Marcelo Mena |
At a royal reception with no air conditioning, I watched the world’s most privileged people endure dangerous heat. We have a fast, cheap tool to cool our planet — and the fight over whether to use it is happening right now in Brussels.
All summer, Europe has been grappling with brutal and acute effects of the climate crisis, with wildfires raging all across the continent. Weeks of excessive heat have shattered records, claimed thousands of lives, and strained precarious infrastructure. Now that heat is exacerbating wildfires from Belgium to Greece, with a new study finding wildfires will only increase even in the best-case climate scenario without action. It is a stark reminder that it has never been more urgent to tackle the biggest drivers of climate change. I witnessed a microcosm of this crisis firsthand during London Climate Week. On a late afternoon, I stood in a sweltering St James’s Palace. The room boasted gilded ceilings, but no air conditioning — only the sound of order papers turned into fans. Around me, ministers, heads of UN agencies, philanthropists, and a king dabbed at their foreheads. The United Nations Secretary-General spoke; His Majesty King Charles III listened, visibly warm. I have spent my career studying how heat moves through the atmosphere. I had never seen global warming rendered so plainly: even the world’s most sheltered people, in one of its grandest rooms, could not escape the dangerous impacts of climate change.
The following day made the point again, and more bluntly. A gathering on extreme heat was called off — because of extreme heat. Across England and much of Europe, temperature records were broken that week. The conference halls of London Climate Action Week debated resilience while London itself supplied the evidence: schools shut, transport buckled, hospitals fortified.
Yet the mood in that sweltering palace was not despair. It was closer to impatience, as we came to talk about a remedy that is sitting in plain sight. Days earlier, the United Nations Secretary-General had launched a global Call to Action on methane, naming nine priority actions across the three sectors that emit it: fossil fuels, agriculture and waste. Methane drives roughly a third of the warming we feel today, but it only stays in the atmosphere for a decade or two, while carbon dioxide can impact the climate for centuries. Cutting methane significantly this decade will reduce temperatures within our own lifetimes — avoiding 0.3°C of warming, the distance between many of the heatwaves we can survive and the ones we cannot.
The economics are common sense. The International Energy Agency estimates that around 75% of oil and gas methane can be eliminated with existing technology, most of it at little to no net cost. Some tactics even create economic value because the gas you stop leaking is gas you can sell. The damages avoided add up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year — more than double what the cuts themselves would cost — before you count the cleaner air, the protected harvests and the hundreds of thousands of lives spared each year. No breakthrough is required. No miracles needed. The technologies exist today, and they strengthen energy and food security at the same moment they cool the planet.
That is what I had come to show the King: reducing methane and other superpollutants is the cheapest, fastest way to lower these dangerous rising temperatures. When I reached him — his face damp like everyone else’s in that room — I said what the afternoon seemed to be asking out loud: wouldn’t it be good if the climate had an emergency brake? It does. It’s methane reduction. I thanked him, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, for lifting this solution onto the highest stage there is. Guterres framed it more sharply than any scientist would dare: we phased out leaded petrol, we healed the ozone layer, and “methane pollution must be next.” It is, he said, a fight we can win — and win in time to feel it.
Winning it, though, now hinges on the European Union’s Methane Regulation — the single most consequential piece of climate policy on the table today that will dictate what Europe does about the methane it imports. The EU emits only about 6% of the world’s energy-sector methane inside its own borders. But it buys 90% of its gas and 97% of its oil, and those purchases drive close to a third of global energy methane. The methane vented and flared abroad to keep European homes warm is largely invisible in Europe’s own accounts, yet it is real, it is enormous, and counted honestly it would add close to a fifth to the bloc’s reported footprint.
This is why the Regulation’s import provisions matter more than almost anything else we could do this decade. From 2027, exporters selling into Europe are meant to monitor and report methane to the same standard as EU operators, the strongest in the world. By 2030, a methane-intensity standard, or a measurement that looks at the volume of methane emissions relative to the total amount of oil or gas produced or imported, takes effect. The tools to verify who is leaking already exist: the satellites of the International Methane Emissions Observatory, the alert system that has flagged thousands of super-emitters, the transparency database Europe is standing up this autumn.
Turn Europe’s buying power into a performance requirement and you reach far beyond Europe: analysts estimate a robust import standard could cut roughly a third of all global oil-and-gas methane by improving standards for all who want access to the world’s largest energy market. In parallel, EU investment in renewable energy deployment, energy efficiency, and electrification – decreases the region’s future oil and gas demand and allows the EU to choose the cleanest supplies.
Predictably, that leverage of the EU methane regulation on imported fossil fuels is exactly what parts of the industry are now working to curb. A coalition of fossil fuel importers and producers is pressing to “stop the clock,” nix the rule, and defer the import obligations that give it global reach. Following pressure, the European Commission recently recommended rolling back penalties for oil and gas companies that don’t comply with the regulation for three years.
Despite pushback, the regulation would slow warming by reducing methane emissions by at least 1.9 million tons annually, minimize methane leaks, and allow companies to export oil and gas that would otherwise be wasted through flaring, venting, or leaks. To weaken the import standard now would be to take the single highest-leverage, best-value climate policy within reach, and quietly file it away — in the very season that firefighters battle devastating wildfires and even palaces have run out of cool air.
Back in St. James’s Palace, I kept thinking about how much care had gone into building it to last, and how little the century it was built for resembles the one we now inhabit. We cannot retrofit the atmosphere the way we might retrofit a palace. But we do, for once, have the emergency brake: proven, affordable, ready. The only question left is whether we are willing to pull it. Everyone in that sweltering hall already knew the answer. The rest of the world should catch up before the next heatwave makes the argument for us.
Marcelo Mena is CEO of the Global Methane Hub and a former environment minister of Chile. He is an environmental engineer specialising in atmospheric science and emissions measurement.