How Do You Solve a Problem Like CH4?

Methane (CH4) forms naturally from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all the time. It's the methane and carbon dioxide that we produce ourselves that we should be most concerned about.

Methane gas is known to chemists as CH4; that is, one carbon ion with four hydrogen ions ganging up on it from different angles. It's produced when the oxygen gets stripped out of carbon dioxide. Needless to say, this happens constantly throughout earth's atmosphere. And when it does, the resulting methane gas traps more heat in the atmosphere than its parent carbon dioxide molecules would.

I've been researching how to keep polar wildlife from starving to death; in the process, I found out that phytoplankton (including algae and diatoms) are the foundational nutrient species in the Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems. The polar food chains have been disrupted by warming ocean temperatures, which caused phytoplankton blooms in the early winter, instead of their usual early spring blooming schedules. This has had an impact on the krill and other zooplankton which feed on the phytoplankton (often scraping algae from the outsides of ice masses, which have been steadily retreating toward the poles), which has affected the survival and diets of small fish, predator fish, marine mammals, and Arctic and Antarctic land species, including the iconic polar bears and emperor penguins, in their respective habitats. Numerous scientists, activists, and conservation organizations are working overtime to discover ways to tweak the food webs and restore normal phytoplankton breeding habits; but the root cause of the problem remains global warming, climate change, and the heating of the atmosphere by way of excess greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane gas. What to do about that?

Of course, certain activist groups have an easy answer to that one: "Just go vegan, you Depraved Omnivorous Heathens™!" Well, sure; but even if everyone on the planet stopped eating beef right now, millions of methane-belching cows, sheep, goats, deer, bison, and related species would still exist, and would continue to exist for the foreseeable future. What are we supposed to do, kill and cremate them all instead of eating them? PETA would almost certainly not be okay with that. But I digress.

I've recently found an informative (and readable) article on the primary sources of methane gas emissions; and, as you might expect, animal agribusiness and fossil fuel production and use are right at the top of the list. Other sources include methane gas trapped in coal-mining matrix rock; extraction and use of natural gas (which is mostly methane anyway); decomposing organic matter in landfills and open garbage dumps (as well as burning the same stuff); wildfires (over 300,000 acres of land in Alaska is on fire right now, as I type this); and even biofuels (apologies to all my fellow bus-riders). Methane is also generated from natural sources such as swamps, other kinds of wetlands, termite colonies, and even the oceans themselves (especially the oxygen-poor sediments at the sea bottom). Gulp. We've got our work cut out for us.

In any case, my fellow Depraved Omnivorous Heathens™, I don't think we need to surrender our taste for chicken wings and cheeseburgers just yet. I do think, however, that the highly centrally-controlled system of Animal Agribusiness needs to be broken up like the telephone monopoly of thirty-odd years ago; plus, we all know that factory farming sucks, and needs to be radically overhauled in favor of smaller-scale, locally-based animal agriculture with a much greater emphasis on farm animal welfare. The fossil fuel and electricity industries need to be tackled in an even more radical fashion (ideas about that will have to wait for another blog post or two). And I'm not even sure what to do about the methane byproducts of biofuels. Meanwhile, my reading and research continues apace. And everybody: stay safe in wildfire zones. Here's the daily-updated map of where the wildfires are in North America at present.