Methane is a major anthropogenic greenhouse gas, second only to carbon dioxide in its impact on climate change. Methane has a variety of sources that can be small, geographically dispersed, and not related to energy sectors.
Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert and Wolf-Peter Schill analyze methane emission abatement options in five different sectors and identify economic mitigation potentials for different CO2 prices.
They recommend an economically efficient global methane mitigation portfolio for the year 2020 that includes the sectors of livestock and manure, rice management, solid waste, coal mine methane and natural gas.
Depending on assumptions of social costs of carbon, this portfolio leads to global methane mitigation levels of 1.5 or 1.9 GtCO2-eq at overall costs of around $14 billion or $30 billion and benefit/cost ratios of 1.4 and 3.0, respectively.
They also examine an economically less efficient alternative portfolio that excludes cost-effective agricultural mitigation options. It leads to comparable abatement levels, but has higher costs and lower benefit/cost ratios.
Spending an even larger amount of money – say, $250 billion – on methane mitigation would be economically inefficient. If the global community wanted to spend such an amount, Kemfert and Schill recommend spreading the effort cost-effectively over different greenhouse gases.
They conclude that, while methane mitigation alone will not suffice to solve the climate problem, it is a vital part of a cost-effective climate policy, and urge policy makers to put more emphasis on methane mitigation.
Dr David Anthoff concludes that a methane emission mitigation policy that follows the spending schedule suggested by the Copenhagen Consensus project does not pass a benefit-cost test. More reasonable methane mitigation policies spend less on mitigation in the years 2010-20, but more in later time periods. Such policies can generate significant net benefits. At the same time, they are no substitutes for CO2 emission mitigation policies because they do not alter the long term temperature trend beyond marginal perturbations. Joint methane and CO2 emission mitigation is an optimal policy mix and leads to highest net benefits, suggesting that a “either-or” approach between CO2 or methane emission mitigation is misguided.
Dr David Johansson and Dr Fredrik Hedenus note that many sources of methane are non-point emission sources. This makes it harder to regulate and control methane emissions than most carbon dioxide emissions. The most important single sector emitting methane is livestock production, and the technical measures available to reduce emissions from livestock are small. The combination of being a non-point emission source and having few technical abatement measures implies that output based policies may be appropriate policies for reducing these emissions. Their back of the envelope estimates point to a benefit-cost ratio of about 2 of having a beef meat tax of US$ 1 in OECD countries. This would reduce global emissions by 30 to 70 M ton CO2 equivalents per year using GWP calculated over 100 years.
Analysis Papers, written by experts in this field, provide a comprehensive exploration of the costs and benefits of one solution to climate change.
Perspective Papers provide a critique of the assumptions and calculations used in the Analysis Paper, and provide another expert opinion on this solution to climate change.
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Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert
Author of An Analysis of Methane Mitigation as a Response to Climate Change. Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert is head of the Department of Energy, Transportation, Environment at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin), and Professor of Energy Economics and Sustainability at the Hertie School of Governance (HSoG). From 2004 to 2009, she was Professor of Environmental Economics at Humboldt-University Berlin. She is an expert in the areas of energy and climate economics.
Wolf-Peter Schill
Co-author of An Analysis of Methane Mitigation as a Response to Climate Change. Wolf-Peter Schill is Research Associate at the Department of Energy, Transportation, Environment at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin). His fields of interest are economics of climate change, renewable energy and electricity markets.
Dr. David Anthoff
Author of A Perspective Paper on Methane Mitigation as a Response to Climate Change. Dr. David Anthoff is an environmental economist working on climate change. He is a post doctoral associate of the Economic and Social Research Institute (Dublin) and a freelance consultant on climate change issues. He holds a PhD in Economics from Hamburg University and the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling, a MSc in Environmental Change and Management from the University of Oxford and a M.Phil. in Philosophy from LMU Munich. In the autumn of 2008, he was a visiting research fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.
Dr. Daniel Johansson
Author of A Perspective Paper on Methane Mitigation as a Response to Climate Change. Dr. Daniel Johansson is a post-doc at the Division of Physical Resource Theory, Department of Energy and Environment at Chalmers University of Technology. Dr. Johansson's main research interests are related to energy and climate change economics and policy.
