It is difficult to know exactly what approach current President-elect Donald Trump will take regarding climate. Candidates say a lot when they compete for office, and history shows that it would be unwise to take those words too literally.
Trump will likely choose to continue, to some extent, down the path his predecessor started. Big Oil has gone on record asking President Biden not to cancel his bill. Of course, he could reverse it, as many predicted. It’s not as if he’s putting “smart regulation” at the center of his climate plan and is likely to use data to get “the best bang for his buck.”
No matter what he decides to do, uncertainty can make an individual feel helpless.
Fortunately, methane is much better known than it used to be. For a long time, carbon dioxide emissions were the only emissions everyone cared about. Carbon dioxide emissions are certainly important. After all, most of global warming is due to carbon dioxide emissions. But methane, the second-largest cause of global warming, has certain properties that make it particularly noteworthy.
The first of these is that the warming power of methane is more than 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. Methane therefore accelerates short-term warming, making it an important target in our efforts to quickly slow climate change.
In other words, reducing methane gives us a much better chance of meeting our climate goals while finding long-term solutions to our carbon dioxide problem.
The good news is that the technologies that national and supranational governments rely on to inform and enforce climate regulations increasingly come from private companies. If a government in the United States or elsewhere decides to repeal the methane law, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in the dark. Organizations that use Earth observation technology and understandable geospatial data that provide access still have that technology and data. And their insights can be shared with anyone who wants to take a more active role in the climate crisis and hold companies accountable.
That’s why we’re launching the first methane-centric search augmented generation large-scale language model just in time for COP29 in Baku. In plain English, this is a machine learning model that can understand and generate human language text, but analyzes it from external knowledge sources, especially satellites and in-house.
We combined this with the open source Mether Watch map released at COP28. This means that, through an interface reminiscent of ChatGPT, anyone with an internet connection can query about methane emissions via text and instantly receive a response corresponding to changes on the map. These insights are available at all levels, from the local level to the facility-specific level. Individuals also have access to extensive inventory across a variety of asset categories.
In addition to our efforts, Climate TRACE and Climate.gov have made interactive maps available through their websites. The Intergovernmental Authority of Development has also curated a variety of open source maps through its Center for Climate Prediction and Applications.
One of the reasons open access tools like these are so important is that we live in a very volatile world where economic, geopolitical, and technological developments are always distracting us from what is constant: the planet getting hotter. . We cannot take for granted that this or that government will stay the course, or that the wider public will do their part to solve the climate crisis, especially at a time of economic hardship. That’s why those who are doing their best to do their part to avoid irreversible climate collapse keep our collective eyes on the prize – politicians, activists, businesspeople and media people. And we provide environmental intelligence companies, climate technology companies, and non-governmental organizations with the data, insights, and guidance they need to do just that.
Companies tempted to reduce regulations on methane will be assured that they know they are being watched, and that anyone connected to the Internet will misreport their emissions, underreport their emissions, or not report their emissions at all. If they know they can show it, they will: We must act regardless of whether we face political pressure to do so. Meanwhile, investors and shareholders can vote with their wallets to vet potential investees on climate change.
As a result, even as governments come and go, political priorities rise and fall, and uncertainty abounds, we remain one step ahead and stay on the path to net zero.
Antoine Rostand is president and co-founder of a global climate technology company.kairos.
