The European Union and USA they drove yesterday in the COP26 an alliance to reduce methane emissions by 30% this decade, a global pact against that potent greenhouse gas less known than carbon dioxide to which a hundred countries have joined, but not China, India and Russia.
Meeting that goal would limit the rise in temperatures by 0.2 ° C by 2050 and prevent 200,000 premature deaths, hundreds of thousands of emergency hospital admissions for asthma, and the loss of 20 million tons of crops.
year.
“Around 30% of global warming since the Industrial Revolution is due to methane emissions”, but “it is one of the gases that we can cut faster. And doing so will immediately slow down climate change,” he said in the presentation of the initiative was the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
Methane (CH4) comes mainly from landfills, the livestock sector and the energy industry, and it is the latter area of activity that has “undoubtedly the most reduction potential,” Von der Leyen said.
“About half of the heat we experience” comes from methane emissions, said US President Joe Biden, describing one of several greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, tropospheric ozone, water vapor or fluorinated gases, among others.
For the most powerful man in the world, President Biden shows quite a bit of his soft side at this summit. On Monday, he apologized in Glasgow on behalf of the United States for Donald Trump, whom he beat a year ago. A day earlier, in Rome, Biden almost cried when talking about his deceased son and the Pope.
Ignoring the policy maxim that apologies show weakness, he says “sorry” all the time: for being late, for speaking too long, or for being boring.
PAL
