It’s difficult to know exactly what approach Donald Trump, now the president-elect, will take in respect of the climate. Candidates say many things when they’re jostling to get into office, and history tells us that it’s unwise to take them too literally.
It’s possible Trump will opt to continue more or less down the path on which his predecessor started out; Big Oil is on the record asking him not to undo President Biden’s legislation. Of course, it’s also possible that he will roll it back, as many have predicted. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he will put “smart regulation” at the center of his climate plans, using data to get the most “bang for his buck.”
Whatever he decides to do, the uncertainty can leave individuals feeling powerless.
Methane, fortunately, is much better known than it once was. For a long time, carbon dioxide emissions were the only emissions anyone cared about. Carbon dioxide emissions certainly matter — they are, after all, responsible for the majority of global warming — but methane, which is the second-greatest contributor to global warming, has certain properties that make it especially worthy of attention.
First among these is that methane’s warming power is more than 80 times that of carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. Methane therefore accelerates near-term warming, which makes it a critical target in our efforts to slow climate change quickly.
In other words, reducing methane gives us a much better chance to meet our climate goals while we work on longer-term solutions to the problem of carbon dioxide.
The good news is that the technology on which national and supranational governments rely both to inform climate regulations and to enforce them increasingly comes from private companies. If a government in the United States or elsewhere decides to abandon methane laws, then, it doesn’t necessarily plunge us into darkness. Those organisations that wield Earth Observation technology and the intelligible geospatial data to which they provide access still have that technology and that data. And their insights can be shared with anyone who wants to play a more active role in the climate crisis and hold companies to account.
This is why, to coincide with COP29 in Baku, wehave released a first-of-its-kind, methane-focused retrieval-augmented generation large language model. In plain English, that’s a machine learning model that can comprehend and generate human language text, but one that uses an AI framework that grounds the model in external sources of knowledge — specifically, in the terabytes of geospatial methane data that we draw from satellites and analyze in-house.
We have combined it with the open-source Methane Watch map that we unveiled at COP28. This means that, through an interface reminiscent of ChatGPT, anyone with an internet connection can make a query through text about methane emissions and instantly receive a response that will correspond to changes in the map. These insights are available at every level, from the regional down to the level of a specific facility. Individuals can also access extensive inventories across different asset categories.
In addition to our efforts, Climate TRACE and Climate.gov have made interactive maps available via their websites. The Intergovernmental Authority of Development has also curated a selection of open-source maps through its Climate Predictions and Applications Centre.
One reason why open-access tools like this are so important is that we live in a highly changeable world, where developments — economic, geopolitical, technological — are always conspiring to distract us from something that is constant: the planet is getting hotter. We can’t take it for granted that this or that government will stay the course or, indeed, that the wider public will remain committed to playing its part in tackling the climate crisis, especially during times of economic hardship. It’s for that reason that those who are committed to doing their bit keep our collective eyes on the prize, from politicians to activists to business actors to people working in the media, which is to avoid irreversible climate collapse. And it’s for environmental intelligence companies, climate technology companies and non-governmental organizations to give them the data, insights and guidance they need to do that.
If companies that are tempted to cut corners on methane know they’re being watched, and know that anyone with an internet connection can reliably show them to be misreporting emissions, underreporting emissions or not reporting emissions at all, then they’re going to have to behave, regardless as to whether they face political pressure to do so or not. Investors and shareholders, meanwhile, can vote with their wallets, vetting their potential investees along climate lines.
The result is that, while governments come and go, political priorities rise and fall, and even when uncertainty abounds, we stay on the path to net zero and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Antoine Rostand is president and co-founder of global climate technology company Kayrros.
