroyed buildings and bridges and factories, all of it is releasing just a massive amount of greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere.
Then (and here I’m just summarizing the article I linked to above), as a reaction to the aggressions of a mad-man, reasonable governments all over the world are increasing their defense budgets, buying more missiles and tanks and fighter jets – and all of that equipment (the production of it, the maintenance of it, the use of it) consumes massive amounts of planet-killing oil and gas.
It makes me think that the most powerful force for a healthy climate, the most effective way to battle global warming, must be – surely is – the pursuit of world peace. More than electric cars, reusable containers for food, or new solar panels, peace among nations would have the biggest climate-positive impact of all. The World Peace - Climate connection is so clear and so urgently necessary.
A peaceful Eurasia would have prevented the methane leaks in the Baltic, that’s for sure.
Bicycles
And if we really care about world peace – here’s where the argument comes full-circle – then one of the most impactful things each one of us can do is to ride our bicycles.
Because a majority of the madmen threatening and starting wars these days are funding their aggression by selling oil and gas. Putin’s war machine is funded by the revenues from his oil and gas companies. Iran’s brutal repression of the women-led protests happening there right now is funded by oil and gas sales. Dangerous dictators from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia are buying rockets, ammunition and mercenary armies with the money from selling oil and gas.
The oil and gas they sell has many different uses, of course. But the number-one use of petroleum, accounting for almost half of its use, is producing gasoline for cars.
The gasoline we buy in America and France probably does not come from Russia or Iran these days. Car drivers in China and India are more likely to be the direct buyers. But the markets for oil and gas are global, and demand in the West impacts prices worldwide.
So if you care about climate change, then World Peace should be your priority.
And if you care about World Peace, then weaning yourself off of fossil fuels, especially gasoline, should be your priority.
And to save life on earth, we need to finance some serious R&D to deal with methane leaks.