In mid-October 2015 residents of the Porter Ranch neighborhood in northwestern Los Angeles started suffering from headaches, nausea, dizziness, and nosebleeds. About a week later an employee of Southern California Gas discovered the cause of their symptoms: a leak at the company’s nearby Aliso Canyon facility, a depleted oil field that serves as the second-largest natural gas storage system in the US. The leak’s full extent wasn’t verified until early November, when a scientist-pilot hired by the California Air Resources Board flew overhead with sensors that detected methane levels so high he thought the instruments were malfunctioning. By early January Governor Jerry Brown had declared a state of emergency. It was certainly a health emergency for the nearly 10,000 residents who were evacuated, but it was also a climate emergency: by the time it was finally plugged on February 18, about six billion cubic feet of natural gas—109,000 metric tons of methane—had escaped. For those four months Aliso Canyon was the largest known source of human-caused methane emissions in the US, and effectively doubled the methane emission rate for the entire Los Angeles area.
It was the biggest documented methane leak in US history—an event on the scale of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil platform blowout in the Gulf of Mexico—and garnered global headlines in the months leading up to the December 2015 adoption of the Paris Agreement. That was arguably the moment of peak attention to methane. A decade later methane’s part in the climate crisis remains largely overlooked, even though it is responsible for around 30 percent of all global warming to date.
The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is now 2.6 times higher than it was in 1776, when the Italian polymath Alessandro Volta first identified and isolated the gas from vapors bubbling up on the marshy shores of Lake Maggiore. Volta’s experiments proved it was highly flammable, so he dubbed it “combustible air.” That moniker anticipated its value as a fuel, in the form of natural gas, but also its function as a kind of atmospheric blowtorch. The simplest of all hydrocarbons, just four hydrogens arrayed around a single carbon atom, a methane molecule packs an enormous climate-warming punch. Though carbon dioxide has a longer life span and is far more abundant in the atmosphere, over a period of twenty years methane traps eighty-six times as much of the Earth’s outgoing infrared radiation.* The combustion of methane is also a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, burned in power plants and furnaces in its more familiar form as natural gas.
In 2015, for the first time in history, global average temperatures were one degree Celsius warmer than preindustrial temperatures. Today the world is 1.4 degrees warmer. Methane is only one factor in that trend, but it’s an important one. And as the rate of warming accelerates, the probability and severity of extreme weather events ratchet ever higher, too.
On the morning of January 7, 2025, about twenty miles due south of Aliso Canyon, residents of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles awoke and started their daily routines. By nightfall their world had become unrecognizable. A wildfire driven by furious Santa Ana winds consumed much of the seaside community. Across town the neighborhood of Altadena was also largely destroyed by the Eaton fire. According to World Weather Attribution, an international group of climate scientists, the extremely hot, dry conditions that made those fires so destructive and difficult to contain were made about 35 percent more likely by human-caused climate change. Survivors lamented how late the evacuation order had come from city officials—and how the fire warning issued the day before by the National Weather Service and posted on social media hadn’t fully conveyed the severity of the threat. If either alert had come through with sufficient urgency, residents could have bought themselves a bit more time to save pets, check on neighbors, grab family heirlooms and mementos. But the speed and ferocity with which the fires blasted out of the hills seemed to catch nearly everyone by surprise.
One way to think about methane is as the Santa Ana wind of climate change: a terribly potent accelerant in a fast-warming world. But methane’s outsize climate effects and relatively short life span also present an opportunity, reason for hope at a moment when many governments, corporations, and institutions are retreating from their climate commitments.
That’s the argument that the Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson lays out in his recent book, Into the Clear Blue Sky. “If we want to reduce greenhouse gas warming over the next decade or two,” he writes, “reducing atmospheric methane concentrations through emissions reductions and atmospheric removal is the best—and perhaps only—lever we have to shave peak temperatures and reduce dangerous weather disasters and heat waves.”
Into the Clear Blue Sky is a sustained rallying cry. The book opens with Jackson’s trip to the Vatican, where the decades-long project of restoring Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes provides an analogy that guides the ensuing accounts of scientists and start-ups working on different kinds of atmospheric restoration. He asks the lead conservator of the Sistine restoration project how far in advance she and her colleagues plan for the frescoes’ care. “We are realists,” she tells him. “We act for the following decade, and we hope the following decade will act for the decade after that.” This is shorter than the timelines on which we typically understand climate action, but it is one that fits better with political cycles. People like seeing immediate returns on their efforts and investments. Tackling methane, Jackson explains, can deliver that.
Most of the book, and most of Jackson’s own research, is focused on methane because it’s the only greenhouse gas that could be restored to preindustrial levels in our lifetimes. Doing so could avert half a degree Celsius of warming—and with it an immense amount of future suffering. Scrubbing methane back to Volta-era levels is more than feasible, Jackson insists: “Essentially all of the three billion tons of extra methane in the atmosphere today were released over the last twenty years.” Cutting methane is like pulling an emergency brake—not a substitute for pressing hard on the primary brakes of cutting carbon dioxide from energy, transport, and industry but a necessary complement.
It’s curious how much attention and financing geoengineering schemes have attracted from venture capitalists and tech titans like Bill Gates when methane offers the most cost-effective climate hack of all: reduce emissions to zero and let the atmosphere diligently scrub out the gas within a decade or two. That, in turn, would lower the likelihood of Palisades-scale disasters and slow our approach to truly irreversible climatic shifts.
Jackson chairs the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of researchers that tallies up total emissions of all greenhouse gases from their various sources. He and his colleagues have been warning for some time that policymakers are ignoring methane at our collective peril. Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide levels keep rising steadily, but their trajectories are more or less what scientists expect, based on observed rates of fossil fuel consumption, deforestation, and fertilizer use. Over the past five years, however, methane concentrations have been increasing at a rate that exceeds anything since record-keeping began, consistent with more dire modeling scenarios. Methane is the wild card.
This unpredictability first came to light in 2007, when methane levels suddenly began surging after nearly a decade of holding steady. For years scientists puzzled over the cause. Was it fracking? The spike did coincide with the onset of the US shale boom. Was it agriculture? After all, more tropical forests were being converted into cattle pastures. (Cows burp copious amounts of methane as a byproduct of gut microbes that metabolize their cellulose-rich food.) Was it a breakdown in the “sink”—scientists’ catchall term for all the natural processes that break down methane? Measurements suggested a decline in the abundance of the hydroxyl radical, the atmospheric constituent that reacts with methane and converts it to carbon dioxide. The range of suspects was vexingly diverse because methane is emitted by pretty much everything humans do, from producing energy to growing food to mining to storing waste. It streams out of rice paddies and livestock and manure pits and coal seams and reservoirs and landfills and 4.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells around the world. Methane escapes from century-old cast-iron pipes snaking under the streets of East Coast cities and from the gas furnaces and kitchen stoves that those disintegrating pipes supply.
In the past couple of years, clues from carbon isotopes and other evidence have led most experts to conclude that the primary contributor to the spike is likely tropical wetlands. (All told, human activities account for two thirds of global methane emissions, while natural sources like wetlands, lakes, wildfires, and termites—which give off methane in a similar way to cows, through microbial activity in their guts—make up the balance.) As more land gets inundated thanks to wetter weather patterns, more organic matter gets trapped underwater, creating ideal low-oxygen conditions for methane-spewing microbes. And as it gets warmer, the metabolism of those methanogens gets cranked up. This has unsettling implications. It means that humans have—through our fossil fuel burning, agriculture, and deforestation—warmed the climate to the point that some natural feedback mechanisms are kicking into overdrive.
“The most important science question we face now is the question of carbon-climate feedbacks,” a NOAA methane expert told me in 2019. “The question that’s really important is, what’s coming down the road?” Will wetlands become a source of methane that feeds more warming, leading to more wetlands and more warming? For now thawing permafrost isn’t a major methane source. But that could change: thawing tundra could wake up more methane-producing microbes, whose output would fuel more warming, then faster thawing, leading to more methane.
Meanwhile, there are warning signs from other poorly studied parts of the globe. A team of scientists recently reported their discovery of places where methane has begun bubbling up from the seafloor near the coast of southern Antarctica. “This system is rapidly changing before our eyes from one year to the next,” said the study’s lead scientist. If those spots behave like other seafloor methane seeps that have been more closely studied, they warned, this could signal the emergence of a new source of emissions—“a fundamental shift” that’s not currently accounted for in most climate models. That, in turn, would suggest we are in for even more, and more rapid, warming than expected.
Such rapid shifts threaten to tip the climate into new, unstable states. In October a comprehensive report by 160 scientists announced that one major tipping point has already been passed: warm-water coral reefs are heading for irreversible decline. In other words, unless we remove enough greenhouse gases to turn the planetary thermostat back down below 1.2 degrees, most coral reefs are doomed to catastrophic bleaching. The dieback of the Amazon forest and the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could become inevitable at just above 1.5 degrees of warming—which the world will likely reach by 2030.
The thrust of these recent findings is that critical components of the climate are more vulnerable at lower temperature increases than previously thought. The most disconcerting observations come from scientists studying the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the complex oceanic conveyor belt that carries warm water away from the equator and, among its other civilization-enabling contributions, keeps Northern Europe temperate. Just a few years ago experts noted that the AMOC was weakening but deemed the likelihood of its collapse to be low. Now some are warning that the point at which AMOC’s eventual shutdown becomes inevitable could be crossed in the next decade or two and that the collapse could actually occur around the end of this century. There is much debate among scientists over just how probable or imminent that scenario is. Regardless, the restrained language of journal articles cannot do justice to the scale of havoc that would result. Europe would experience much colder winters and perhaps centuries-long drought conditions, upending the global food system in ways that are beyond adaptation.
How can we avoid this dark path? “The single most important prevention measure,” the report’s authors write, “is a rapid phase-out of greenhouse gas emissions, methane in particular.” The steep slope of the line representing global methane concentrations on the charts compiled monthly by scientists at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (the very scientists vilified by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Trump apparatchiks as “drivers of the climate alarm industry”), climbing up and up with no peak in sight, thus serves as a kind of climate memento mori. We are closer to these civilizational cliffs than we thought, even just a few years ago. These are scenarios we should be scrambling to avoid because, as Jackson notes, “you can turn a wrench to quench methane emissions in an oil field, but there is no wrench to turn for the Amazon.”
For now, however, plenty of wrenches are at hand. Tackling methane might not require a political movement or economy-transforming policy shifts. It’s a complex challenge, but it’s one that might yield to entrepreneurial schemes, regulatory tweaks, and technological solutions.
There are proven technologies for diverting food waste and capturing gas from landfills, and promising new approaches to irrigating rice paddies. Livestock is a knottier problem: the methane footprint of meat and dairy production rivals that of the fossil fuel industry. Getting people to shift their diets away from meat and dairy is a tough sell; in much of the developing world, the trends are moving in the opposite direction. Still, Jackson assesses the prospects for plant-based meat substitutes (limited) and feed additives like seaweed that can lower methane production in cows’ guts (promising).
But the best opportunity for slashing methane emissions is in the fossil fuel sector—which, of course, also happens to be the biggest source of carbon dioxide. The International Energy Agency’s most recent analysis suggests that 30 percent of all methane that escapes fossil fuel infrastructure worldwide could be captured and used at zero net cost. (The IEA also noted that stopping unnecessary leaks and flaring from oil and gas operators would capture more than double the amount of gas that is currently locked up in the Strait of Hormuz thanks to the US war on Iran.) Independent surveys of major US oil and gas basins have consistently shown that emissions are much higher than both EPA estimates and companies’ own reported figures. A 2024 study led by Stanford scientists (not including Jackson) drew on a million discrete measurements from aerial surveys and found that nearly 3 percent of total US natural gas production is lost to unintentional leaks and intentional venting—a figure that is three times greater than EPA estimates and that would largely negate the climate benefits of burning gas instead of coal. (Using natural gas to generate electricity produces about half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal.) Some researchers argue that a true accounting of methane emissions would render most of the past two decades of reported greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the US illusory.
Fixing oil and gas leaks has long been cited as the low-hanging fruit of climate mitigation. Tackling emissions from millions of cows and hundreds of thousands of small farms is more daunting than getting several hundred fossil fuel “super-emitters” to close some valves. The theory is that companies have an incentive to cut down on “fugitive emissions” and keep their valuable product from escaping; the Stanford study estimated that oil and gas producers let a volume of methane worth $1 billion escape annually. With a little naming and shaming, the thinking went, surely these firms could be nudged into doing the right—and profitable—thing.
That was the motivation behind MethaneSAT, the Environmental Defense Fund’s $88 million satellite project, funded in part by Jeff Bezos and Google: that it would leave these companies nowhere to hide. Launched in March 2024, MethaneSAT orbited the globe fifteen times a day, sweeping its sophisticated sensors across more than 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas production areas and mapping with new levels of precision how much of this invisible, odorless gas was streaming out of wells, pipelines, and storage tanks around the world. The hope was that the satellite’s transparent, publicly accessible data would prod the worst methane polluters into action. In June 2025 operators lost communication with the satellite. Before it went dark, though, it collected data on methane concentrations over major oil and gas fields like the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, which EDF researchers are still analyzing.
The scientists behind MethaneSAT and other major recent advances in remote sensing technologies are indeed making it increasingly hard for oil and gas super-emitters to hide their plumes. Yet emissions keep rising anyway. Across the US, from the Permian to the Marcellus Shale, the oil and gas industry releases an Aliso Canyon’s worth of methane each week. But energy firms in both the US and globally are responding to this new data with shrugs. A recent report revealed that nearly 90 percent of methane leak alerts sent to oil and gas companies last year by the International Methane Emissions Observatory, a satellite network operated by the UN, went unanswered.
Jackson, like most researchers, uses the word “leaks” to describe escaped methane. But it is a somewhat misleading term. Most of the methane that streams from oil and gas wells, pipelines, and storage tanks is released by design, vented as part of scheduled maintenance to release pressure or simply for lack of available pipeline capacity or because the prevailing price is too low. Flaring, also routine, is the practice of burning excess gas that’s not worth storing and selling, thereby converting methane into carbon dioxide, though incomplete combustion means that methane is emitted as well. In those cases emitting methane is a calculated financial decision.
The problem with voluntary schemes, of course, is that they are voluntary. In the absence of any fees or penalties, these companies have proved unwilling to address their methane pollution. While investing in methane detection systems could somewhat burnish these companies’ social license to operate, it also risks reminding people that their core product is itself a climate-warming superpollutant, rather than the “clean bridge fuel” they have often portrayed it as. Thanks to gas companies’ canny marketing strategies, surveys have found that most Americans don’t associate natural gas with methane, even though the fuel is about 90 percent methane. At the same time, when asked about methane, they report overwhelmingly negative associations.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included a fee of $900 per metric ton of methane emitted over a certain threshold, to incentivize energy companies to cut down on leaks. In February 2025, after vigorous lobbying by oil and gas firms, Congress voted to rescind it. The Trump administration recently repealed another new rule capping methane from oil and gas operations. It followed that move with the radical step of revoking the “endangerment finding,” the EPA determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which buttresses all federal regulations of climate-warming pollution. Now that the US government has torn up its own limited plans to tackle methane, it is pressuring other countries to do the same. Trump officials and US gas exporters have been lobbying European officials to exempt US natural gas from the European Union’s tough new regulatory caps on methane leaks from fuel imports, which will take effect in 2027. Climate advocates are watching this struggle closely in the hopes that European regulators will hold the line. There are signs that instead they are ready to buckle and exempt US suppliers.
In 2021 the Biden administration and the European Union orchestrated the Global Methane Pledge, which 159 countries have since signed, promising to reduce methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. But it’s voluntary, and they aren’t following through. One recent study of sources of methane emissions across 164 countries notes that “there is no foreseeable slowdown in the momentum of global methane emissions growth.” In just the latest sign of retreat, New Zealand—a pledge signatory and one of the world’s biggest livestock and dairy producers—cut its mid-century targets for methane reductions by half after lobbying from the agriculture industry.
That’s why some scientists, politicians, and climate advocates have launched a campaign for a binding global agreement on methane reductions—a treaty modeled on the successful global effort to reverse the hole in the ozone layer that produced the Montreal Protocol. The underwhelming outcome of last year’s COP30 UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil, only underscored the need for new approaches that have both widespread support and legal teeth. In the weeks leading up to the event, Simon Stiell, the head of the UN’s climate convention, noted that for the first time ever total greenhouse gas emissions are forecast to fall by 10 percent below 2019 levels by 2035, thanks to anticipated reductions in CO2 emissions as various countries put into practice the climate plans that resulted from the Paris Agreement. In the same breath, he warned that that is “not nearly fast enough…. We have a serious need for more speed.”
Jackson believes that some kind of regulatory or legislative price on emissions will be necessary to achieve his vision of restoration to preindustrial methane concentrations. Barbadian prime minister Mia Mottley is leading an effort to begin drafting a legally binding methane treaty in time for discussion at this year’s COP31 conference. That is a long shot, of course, as the peer pressure mechanism at the heart of the Paris Agreement seems to be breaking down. In this sense, whether political and corporate leaders embrace some form of mandatory methane cuts in the years ahead is a test of their seriousness. If they won’t, maybe we really have entered a post–climate action era.
Beyond better plumbing, there’s the vision of a world that runs on electrons instead of molecules. Jackson writes about one of his research partners, a Boston University scientist named Nathan Phillips who has pioneered the mapping of urban methane leaks; he reports them to gas utilities, which slowly go about the costly, Sisyphean work of replacing pipes. Jackson cites estimates that there are more than 600,000 gas leaks in urban areas around the US, and millions more go unnoticed from stoves and furnaces in homes. Phillips advocates for a triage approach of fixing only the most dangerous leaks while pursuing wholesale electrification of streets and neighborhoods—leaping past gas dependence once and for all instead of playing an expensive, never-ending game of leak whack-a-mole. “Transitioning means not paying millions of dollars to replace gas pipes that lock in further gas use for decades to come,” Jackson writes.
In that electrified world, pumping methane into depleted oil fields like Aliso Canyon, which sits on a seismically active fault in wildfire-prone terrain surrounded by high-density residential neighborhoods, wouldn’t be quite so necessary. Purging the skies of methane might thus hinge on the outcome of the battle being waged between industrialists determined to see the world run mostly on oil and gas and those working to power it with batteries hooked up to solar panels and wind turbines.
Alessandro Volta, it’s worth noting, is remembered today not for the discovery of methane but for his work on electricity. He created one of the earliest batteries in 1800, known as the voltaic pile. Variations on Volta’s battery design became the primary means of storing and delivering electricity for much of the nineteenth century. For the man who first detected “combustible air,” methane became an afterthought.
English (US) · 