Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Logo
Menu
  • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Organizational Charts
    • Virtual Tours
    • EESA Strategic Vision
  • Our People
    • A-Z People
    • Alumni Network
    • Area Offices
    • Committees
    • Directors
    • IDEA Working Group
    • Paul A. Witherspoon
    • Postdocs & Early Careers
    • Search by Expertise
  • Careers & Opportunities
    • Careers
    • Intern Pilot w/CSUEB
    • Mentorship Program
    • Recognition & Funding Opps
    • EESA Mini Grants
    • S&E Metrics for Performance and Promotion
    • Student Opportunities
    • Supervisor EnRichment (SupER) Program
    • Promotion Metrics (Scientific)
  • Research
    • Area-Wide Program Domain
      • Earth AI & Data
    • Our Divisions
    • Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division
      • Environmental & Biological Systems Science
        • Programs
        • Environmental Remediation & Water Resources
        • Ecosystems Biology Program
        • Bioenergy
      • Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions
        • Programs
        • Climate Modeling
        • Atmospheric System Research
        • Terrestrial Ecosystem Science
      • Climate & Atmosphere Processes
        • Programs
        • Climate Modeling
        • Atmospheric System Research
      • Earth Systems & Society
        • Programs
        • Climate Modeling
    • Energy Geosciences Division
      • Discovery Geosciences
        • Programs
        • Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Geophysics
        • Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Geochemistry
        • Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Isotope
      • Energy Resources and Carbon Management
        • Programs
        • Carbon Removal & Mineralization Program
        • Carbon Storage Program
        • Geothermal Systems
        • Hydrocarbon Science
        • Nuclear Energy & Waste
      • Resilient Energy, Water & Infrastructure
        • Programs
        • Water-Energy
        • Critical Infrastructure
        • Environmental Resilience
        • Grid-Scale Subsurface Energy Storage
        • National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)
    • Projects
    • Research at a Glance
    • Publication Lists
    • Centers and Resources
    • Technologies & National User Programs
  • Departments
    • Climate Sciences
    • Ecology
    • Geochemistry
    • Geophysics
    • Hydrogeology
    • Operations
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
    • Earth & Environment Newsletter
  • Intranet
  • Safety
    • EESA Safety
  • FoW
  • Search

  • all
  • people
  • events
  • posts
  • pages
  • projects
  • publications

New Study Finds the Economic Harms of Methane Emissions Can Vary Greatly by Region5 min read

by Julie Chao on May 21, 2021

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division

 

stock photo of gas flares at an oil refinery

Oil and gas production is one of the top sources of methane emissions. (Credit: iStock)What is the cost of 1 ton of a greenhouse gas?

This article appeared first at lbl.gov.

When a climate-warming gas such as carbon dioxide or methane is emitted into the atmosphere, its impacts may be felt years and even decades into the future – in the form of rising sea levels, changes in agricultural productivity, or more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heat waves. Those impacts are quantified in a metric called the “social cost of carbon,” considered a vital tool for making sound and efficient climate policies. Now a new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley reports that the social cost of methane – a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat – varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world.

Published recently in the journal Nature, the study finds that by accounting for economic inequalities between countries and regions, the social cost of methane drops by almost a factor of 10 in sub-Saharan Africa and jumps by almost a factor of 10 for industrialized countries, such as the United States. The study calculated a global mean estimate of the social cost of methane of $922 per metric ton (not accounting for the inequity), decreasing to $130 per metric ton for sub-Saharan Africa and rising to $8,040 per metric ton for the U.S.

“The paper broadly supports the previous U.S. government estimates of the social cost of methane, but if you use the number the way it’s typically used – as a global estimate, as if all countries are equal – then it doesn’t account for the inequities,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Collins, one of the study’s co-authors.

The lead authors of the study were David Anthoff, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, and Frank Errickson, a graduate student in the group at the time of the study. “The Biden administration’s climate policy agenda calls for prioritizing environmental justice and equity. We provide a way for them to directly incorporate concerns for equity in methane emission regulations,” said Errickson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. “Our results capture that the same climate impact, when measured in dollars, causes a greater loss in well-being for low-income regions relative to wealthy ones.”

Like the social cost of carbon, the social cost of methane is a metric that is not widely used by the public but is increasingly used by government agencies and corporations in making decisions around policies and capital investments. By properly accounting for future damages that may be caused by greenhouse gas emissions, policymakers can weigh present costs against future avoided harms. In fact, the recent White House executive order on the climate crisis established a working group to provide an accurate accounting of the social costs of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide within a year.

“President Biden’s action represents a much-needed return of science-based policy in the United States,” said Anthoff. “Devastating weather events and wildfires have become more common, and the costs of climate impacts are mounting.”

“The social costs of methane and carbon dioxide are used directly in cost-benefit analyses all the time,” Collins said. “You have to figure out how to maximize the benefit from a dollar spent on mitigating methane emissions, as opposed to any of the other ways in which one might choose to spend that dollar. You want to make sure that you are not using a gold-plated band-aid.”

Given the current estimate of global methane emissions of 300 million metric tons per year, that puts the annual social cost of methane at nearly $300 billion, said Collins, the head of Berkeley Lab’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division and also a professor in UC Berkeley’s Earth and Planetary Science Department. “Wet areas will get wetter and dry areas dryer, so there’s an increase in severity of storms and droughts,” he said. “The cost would include all the things that flow from that, such as infrastructure damaged, increased expenditures around keeping places cool, health risks associated with heat, and so on.”

While some methane comes from natural sources – mostly wetlands – about 60% of methane emissions come from human activity, including agriculture, fossil fuel production, landfills, and livestock production. It is considered a short-lived climate pollutant, staying in the atmosphere for only a decade or so, compared to more than 100 years for carbon dioxide.

“Given its potency as a greenhouse gas, regulating emissions of methane has long been recognized as critical component for designing an economically efficient climate policy,” said Anthoff. “Our study updates the social cost of methane estimates and fills a critical gap in determining social costs.”

Under the Obama administration, the price was estimated at about $1,400 per metric ton. The Berkeley researchers made a technical correction in accounting for offsetting influences on the climate system, arriving at global mean estimate of $922 per metric ton. “We’re suggesting they slightly overestimated it,” Collins said.

But more importantly, the uncertainty around the social cost of methane comes more from the social side, not the physics. “As a climate scientist, we’ve been busy trying to improve our estimates of the warming caused by methane,” Collins said. “But it turns out the physics side is no longer the major source of uncertainty in the social cost of methane. It’s now moved to the socio-economic sector, accounting for the damages and inequities.”

How societies choose to develop in the future – such as expanding cities along coastlines or areas prone to flooding or wildfires, or moving away from such areas – are a big unknown. “If we choose mitigate climate change more aggressively, the social cost of methane drops drastically,” Collins said.“Continuing our work to further explore the relationship between climate change and socioeconomic uncertainties – not to mention the complex but important issues that arise when we account for equity – is a promising area for future research and policy exploration,” said Anthoff.

Other study co-authors were Klaus Keller and Vivek Srikrishnan of The Pennsylvania State University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Penn State Center for Climate Risk Management.

News & Events

Chun Chang Places Second in Annual Berkeley Lab Pitch Competition3 min read

January 18, 2023

Commercializing Berkeley Lab inventions is an important part of the Lab’s mission, and one that requires strong communication skills. For example, Lab inventors need to be able to pitch their ideas to external partners and potential funders.  The annual Berkeley Lab Pitch Competition occurred on October 27, 2022 and is a part of an entrepreneurship…

EESA Scientists Collaborate With Universities to bring Environmental Science Research Opportunities and Training to Students Underrepresented in STEM3 min read

January 13, 2023

  EESA researchers are collaborators in three of the 41 projects awarded in December by DOE through its Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) initiative.  RENEW aims to build foundations for research at institutions that have been historically underrepresented in the Office of Science (SC) research portfolio. The initiative provides opportunities for undergraduate and…

New Report Explores Revolutionary Environmental Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure5 min read

January 10, 2023

In a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, as well as with community experts, the Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) workshop was held from October through December 2021. BER developed the process as the Model-Experiment paradigm, or ModEx, and a report released this fall outlines the key takeaways of last year’s event.

A Q&A With Postdoc Kunxiaoja Yuan3 min read

January 4, 2023

  Kunxiaojia Yuan received her Bachelor’s of Engineering in remote sensing and Ph.D. in geographic information engineering from Wuhan University. She is a postdoctoral researcher in EESA, with a research focus on global carbon, energy, and water cycle analysis and model evaluation using machine learning and causal inference. What motivated you to pursue a postdoc…

  • Our People
    • Area Offices
    • Committees
    • Directors
    • Organizational Charts
    • Postdocs
    • Staff Only
    • Search by Expertise
  • Departments
    • Climate Sciences
    • Ecology
    • Geochemistry
    • Geophysics
    • Hydrogeology
  • Research
    • Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division
    • Energy Geosciences Division
    • Program Domains
      • Programs
    • Projects
  • Contact
    • 510 486 6455
    • eesawebmaster@lbl.gov
    • Our Identity

Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo DOE Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo UC

A U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory Managed by the University of California

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory · Earth and Environmental Sciences Area · Privacy & Security Notice