 All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. We have a really great session coming up in just a few moments. I'm Dan Berset with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I get to welcome you all to the third installment of Congressional Climate Camp. Today, we're going to be talking about non-CO2 greenhouse gases and warming agents. I'd like to start by saying thanks to the Congressional Office who helped us get the room today. Special thanks to Representative Paul Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, and shout-outs David and Sharon for joining us today as well. So thank you so much for all of your support and helping us bring this really important topic to a congressional audience. Very briefly, ESI was founded in 1984 by policy makers, members of Congress themselves, to provide science-based objective information about climate change topics to policy makers. And so that's what we do here at EESI. We do it in lots of different ways. Over the years, we've also developed some expertise, helping utilities in rural areas, access federal resources, especially those from the US Department of Agriculture. We hold diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as core values at EESI. And our mission and vision are listed there at the bottom of the slide. When it comes to policymaker education, this takes lots of different forms. Probably the highest profile thing that we do is our briefings and webcasts. And this is the third briefing so far of 2023. I think we have another three or four slotted for the next couple months. And then we'll got a really robust schedule coming up. So I'll talk about that in just a moment. We also have a biweekly newsletter that's really good. It comes out every other Tuesday called Climate Change Solutions. If you haven't subscribed to that, I encourage you to do that. It's a great way to keep up with not just everything that we're up to and the resources that we're offering, but it also has a legislative tracker. It helps keep track of what's happening up here on the hill and in climate policy more general. It's, I think, a really nice resource. There's a picture of it. We also do a lot of writing. Sometimes that takes the shape of fact sheets and issue briefs. This is our Climate Change FAQ. That's one of our popular ones. We also have a really great one on sustainable aviation fuels. We're working on one on EV semi-trucks, which will be out in the next month or two, which is really exciting. And every once in a while, we really buckled down and we produce a report. So this is our sustainable communities report that is a summary of our 19-part briefing series about coastal resilience. But today's climate camp. And what the climate camp is is a way to help new staff, whether they're new to Capitol Hill or new to the issues of climate change, sort of get up to speed at the start of a Congress. There's a lot going on in this issue area. The first installment was about budget and appropriations. Second was about public polling and public attitudes about climate change. Today is about non-CO2 gases and other warming agents. And then in two weeks, we'll be back for a big one all about status of the implementation of the IIJA and IRA. That's Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. If you missed any of these, if you want to sign up for these briefings, are all the ones we've got coming up on DOE nuclear programs, the Sustainable Energy in America Fact Book, or all of the Farm Bill resources coming online. The best way to do it is to visit us online at www.esa.org. Sign up for the newsletter. If you sign up and you can't make it, don't worry about it. We got you covered. Everything is livecast. There's archives of all of our briefings on YouTube and on our web page. We also have presentation materials, and we have summary notes after the briefing. So if you sign up, you'll get the information, even if you can't actually make it during the briefing. I'm also joined today by a bunch of my colleagues. We're wearing lapel pins. We'll be here after the briefing as well. If there's any questions we can help answer, please track us down and we'd be happy to chat. We are joined by the folks in the room today. We also have a robust online audience. So thanks to everyone on our livecast watching us. We will have a Q&A period after our fourth panelist. And if you're in the room, we'll have a microphone roving around where you can ask questions. If you're in our online audience, you can also ask questions. And the best way to do that is to send us an email. The email address is askask.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and other social media at EESI online and send us a question that way. The big differentiator between our in-person and online audience is the in-person audience has access to donuts in the back of the room. So if you have a snack or if you need a snack, if you feel like you need a munch, there's looks like a fairly dwindling supply of donuts, I have to say. So this is your time. Without any further ado, it's my privilege to welcome the first of our four panelists today. Dr. Gabrielle Dreyfus is a climate scientist with over a decade of experience working at the interface of science and policy. She's the chief scientist for the Institute for Governance of Sustainable Development and Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University. She also serves on scientific and technology advisory panels to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and Montreal Protocol. Before that, she was deputy office director at the US Department of Energy and a fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Gabby got her star in DC as an American Geosciences Institute and American Association for the Advancement of Science Congressional Science Fellow, and that was after completing her PhD jointly with Princeton University and their CERBAN in Paris. Gabby, welcome to the lectern. The clicker is all yours. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, everyone who's here today in person and online. It's great to be part of the ESI Congressional Climate Camp. This presentation and this excellent panel that we have today could also be part of a climate solutions briefing series because we are going to tell you today about underappreciated and often under-recognized gases and other pollutants that if we tackle them and use strategies specifically focused on them can deliver fast climate, economic, and health benefits. In particular, these strategies that are targeting non-CO2 and very specifically the short-lived climate pollutants that include methane, hydrofluorocarbons, ozone, and the aerosol black carbon or soot, they can slow warming in the next 20 years. They can do this based on strategies that target short-lived climate pollutants can avoid four times more warming by 2050 than strategies focusing on decarbonization alone. Now, the short-lived climate pollutants in particular black carbon and ozone, Susan will tell us more about next, are also air pollutants that are responsible for millions of premature deaths each year, as well as billions of dollars in crop losses. Eric will speak next about agriculture and by cutting short-lived climate pollutants and improving use of fertilizer and reducing N2O and other non-CO2, we can increase food security. So that's a slowing warming, reducing air pollution, reduce those crop losses, plus use of climate smart and precision agriculture can increase productivity while reducing these non-CO2 emissions. And finally, Debbie will speak more about ways that we can improve monitoring the fixed leaks and to avoid wasted energy, in particular methane, which is the primary constituent of natural gas. So what are we talking about when we talk about non-CO2? This is a little table just to get us situated. In blue, we have long-lived greenhouse gases. Most people are most familiar with carbon dioxide, CO2. This is the biggie every ton of CO2 that we put in the atmosphere sticks around for a long time. The carbon cycle is slow. I'm a paleo-climatologist. I have a long time scales and CO2 essentially sticks around in the atmosphere and ocean system for a long time, which is why we need to reduce our emissions because it keeps building up. So nothing in this presentation today should by any means distract from the need to slow down and stop and get to net zero CO2. But we have these other climate pollutants that are also very important, not only to warming, but also to health and agriculture. Nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas, if you've ever had that at your dentist, is produced from over-accessive use of fertilizer. It is what makes these super climate pollutants, I'm going to call the super climate pollutants, and in particular these orange, short-lived climate pollutants. So important is that they are tens to thousands of times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in our atmosphere. Plus, in particular, the short-lived climate pollutants orange are short-lived. This means that they last in our atmosphere from days to up to 15 years, the way that we've defined this. And I'll speak more about hydrofluorocarbons in a minute, but just want to emphasize two things that really matter here. This idea of potency and time. And why time matters is that when I was learning about climate change 20 years ago, it was a problem for the future. We were talking about impacts later this century. What this graph shows, this is data from NOAA, is that the number, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events is increasing. This is from 1980s US only billion-dollar disaster events. You can see that the number of them is increasing, and thinner lines harder to see, but we're trending towards $2 billion in impacts a year. And these are also people's lives. I suspect everyone in this room has had either directly personal experience with one of these types of events or knows someone, a family member or a friend who has. I'm from California. When I was growing up, fire season was one month. If there is a month that California is not on fire, that is news these days. These impacts are real. Climate change is happening today. Every fraction of a degree of warming is going to make this worse. And the rate at which we warm will also increase the frequency and severity of these impacts that have significant human lives and economic consequences. This is why it is so important to think about slowing warming today for the near term, at the same time as we make the transition we need to shift to low carbon and net zero CO2. Here's another way of looking at this and understanding that there is more than CO2 in the role of these non-CO2 in our current climate crisis. The middle graph, though, this is from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report. What they've done is they've converted emissions of all of these main pollutants. The far right side shows, breaks it down by pollutant into the contribution to our current warming. And what you can see is that the positive warming, that middle tall bar, half of that is non-CO2 gases. And this is what we're talking about today because we have solutions to tackle these. And a key takeaway that I hope that you'll take from today is that we are talking about dual strategies. These are complementary strategies, they are not interchangeable. The strategies that will target short-lived climate pollutants can slow warming in the near term, that's the red curve, slow warming in the near term but you see it ticks up again at the end. Strategies that target CO2, absolutely essential to bending that warming curve to make sure that we get to a stabilization temperature that human civilization can adapt to in the longer term. Only by putting these in play together do we get to this yellow dotted line which is the full mitigation which is avoiding the most severe consequences of climate change. So a way to think about this is that we are running two races simultaneously. We have a SLCP short-lived climate pollutant sprint to slow warming in the near term at the same time as we're running the decarbonization marathon to get to net zero CO2. Again, complementary not interchangeable strategies that target CO2 will not reduce warming in the short term, carbon cycle is slow and strategies that reduce short-lived climate pollutants will not keep that CO2 from building up in the atmosphere for the long-term warming. So I'm out when you can talk about one particular short-lived climate pollutant hydrofluorocarbons because it's a good news story. I don't know how many people in this room are still worried about the ozone hole. I put sunscreen on when I walked here because it's 80 degrees in February but that's a different story, it's a climate story but it used to be a major concern but the Montreal Protocol on substances that will leave the ozone layer was the first and most successful environmental and climate treaty that we have to date. Signed in 1987, this treaty has now been amended. It has phased out for fluorocarbons and the next it's phasing out the next replacement HCFCs that together are putting the ozone hole on track to recover by mid-century. This is going to avoid millions of skin cancers and cataracts and together probably avoid on the order of one to two degrees of warming by the end of the century. Already by 2050, the fact that we have not built up CFCs and HCFCs thanks to this treaty is avoiding about the same amount of warming of CO2 today. But what we did and then there's also trees don't like sunburn, this is the other thing if the ozone hole had been allowed to proceed we would have had enough UV damage to plants that we would have reduced the carbon sink adding at another degree of warming by the end of the century. This treaty was amended. It still has a lot of good strength in it. In 2016, the Kigali amendment added hydrofluorocarbons, a phase down schedule that was ratified by the US Senate last September. Congratulations to anyone in this room or online who was involved in that big deal. And then the EPA is currently implementing the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act to do the HFC phase down which was signed into law under President Trump in 2020. Good news story, more can be done. So this is a graph, middle is emissions, far right side is surface temperature of HFC emissions in blue that would have occurred absent the Kigali amendment. And you can see with the Kigali amendment we are on track to avoid about what 0.1 degrees by mid-century, 0.5 degrees by the end of the century. That's a big deal, again, every fraction of a degree is lives, severity of storms and economic damages. But there's more that can be done. HFCs, these are what you have in your air conditioner. I have about seven kilograms of a HFC that's 2000 times more potent than CO2 in my central air conditioner. One of the issues that we have is that we have stocks of existing air conditioner refrigerators that contain these gases. And even as we phase down continued production and use that means we still have thousands, millions of tons of these gases that when you take together if you don't make sure that they don't get into the atmosphere could add up to a billion tons of CO2 equivalent by the end of the year. And there's a table for the US, we're looking at about seven billion tons by 2050, nine by the end of the century. There's a great report that came out, I'll have a link to resources that talks about the opportunities through life cycle refrigerant management to prevent leaks and do you better job of end of life reclaim, recycling and destruction of these gases. Plus at the same time as we replace these old air conditioners we can make them more efficient. I'm a big fan of efficiency, why waste energy and save people dollars on their energy bills. So just to finish where we started, non-CO2, short-leclimate pollutants in particular are part of your solutions playbook. They can deliver fast climate benefits in the near term. Again, four times more avoided warming than decarbonization strategies alone. They can improve health, we'll get to this next in terms of reducing air pollutants, improve food security and avoid energy waste. The HFCs that we've covered the Kigali amendment really important first step, more can be done with life cycle refrigerant management. We'll hear more, there's a lot of great stuff happening on methane, thank you also to Congress and some of those, the inflation, the IRA and more also coming up opportunities to reduce and cut these gases and have some of these co-benefits. So some resources, these are in the slides for you to get to and thank you and I will look forward to the Q&A. And I can go, should I just go through my slides? Yeah, got some extra stuff, we won't talk about tipping points. There's other scary things I didn't go into. I'll hand it over. Thank you so much. That was a great presentation and really great slides and you had the life cycle refrigerant management report just as a reminder, the slides from today's session or presentations will be available online. If you RSVP'd you'll also get those via email and also to the extent that our panelists have other resources to suggest like that LRM report, those will be linked to as well on the briefing page. Our second panelist today is Dr. Susan Annenberg. Susan is the chair of the Environmental and Occupational Health Department at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. She's also the director of the George Washington Climate and Health Institute. Susan's research focuses on the health implications of air pollution and climate change from local to global scales. She currently serves on the US Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board and Clean Air Act Advisory Committee and World Health Organization's Global Air Pollution and Health Technical Advisory Group and the National Academy of Sciences Committee to advise the US Global Change Research Program. Susan, welcome to our briefing today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here today. So Gabby set us up so nicely that I will just dig right into the two specific short-lived climate pollutants that not only warm the climate in the near term, but also have these contributions to ambient air pollution that contributes to poor health. So we've already talked about this, but I think it bears repeating that short-lived climate pollutants, these refer to species that are both climate warming agents and air pollutants. When I say species, that just means chemical components that we're releasing into the air. So these are chemical components. These are pollutants that are both climate warming agents and health-damaging air pollutants. I'm gonna focus specifically on black carbon. Black carbon is a part of Fine Particulate Matter or PM 2.5. PM 2.5 is a regulated air pollutant in the United States and around the world. We have nationally been air quality standards or NAACS that the EPA sets. And it is a major contributor to the burden of premature mortality, as well as cardiovascular disease and stroke. And I will also talk about methane because methane is a precursor to tropospheric ozone. That's ground-level ozone, not the stratospheric ozone that Gabby was just talking about, the ozone hole. That's the good ozone. We like that ozone that protects us from UV radiation. Methane is a contributor to ground-level ozone that is a key ingredient of smog. When we breathe this in, this has damages for human health as well. These have different sources. And methane itself is a greenhouse gas and ozone is a greenhouse gas. So methane sort of has this dual impact on the climate as well as the health-damaging contribution to ozone. When we think about the health damages of black carbon as a component of PM 2.5, as well as ozone produced from methane or really any other source, there's a pyramid of effects of air pollution on human health. And the most severe effect is premature mortality. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole range of other non-fatal effects like emergency room visits, hospital admissions, heart attacks, doctor's visits, school absences, lost workdays, respiratory symptoms, asthma attacks, and even subclinical effects. These are effects that you wouldn't see a doctor for, but they still are contributing to your ill health. And the subclinical effects, the bottom of this pyramid, we have the largest range of the population that's affected. The best resource to go to if you're interested in the health consequences of air pollution, the best resources are the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Science Assessments, or ISAs. They produce these on a five-year cycle as part of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards Reviews. And they're really comprehensive scientific literature views by the scientific staff at the EPA. And I'm just listing here the health outcomes that are associated, that are determined either to be causally associated or likely to be causally associated with these air pollutants in the most recent ISA. So for PM 2.5, which again, black carbon is a component of, we have cardiovascular effects, respiratory effects, nervous system effects, cancer, and of course, premature mortality. For ozone, we have respiratory effects, cardiovascular effects, and also premature mortality. Gabby showed this chart, but it is complicated. So I think it is worth going through, again, just, if we were to do nothing about climate change mitigation, if we were not to reduce greenhouse gases, long-lived greenhouse gases, or short-lived climate pollutants, we would follow this line indicated by the reference area arrow here. And you can see how that continues to increase. If we only reduce long-lived greenhouse gases, we can bend that curve, but not until many years into the future, decades into the future, because of the long-lived nature of CO2. If we, on the other hand, only reduce short-lived climate pollutants, methane and black carbon, we slow climate warming in the near term in the next several decades. But you can see that the line begins to mirror that of the reference line, that slope of the line continues. And the only way to stay below the two degrees Celsius temperature rise target is by mitigating both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants. And in fact, we don't even get to the one and a half degree temperature rise goal, by mitigating both of these. So I'm gonna dig a little bit more into first particulate matter and then methane. When we talk about particulate matter, that sounds like one pollutant, but it really isn't. It's a complex mixture of pollutants, and it depends on where you are and what the nearby sources are. So one key ingredient of particulate matter is black carbon. That's actually a small fraction of particulate matter. A much larger fraction of particulate matter is made up of sulfate aerosol, which is formed by sulfur dioxide emissions, mostly from coal combustion within the U.S. We also have organic carbon and ammonia contributes to PM2.5 as well. And these different components and the makeup of the mixture of PM2.5 determines its radiative impact. So if you have a lot of sulfate aerosol, if you have a lot of organic carbon, you actually could get a cooling effect on the climate. Whereas if you have a lot of black carbon, you could get a warming effect. And you see that here in this graph from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shows the effective radiative forcing of CO2, of methane at the top, and then these aerosol precursors at the bottom. And we see that the bar for SO2 is negative, indicating that SO2, sulfur dioxide, which contributes to sulfate aerosol, leads to a cooling effect. And the same thing for organic carbon. Whereas the bar is positive for black carbon, indicating that black carbon has a warming effect. In the history of the United States, we have a very effective Clean Air Act that has led to very significant regulations and it brought down emissions quite a bit. And that's a very, very good thing for public health. What it has done is reduced a lot of sulfate aerosol. And again, very good thing for public health, but it has actually unmasked some warming that is there from CO2 because of sulfate being this cooling agent. So if we want to counteract that cooling, that warming that we get from reducing sulfate, we also have to be targeting black carbon reductions. So what is black carbon? It's a very, very dark component of PM2.5 and it absorbs incoming solar radiation. It also deposits on reflective surfaces like snow and ice in the Arctic. You don't really see trucks like this that much anymore in the U.S. Every now and then I'm driving on the highway and I see a truck spewing pretty dark clouds of smoke. A lot of that is black carbon, but we now have diesel particulate filters and pretty effective emission controls on our diesel trucks and buses that has really dramatically reduced black carbon. But nonetheless, we have a lot of black carbon coming from our transportation sector, especially in the rest of the world. And the deposition of black carbon on snow and ice covered regions, especially in the Arctic, is not all from local sources. This is a lot of that is actually traveling from the mid-latitudes, including from the United States and other countries at the mid-latitudes. So what we emit here in the United States can actually affect what is happening in the Arctic and the snow and ice melting in the Arctic. Black carbon comes primarily from diesel exhaust, biomass for cook stoves and burning coal and biofuels. Today, developing nations are the highest emitters of black carbon. And part of the reason for this is because as I said in the United States, we have diesel particulate filters have been very effective at removing black carbon from the effluent stream. But nevertheless, the black carbon that we emit has a very, very strong impact on the climate in the near term. So because there's strong absorbers of solar radiation, the global warming potential of black carbon over 100 years ranges between about 1,000 and 2,000 relative to a global warming potential of one for CO2. As I mentioned, a lot of black carbon comes from household energy. This is the combustion of solid fuels and polluting fluid fuels like kerosene for household energy needs for cooking and for heating and for lighting in places that don't have easy access to electricity or cleaner burning fuels like LPG. So this is contributing on a global scale a lot to black carbon, but transport is next with about a quarter of black carbon globally. And that's mostly from diesels here in the United States. Almost all of our trucks and buses are powered by diesel and almost all of our light duty passenger cars are powered by gasoline, but that's not the situation in other countries. A lot of countries actually have far more diesels in their passenger fleet than we do here in the US. It could be around 50% like in Europe. I wanna talk about the mitigation options because we do have a menu of mitigation options that are available, have been implemented and just need to be scaled up. And these right here, I'm not gonna read these, but these are the mitigation options that we assume have been implemented in that curve that I showed of temperature rise and the importance of mitigating both long with green house gases and short lived climate pollutants. And you can see they range from the household energy sector, industrial production, transportation, agriculture, fossil fuels and waste management. So now I wanna talk about ozone precursors because ozone again, ozone is a key ingredient of ground level smog that contributes to respiratory effects and premature mortality. And a lot of people don't think of methane as a precursor to ozone, but methane is actually responsible for a lot of the buildup of ozone in the atmospheric global scale. Methane lives in the atmosphere for about a decade and that is long enough for methane itself to smooth out around the world and its contribution to ozone to be also smoothed out around the world. So you don't get these high urban peaks in ozone from methane emissions, but you do have this elevated background level of methane that then the urban emissions build on top of. And that methane is a climate warmer and ozone is a climate warmer. So the fact that methane contributes to ozone has this dual impact on the climate. You have the warming from methane and you have the warming from ozone. Methane mostly comes from agriculture and the fossil fuel operations and I'm not gonna go into this in more detail because the other speakers will do that. But it's 86 times more powerful than CO2 and it also contributes again to respiratory disease, heart disease and damaged airways. It also contributes to agricultural and ecosystem impacts because ozone can damage leaf surfaces and other vegetation. We also have a variety of methane mitigation options and again, these are available. These have been implemented. They need to be scaled up and these are in the agriculture sector and the fossil fuel sector and in waste management. And again, I'm not gonna go into these in detail because some of the other speakers will be doing that. I wanna direct you to a few key resources. I was honored to contribute to several of these but two really key ones were published in the early 2010s. In 2011, we had the UN Environment Program and World Meteorological Organizations integrated assessment of black carbon and tropospheric ozone. And at the same time, we had the EPA's reports of Congress on black carbon that really shed light on the US specific situations. That was, those were published in 2011, 2012. More recently, we have the Global Methane Assessment that was published in 2021. And then just last year, we have the summary for policy makers available now. We're still waiting on the specific chapters of the report impacts of short-lived climate forces on Arctic climate, air quality and human health. And that was from the Arctic monitoring and assessment programs expert group on short-lived climate pollutants. So the chapters are still coming for that but it does show that what is emitted at the mid-latitudes where we are in the United States has severe impacts for warming in the climate. And I just also wanna say that the US was a founding member with several other countries in 2012 of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to reduce short-lived climate pollutants or the CCACs for short. This is an intergovernmental coalition of countries and non-state partners that have come together not to do research but to actually implement scaled up action to get rapid reductions of black carbon and methane and HFCs as well. They work through several hubs, the National Planning Hub, the Household Energy Hub, agriculture, cooling, heavy-duty vehicles and engines and fossil fuels and you can actually see some results that this coalition is having in terms of individual cities transitioning their entire municipal bus fleet to electric vehicles, really rapid, important actions that the CCAC is having. So with that, I will conclude. Thank you very much. And I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you. Another excellent presentation. Thank you so much for that. We had a bump in the road on the live cast. It sounds like the audio is back, but we did drop audio and video there for a minute. The recording is still taking place though. So if you're listening and you're like, hey, where did that go? It'll be up. We didn't lose anything. Another reason why it's great to be back in the room so that we still have the in-person audience as well. So sorry for folks on the live stream, but we're troubleshooting to get the video back up. I have a quick follow-up. I don't always do follow-ups, but that EPA report, is there another one coming up that's already over a decade old? You know if there's another report to Congress coming? Okay. Maybe, I was just curious. It seems like a good thing to do. And it's, you mentioned the methane mitigation that reminded me, we'll be talking a lot about a lot of those solutions in our firm bill briefings. So if you wanna learn more about what Susan talked about, our firm bill briefings will be a great source of information about that. And then you had that picture of the truck. I was on a plane once and the pilot was like, hey, everybody, look at this old plane that's taxiing and that color exhaust was coming out of the jet engines. And he was like, yeah, that plane hasn't been made for 40 years, thankfully, but it was really gross. It reminded me of that. Our third speaker today is Debbie Gordon. Debbie is senior principal in RMI's Climate Intelligence Program where she co-leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Debbie serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and is an affiliate at the Brown Climate Solutions Lab. Her research spearheaded the development of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas or OCI Plus, a first of its kind analytic tool that compares the lifecycle climate impact of global oil and gas resources. She is a stakeholder in NASA's carbon monitoring system and is testified before Congress and served on a National Academy of Sciences panel. And most of all, she's a member of our advisory board. So it's always great to see Debbie and I'm really looking forward to your presentation. The clicker is all yours. Thank you. Great. Well, it's fantastic to be here. Thanks, Dan. So, I don't know why I put this slide up because I think everyone in the room probably realizes that this is not a great situation that we're in right now, that the evidence is very much clear and the other speakers have talked about this, that short-lived climate pollutants put action in our hands now. And that's really why I've focused so much on it. And the fact that the average annual greenhouse gas emissions were their highest levels over the last decade should be enough cause for action and that we can actually have emissions by 2030, according to the IPCC. You've seen this before, so I'm not gonna go into much of it again, but I just wanted to, where I circled on the graph, I wanted you to focus on the fact that the IPCC finds that climate warming from methane rivals CO2 within error. So if you look at those first two circled bars, the first to CO2, the second is methane, they really are both duly incredibly important. And it was shown on the other slides the lifetime of methane, which is only about 10 to 12 years. In 10 to 12 years, methane is actually over 100 times more impactful than CO2. So it matters a lot to prevent it, not to just clean it up. Susan touched on this, but a graph just to give you a sense for US emissions, a little different than global emissions, but oil and gas and waste are the largest sectors for methane emissions, about one half of the emissions. And that's rivaled by livestock, especially CAFOs, these commercial feedlots for animals that put out a lot of methane. But what's scary about this is, with the satellites going up right now, which I'll talk a bit about, we're thinking that these inventories, the size of this pie is probably not right, that it probably is a lot bigger than we think it is. And I've talked to folks at the California Resources Board, they are obviously leaders in everything air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions for generations now, but they have been really undercounting waste methane. They didn't even really have much waste methane in their inventory, and we can see how big it is. So I expect the size of this pie is gonna grow as we learn more about short-lived climate pollutants, methane especially. What's co-emitted with methane? Susan talked about the air pollution effects of methane and also of its creation of ozone, but I wanted to give a sense of what is methane. So methane is natural gas, methane is a gas. It's about 70 to 90% of what makes up natural gas, but then there's a lot of other stuff in that gas when it's emitted, including impurities, and those impurities include carcinogens, V-tex, the benzene, the toluene, the xylene, ethyl benzene, those also come out of the ground. So this is as much a climate issue and an air pollution issue, as it is an environmental justice issue. So going into methane, specifically focusing now on the oil and gas and the waste sectors, a really big part of what I do, and I've been doing for a major part of my career actually, is making emissions visible. We talked about this earlier with the panel when we were just chatting, and we were surmising that air pollution was really the first to be solved over the last, really since the 70s, 1970s, we're starting in the 50s in Los Angeles, because you could see it. But the problem with climate change is these gases are largely inert and invisible and odorless. And so it's made it a lot harder to appreciate the fact that they're a really big problem for our health, for everything that everyone has been saying. But you could see on the left here, this is a satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore platform, which should be producing its oil and gas and not leaking its methane. Interestingly, NASA's developed now a way to see methane over water because the water reflects light and the instruments need, they actually can't see through that reflectivity. So they come in at an angle called glint mode, and now we're starting to see and visualize methane over water, which is a huge breakthrough and will really help. The middle side is waste from, is a landfill and the methane leaking from a landfill. And then the third slide in California is looking at disadvantaged communities and where these emissions are of methane, which we know are co-emitted with carcinogens. The work that I've done to model oil and gas has largely been about really trying to push back on the very simplistic notion that oil's oil and gas is gas. And the reality is that both physically and chemically and environmentally, these resources really differ from each other. And if we fool ourselves to think they're all the same, we won't really have the opportunity to get the worst actors, the worst oils, the worst gases either cleaned up or not produced in the first place. And so of about 70% of the world's oil and gas that I've modeled at this point with the OCI+, that Dan mentioned, this online publicly available open source web tool, about half of the emissions are due to methane leakage. And what's so interesting about this is that methane has value. I mean, this is gas leaking. And when gas is leaking, as Gabby alluded to, you're losing value. You're losing economic value of what you're there to do in the first place is to produce oil and gas. So not only is this an economic concern for the country, but it's also really a big, you can imagine this whole graph moving down if it's only the light blue portion that is CO2 and other climate VOCs and other volatile organics, other climate pollutants. So a big part of RMIs Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative has been this expanding emissions visibility that will then be able to drive decarbonization. And from measuring and monitoring and quantifying, we can then start to account and track and attribute. And from there, we can certify and we can regulate. So it becomes this virtuous cycle of being able to go around the circle to actually make a difference in this space. And I will offer that I think we were really slow about this over a generation with CO2. And I think we're gonna be really fast about this with methane and that will definitely come up in the briefing on IRA. So what can we manage? We can manage what we can measure. Methane is wasteful, it's harmful, and it's dangerous to leak gas. The oil and gas sector is the number two source as you saw on the pie chart that we think of man-made methane, but it's the number one for reduction. And the reason for that is because it has economic value. It's not like CO2, it's not a pure waste product. It's actually something you sell and make money on if you don't leak it. What's startling and people don't always realize that when gas leaks over 3% and I would challenge myself or anyone in this room to have a budget, household budget that doesn't waste more than 3%. Like we'd think really good of ourselves if we knew 97% of what we earn is productively expended. 3% is not a really big number. When gas leaks over 3%, it's worse than coal in terms of climate change. That's huge. I mean, this is seen as a bridge fuel, natural gas, but the reality is leaking gas is worse than coal. And to publicly track asset ownership is gonna be a challenge that Congress is gonna have to take on because these assets, oil and gas assets change hands all the time. I've been tracking an asset in California one of the dirtiest oil assets in California for years now called Midway Sunset. And it was owned by Chevron. Then it transferred to a non known name. Then it transferred to a joint venture from Schellen Exxon. And now it's been bought by a German asset manager. So you're seeing a lot of turnover in this space which makes it very hard to track and follow. Quickly on the waste side, we're putting together now similar to what we've done with oil and gas. We've put together a waste map for around the world trying to track very much with satellite and with country data in terms of waste. We know where the landfills are but there are a lot of open dumps and other problems out there in the waste sector. And then we're following the same similar to oil and gas in the waste sector, this two pronged approach where you have this visualization, this open source platform and then you can develop decision making tools from that. You get on the ground support to develop policies and share information. And again, it becomes this virtuous cycle of being able to do something about a problem that many people think is too big to deal with. So prioritizing methane in this decisive decade I think will be critical. This increased transparency that I've been talking about definitely needs public funding right now. It's very much supported by the philanthropic sector to launch satellites, to create open source databases of this information, to do aerial detection of leaks. We don't want this all in the private hands. There are private detection agencies out there, there are agents, there are private satellites but the problem is that we, the public don't get to see that information. And then once we track this methane, we can quantify it and we can establish markets around it. Think about again, IRA with this fee on methane that's coming and we can advance policy making, certifying low leakage gas as an example which will really make a very big difference in this space. So in wrapping up here, what we've learned over the last 40 years really shapes what we work on and I think it would be very helpful if Congress thought this way as well. You start with a sense of expertise and knowing energy systems, knowing supply chains, having the staff that can actually drill down on these problems and connecting that to influence and relating that to impact in terms of what are the biggest opportunities I think that Dan was gonna ask us questions about that, like what are the actions that we could take that have the greatest impact today and then being very inclusive in how we think and approach these issues. I do think everything we're talking about here today has an environmental justice component and that leads us to the constellation of solutions. So how do I do this? I wonder if I can get this to do, I did it before there, yeah. So I just wanted to end with some tanks that are leaking methane. As you can see, I mean, this is again, how do you really deal with this issue? It's making it visible. Once it becomes visible, it's a problem that needs a solution. And in addition to preserving natural resources and mitigating climate change, according to Richtu, who actually I think is chairing CCAC right now, not sure, at the State Department, cutting methane emissions is critical for environmental justice and it will save thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of lives rather globally if we do this with that, all right. That was a great presentation. You suggested something about having questions in advance. I don't know anything about that. Everything in the Q and A is spontaneous, totally spontaneous. I expect given the caliber of the presentations today, we're gonna have a really robust discussion. I'm really looking forward to that. And speaking of questions, for those in the room who have questions for our panelists, Tyler, I think it's gonna be our microphone wrangler and he'll come around and allow you to ask questions so that our live cast audience can hear it. If you're in our live cast audience, you can send us an email. And the email address to use is ASK or ask at esi.org and we'll do our best to incorporate those questions into the discussion when we get there. Also, we haven't seen Eric's presentation yet, but it's also really good. If you'd like to go back and see any of the slides or watch any of the presentation or if you're on the live cast and you wanna go back and revisit the part where we had to hiccup, everything will be available online at www.esi.org. And that brings us to Eric Davidson. Eric is professor of the Appalachian Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Principal Scientist for Spark Climate Solutions. Eric's research includes terrestrial nutrient cycling, greenhouse gas emissions from soils, global biogeochemical cycles and sustainable agriculture. Eric is past president and fellow of the American Geophysical Union, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, web of science, highly cited researcher in science, senior editor for AGU Advances. Eric, welcome to our briefing today and I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Well, thank you. My colleagues have done such a wonderful job of emphasizing the importance of methane. So I'm gonna jump right into the question of the agricultural sources of methane and I'm also gonna touch on nitrous oxide which Gaby also introduced for you. This is a pie chart showing US emissions in 2020 data from the EPA using the 100 year global warming potential. And you can see of course that CO2 is the largest and you've already heard and you've seen these sorts of estimates before of methane being about 11% nitrous oxide being about 7% and those wedges are actually fairly similar of globally as well. Agriculture sector contributes about 40% of that methane in the US and about three quarters of the N2O and if you go through the math that adds up to about 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions. But as I said, this is using the 100 year warming potential if we were to use the 20 year warming potential because of the importance of methane and our potential to be able to change the radiative forcing more quickly by mitigating methane. If we were to recalculate that then the role of methane would increase from about that 11% wedge to at least 24% depending on how you do the calculations and the role of agriculture would go up from 10 to 15%. And then I wanna point out that nitrous oxide is not only a potent long lived greenhouse gas but it is also an important reactant in destruction of the protective layer of stratospheric ozone and we've heard about that today. And in fact, now that we've had that progress that we heard about before in terms of CFCs and now HFCs the N2O is the largest currently emitted ozone destroying substance. There's still a bigger legacy effect from the gases CFCs and the HFCs but in terms of going forward with new emissions now N2O is our biggest concern. You've seen this sort of information before in terms of the sources of methane emissions in the US. Livestock is the largest source and oil and gas is the second largest source and I don't have time to go through the rest of them and as Debbie just pointed out oil and gas is getting a good deal of the attention for good reason because you can see that the three different colors here show the lightest colors is that portion of the emissions which according to this source is economically feasible to mitigate today and the more orange is those that are technologically feasible perhaps but not yet economical and then the larger part under enteric emissions at least for the darker color are those emissions for which we have neither a technological solution now nor an economically viable one. So for oil and gas about half of it at least is economically viable partly because it's valuable and so it makes sense for us to be going after that first. However, if you only go after those that are on the light color you'll see that we're not gonna get where we need to get in terms of mitigating methane emissions. So we need a vigorous program of R&D for these others. Well, that enteric source, what do we mean by that? That means intestinal source and particularly in this case for animals that we call ruminants which include cattle and dairy cows and also sheep but for the United States it's primarily cattle and dairy and these animals have a special compartment in their digestive tract called the rumin where there are microorganisms that are capable of helping the cow digest of the type of food that they eat and in the process that produces methane. Well, on the right hand side you can see that there are some approaches to mitigate that there are currently some products available one called three not as a feed additive you may have read about some research on using seaweed and these have the potential we think of reducing those emissions from each cow on the order of about 30% of course it's gonna vary depending on conditions and feed. There are some other things down the road modern molecular approaches of understanding the microbiome it's important for human health it's also important for the health of cows and there's possibilities of trying to manage the microbiome of the ruminum which we could call the ruminome to reduce methane emissions and further down the road there's some possibilities of other feed additives that could be helpful. And as was the case for oil and gas however I think it's important to recognize that there's an economic value to this not that we're going to catch the methane as the cow was burping no that's not what I'm talking about what I'm talking about is that that energy that the cow has to devote towards producing methane is energy that could be saved and could be reallocated to produce more meat and more milk and that means more profitability for the farmer. So this may not meet the type of resistance to regulation that we often think of when we talk about mitigating greenhouse gases because this could actually have an economic benefit to this sector. Unfortunately however the tools that we have at hand for feed additives really will only work at present for those cattle that are in the feedlot where we actually feed them or in the dairy barn where they get their feed and so we can add feed additives to that feed. The majority of the cattle are out there on the pasture land grazing and so those options won't do as well and so again we need other types of R&D to figure out other approaches that can reach the grazing cattle both in the US and across much of the world. So I want to shift gears now to nitrous oxide and my point of this map is to emphasize how our food production system is so tightly coupled to a number of forms of nitrogen pollution and we're going to focus of course on the places where we're using a lot of fertilizer and growing a lot of food such as the Corn Belt of the US or the Central Valley of California. Also you can see that India, China and western Europe are all colored in red here where we use a lot of fertilizer and those are the areas where we produce the most nitrous oxide as well. At the same time, you know, environmental justice has been brought up before we have to think about much of the world where they don't have enough access to fertilizer and so we have to consider the fact that we need technologies that will allow them to increase their inputs of nitrogen either fertilizer or manure or other forms of nitrogen, nitrogen fixation to allow them to improve their crop productivity without increasing nitrous oxide or other nitrogen pollutants. If we think of the nitrogen system in agriculture as a leaky pipe, as a metaphor, in the left we have our inputs, the synthetic fertilizers, the manure, the natural nitrogen fixation. We feed that into the pipe, we grow a bunch of crops. The majority of our crops are fed to our livestock. Only a small fraction of our crops that we grow are directly consumed by humans. So that feed then goes into this second leaky pipe that we call the animal production system and of course the animals produce a lot of manure and at the end of the day, if you look at the nitrogen that we put in on the left side and how much humans actually consume either in the crops like wheat that we eat directly or in the animal products like milk and meat, we really only consume a very small fraction of the nitrogen that is used to grow those crops in the livestock. Where does the rest of it go? Well it goes through these holes in these leaky pipes. Some of it goes into groundwater and surface water and forms of pollutants that result in algal blooms and give us water quality problems. But some of it goes up into the air in various forms of air pollutants including nitrous oxide. So this is inherently coupled to our food production system. Of course we want to produce a lot of nourishable, affordable food. So how do we break that coupling? Well we're not doing a very good job so far. This graphic shows on the left from the year 2000 up to today. These various lines don't worry about the top-down, bottom-up approaches to how we make these measurements. They're pretty much in agreement. But the main point here is that our N2O emissions are growing faster than even the worst case scenario that was projected a few years ago by the IPCC in their shared socioeconomic pathways. So whatever we're doing now to try to mitigate nitrous oxide is really not working on the global scale. In the U.S. we're promoting voluntarily what is called the 4Rs for incrementally improving the efficiency of nitrogen use in our croplands. So that involves using the right source, the right kind of fertilizer that's balanced and so forth. The right rate, we can test the soils or have sensors on the crops to figure out how much to use, applying it at the right time and the right place. And this is certainly very valuable. It's been very useful. In the United States we are using about the same amount of fertilizer that we did a few decades ago and yet producing more food because we are making more efficient use of fertilizer. And our N2O emissions have all gone up slightly compared to the rest of the world, but they aren't going down. There are a number of agronomic practices that we can use to improve this. I don't have time to go through each one, but I'll just read them off like cover crops, nitrification inhibitors, conservation tillage, increasing the diversity of crops, reintegrating the livestock in the crop system so that manure gets recycled back and we don't have to use as much fertilizer. Improvements in livestock feed management, not only from methane, but also from the nitrous oxide that comes from the manure management. Precision agriculture, regenerative agriculture, climate smart agriculture. These are not synonymous with organic agriculture. There is a role for use of fertilizers in these. Perhaps another time we could talk about what they each mean and what the opportunities are. But in each of them there are opportunities to mitigate nitrous oxide emissions. There are some non-technical needs as well for improving nitrogen use efficiency. Many of those techniques that I just... agronomic practices and the 4Rs for that matter have been around for a long time, but they haven't all been adopted as well by farmers as we would like. And there's a posity of social science investigations to understand farmer decision making. It's not all driven only by economics. There's a lot to do with where their trusted sources of information come from. And engaging farmers in the research, they're experts at what they do. They know a lot about what they do. And by engaging them in the research, they're more likely to buy into the results of that research. So there's a lot that needs to be done on the social science side as well. And finally, in terms of longer term, there are a number of things that we need to think about to begin uncoupling that food system from the nitrogen pollution. And these are things that are further out in terms of solutions, but we need to work on the R&D on these now, such as nitrogen fertilizers that's synthesized through renewable energy or through novel catalytic pathways, some additional crop breeding to extend growing seasons and reduce grain nitrogen and so on. And feeding livestock directly synthetic amino acids instead of broadcasting the nitrogen fertilizer on the ground and growing crops, which is an inherently leaky system. And these transformations would begin to uncouple that N2O emission from food production. But where is our current R&D going? Well, unfortunately, there's very little going to enteric research besides the fact that we just got through, I had three of my colleagues telling you how important methane is, and livestock is the biggest source of methane. And yet very little of our R&D goes there. Soil management of N2O does a little bit better, but when you compare it to how much is being spent on soil carbon sequestration, and that's the topic of another day, let's just say that I think we're out ahead of our skis in terms of the soil carbon sequestration. The enthusiasm for it is bigger, I think, than the soil science, the agronomic science, or the social science or economics supporting it. And if we look at our goals of trying to get to a mitigation goal on climate by 2050, we need to have these technologies in place for methane and nitrous oxide and starting to use them in a large scale by say 2040. That means we need to have those technologies developed and being beta tested and starting to be used more broadly by 2030. So that means we only have about seven years to produce some of these new technologies. And so that means it's a very urgent thing that we need to be supporting this kind of R&D now. So thank you for your attention. All right. I think we're going to close down the screen so that we're not all silhouetted against it. And I actually kind of liked being in the audience. It's so much easier to watch the presentation, so much good stuff to digest. So thank you so much for that. At the end of Eric's presentation or towards the end of Eric's presentation, he had a slide list of cover crops, crop diversity, regenerative agriculture, all things that we will have coverage of in our Farm Bill briefings, but also we already have resources on. So if you visit our Farm Bill resources page, I think that'll work. Yeah. Then there's already a lot of really great writing and articles and things like that on those topics. So my colleague Tyler has a microphone and we will be happy to take questions from our audience. I also have a couple online. While I'm waiting for our audience members to raise their hands, I'm going to start with one. And Gabby, I'd like to hear from you first and maybe we can go down the line. You sort of mentioned this in your presentation and I was also thinking of maybe the air conditioner example. It would be something to go into a little bit more detail on. But how can strategies to mitigate non-CO2 emissions and other pollutants also deliver CO2 mitigation benefits? And vice versa, are there sort of what we might call win-wins or double whammies that we should be pursuing? Excellent. Thank you. So there's one in the oil and gas sector I'll defer to Debbie on, but you brought up the air conditioners. So this was near and dear to my heart because the same piece of technology that is being redesigned for these alternatives, these low global and potential HFCs are also, it's the same air conditioner, right? That can also be made more efficient. And we actually, when we calculate out the lifetime, the life cycle climate performance, it has a couple components. One is what is that gas that is in it? How much of that gas stays in and is recovered versus leaks to the atmosphere? And how much are emissions associated with the energy to power that air conditioner? And about 70 to 80% is associated with the energy use. And we know that today, most air conditioners, most people don't buy the most efficient air conditioner. There is a price premium. It's part of the marketing strategy, guys. This is why we need efficiency standards is at the minimum of what the efficiency is allowed. And we actually have technologies that can double that efficiency. And there is actually a cooling, a global cooling prize. I was part of the technical review committee on in 2021. It was actually right out in India. There was a global competition where we found, there are two winners, two prototypes that were actually tested in an apartment complex in India and in the lab to confirm that were five times less climate polluting than a standard AC in the Indian market. So real opportunity to get alternatives that are climate-friendly or refrigerants and make these units much more efficient. And it turns out they handle humidity better so it makes you more comfortable. Susan? Yes, thank you. Great question. These co-benefits are my favorite topic. So let me just say that anytime we burn anything, we're emitting CO2 as well as air pollution at the same time. So it really is almost as simple as burn less stuff and we'll reduce CO2 and these short-lived climate pollutants that are air pollutants as well. Of course, burning less stuff gets more complicated when you start to think about what is the process that's burning it, what type of fuel is being burned, what are the emission control equipment that are already there. But there are so many ways to reduce the amount of fuel that is burned in a variety of different sectors. I'll just give an example from the transportation sector. I talked about how diesel trucks and buses are emitting black carbon and they're also major sources of CO2. If we were to reduce the amount of diesel that is burned in the heavy-duty vehicle sector, we could both reduce CO2 and short-lived climate pollutants as well as air pollution. In the United States, like I said, our trucks and buses are already pretty clean in terms of reduced black carbon. But electrifying these buses could further reduce nitrogen oxides and other air pollutants as well as CO2. And then you think about the trucking sector and the amount of emissions that are coming from trucking our goods around. These are all ways to, if we were to accelerate the transition of the trucking sector from diesel to electricity, we would dramatically reduce CO2 and short-lived climate pollutants as well as air pollution and improve public health, especially children's health. Yeah, I like to call these things two-fers. Interestingly, the oil and gas sector uses a lot of its own products. So with Susan Stop Learning Stuff, that really applies to oil and gas, the oil and gas industry. The producers, the shippers, the processors, the refiners, they use so much natural gas and diesel to just extract, process, and ship oil and gas. And if that was renewable, if they actually ran their industry on renewable energy, they would first have more to sell in terms of profit-making. But I think that it would be an incredible two-fer in terms of both the leakage of methane from all that natural gas that goes into moving and producing and shipping oil and gas. But then also it would be less CO2 because it just would be less burning. And on the waste side, the one example I thought of that would be a two-fer is organics. I mean, in terms of composting food materials, the two-fer there is that it's the organics that lead in the rot in the landfills that lead to a lot of those methane emissions. But it's also the movement of all that food stuff and garbage in trucks and garbage trucks. It's all CO2, heavy-duty diesel garbage trucks that are moving things that shouldn't be in the first place to the landfill. So having a whole different culture around composting and what we do with our food waste I think is incredibly impactful for both. Well, the production of nitrogen fertilizers globally contributes about 2% of global CO2 emissions. So if we could improve our efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer use, we would reduce the CO2 emissions. And if we could find, move on to a technology in which the fertilizers are synthesized through some other process than the one that we use now, which is called Haber-Bosch, that is very energy intensive. If we could go to a renewable source of energy for producing the fertilizers, then that would also reduce CO2 emissions at the same time that it would make fertilizers more available to farmers throughout the world. So I like the question. I like the win-win. But I also want to point out that some of these interventions you need to go beyond the CO2 focus to be able to get them. So most of the methane emissions that you're going to be able to reduce actually need targeted strategies. You're not going to get them as a co-benefit of going after the CO2. So there are these win-wins, but I don't want to distract from the fact that we also need measures. And I think there are plenty of those listed that are specific to targeting these non-CO2. Thanks. I think that's an important point. And I love a good plug. Susan mentioned air conditioners, heat pumps, things that the Inflation Reduction Act is going to start incentivizing pretty soon, happen to have a briefing about those programs, those rebate programs at DOE in two weeks. So if you'd like to learn more about the status of those and those incentives are largely oriented towards the higher efficiency products. And then also talked about buses, and we've done a lot of coverage on the EPA bus program, the school bus program in particular that came from the IIJA. We did a briefing on that, covered that in September and also an article. And as Debbie mentioned, organics, just so happened a month from today have a briefing about organics with our partners at NRDC. So really happy as well for that. So I'm going to scan the audience and see if we do have a question. Tyler, we have a question right here in the middle. So thanks very much. Hey, thank you all so much for being here. This may be a relatively elementary question for someone who studied a little bit of biology in college, but this by no means a biology major. I guess directed mostly to Drs. Dreyfus and Annenberg, because you both mentioned it, but certainly open to all of you. Would you mind explaining specifically the process of the role that methane plays as a precursor to ozone? I imagine there are some other chemical reactants involved there, given that CH4 isn't degrading into oxygen atoms. What other kinds of gases in the atmosphere are involved in that process? What exactly does that look like? I like that you talked about biology, because this takes some intense chemistry, actually. So no worries about not having had that. So actually it does get pretty complicated ozone chemistry in the atmosphere because ozone is not emitted directly. It's a secondary pollutant that is formed in the atmosphere by reaction of precursors. So it gets pretty complicated when we want to reduce ozone. We have to think about what are the precursors that the precursor components that are directly emitted that we can go after. Methane is one, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide are others. And they react in different ways, and there are intermediaries, and we won't get into that. But I just want to say that methane produces ozone on sort of a global scale. When you emit NOx, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds, those produce ozone on more of a local scale, more of a regional local scale. These are all components that we can target, though. These are all directly emitted, and those are the things that we can target to reduce ozone. You can't target ozone emissions because there are no ozone emissions. So ozone is created in the atmosphere. And I just add, so very early in my career, I started my career as a chemical engineer with Chevron, and I was sent out onto the field, this is in the 80s, when we were only talking about smog and air pollution, was sent out onto the field to find all the leaks in their production facilities in California. And I was explicitly told by the regulators, by carb and EPA, subtract out the methane. The methane doesn't make smog. It does, and we know a lot more now than we knew then, but the problem is a lot of this equipment and operation was designed with that in mind. It wasn't designed with the knowledge that we have now. So the opportunity for retrofitting or legacy assets being the first to shut off when they're dirty is huge. All right, so you raise a really good question about what's happening. And essentially, beyond this year, there's a certain ability to oxidize chemicals like methane. That's how it gets removed. And the main component that does that oxidation is the hydroxyl radical, OH. And the reason I bring this up is a lot of people are very excited about a hydrogen economy, H2. The problem is if you have a hydrogen economy that is leaky, that H2 is going to eat up some of that OH and reduce the overall oxidative capacity of the atmosphere, extending the lifetime of methane and other gases and increasing their warming potential. So just putting that as a plug, I don't know if you'll be talking about the hydrogen economy, but for all those who are interested in chemistry and biology and atmosphere, this is, again, a chemical process, the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere is a thing, and it's a thing we do not understand very well. And so just for those folks who are curious, a very important thing to consider. Did you say hydroxyl reaction? Radical. That's an even better band name. OH part of water. Yes. Yeah, it sounds like a great band name. So actually, Gaby, we didn't plan this, but I actually got a question from our online audience that I think I'm going to interject here because it follows the point that you just made. And this comes to us from a follower on Twitter. Can any of the presenters speak about the potential impacts of increased production and emissions of hydrogen on atmospheric methane? So thank you for asking that extremely relevant question. Gaby, since you were just speaking on it, I'm happy to turn to you, but I'd love to hear other thoughts from the panelists as well. Yes, indeed. So going back and please, if anyone has questions, I like to say atmospheric chemistry keeps me humble. I, that was something I did as an undergrad and I stopped doing that because it is very complicated. But the fundamental issue is around this, how much of this hydroxyl radical, and it gets renewed, is available. And the more things like methane and hydrogen that we add to the atmosphere that eat it up, the less of, speaking that more, the less available, the more competition we have for that essentially, it's the atmospheric cleaning agent, right? The less available it is, the longer stuff sticks around before it gets cleaned out. And if you extend the lifetime of a super potent gas like methane, it was going to add more warming. Just to add one thing for those of you in the room, we have a row and a half of atmospheric scientists at GW who are here. So please feel free to introduce yourself. Any other thoughts? We have covered hydrogen. We did a briefing on green hydrogen last year, who's really interesting. But a lot of hydrogen is blue hydrogen, but even more of it is gray hydrogen. And so I think we'll definitely have to come back to that issue. It's super interesting. Go ahead, Debbie. Yeah, I mean, I think this points in one direction, and actually Eric brought it up to even in the nitrogen system. It's leakage. Leakage is a big problem. And we might be smarter than we used to be and have technological innovation constantly. But we really haven't really surmounted the leakage issue. And that's going to be a problem. It is already a problem in the gas system. It will be a problem in the hydrogen system. It's a problem in the agriculture system. And that's, I think, what we confront all the time. I'm looking to see if we have any other additional questions in the audience. All right. Well, while we're waiting for more questions from our, Eric slide had the one with the sort of the light color, the salmon color, and then the darker color. You had no solution available. You had technically feasible, but not economically feasible. And then you had both technologically and economically feasible. I'd like to revisit that issue a little bit and give the other panelists an opportunity to respond about which sectors or which parts of sectors or industries might we want to look at to sort of make the most impact. If as we're devoting resources to cutting non CO2 gases and other pollutants, which sectors might be the hardest, what might be the most impactful and how we might sort of go about sort of, you know, aiming our policy levers and investments in the right places. So Eric, I'd happy to start with you since it was your slide I mentioned, but I'd love to hear comments from our other panelists as well. I'll just reiterate quickly that the livestock sector is a huge part of methane emissions. And if we don't find a solution in the livestock sector, we're not going to be able to achieve our goals. And it is a tough one, but there are some promising technologies on the horizon that are some actually being used now. And so to me, that just speaks volumes as to where we need to be putting a lot of R&D. And it will have other side benefits as well in terms of food security, in terms of economic productivity for a lot of countries that depend on agricultural sector. So that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing other things at the same time. It's a yes and sort of situation, not in either or as long as I'm happy to have us continue that discussion on the yes and sort of basis. Like good improvisers, yes and Debbie? Yeah, I do want to reiterate the value of satellites with, we're working with Carbon Mapper, which is a the first ever public private nonprofit satellite that's being two of which are being launched at the end of this year. What makes it unique is having the California Resources Board and NASA together with Planet and RMI and Carbon Mapper. It really means that the biases are all balanced because it's not just a public sector or private satellite. I do think that the satellites are going to change everything. We were surmising a little bit earlier, like if you see something, say something. I mean, that's like the world we live in now. And if you can't see it, you can't manage it. The idea of satellites, especially the Carbon Mapper satellites are very targeted on super emitters, really large emitters. Again, they're invisible. So you don't even know that there's a super emitter going on much of the time, especially when there's wind aloft in its offshore in the middle of nowhere with a pipeline. And the idea of seeing these things on a rotating basis, a constant basis, I think is really going to point to remediation, though we don't really have that opportunity today. The other thing I'll mention that I think is really changing out there is the idea of certifying these operations. So certifying, there's a lot of claims out there for net zero operations. Net zero liquefied natural gas shipping, for example. And it's words until it's actually certified with a third party organization that can actually evaluate whether you really are net zero or not. And who's getting into the game that's a big, which is going to change, this is the financial sector. So net zero banking is out there. Those that lend money to industry are really concerned about who they're doing business with and how exposed they are when these businesses are dirty. So I think that between the financial sector, voluntary and regulatory certification, and the satellites, I think we have this constellation of real solutions out there that are coming. Susan? Well, I love the yes and framing because that's exactly what I, you know, how I come to this is that we can do hard things and we shouldn't be thinking about what's just easy or what's just, you know, the low hanging fruit. Not that you were implying that with the question, but you know, I just want to add to this is not just we shouldn't only be thinking in technical solution space either that there are ways to accomplish these reductions in non-CO2 climate forces that are non-technical. So changing diet, for example, you know, that is one way where we can not only reduce methane through animal production but also improve health for people, including cardiovascular health, reduced diabetes, reduced obesity, etc. By encouraging, walking and cycling and active transportation, you know, we are reducing ridership of personal vehicles and reducing the amount of fuel that is burned for that. So there are very, very important non-technical solutions that should absolutely be on the table in addition to accelerating those technical solutions as well. I like to think about having a balanced portfolio. You want your near term, high risk, high reward stocks, but you also want those bonds that you can depend on later that you'll need later. So this is some of the research that great graph kind of working backwards. We know we're going to need to have these by 2050. We need to be investing today to have those solutions. One topic, and I don't know if this is what you were hitting out with remediation, that I'm super interested in is just a very early emerging field for R&D is this idea of methane removal. There's too much of it. A lot of it's from us. A lot of it is feedback, so we don't really understand from permafrost and wetlands. Scary. And so we need to invest in that. But there are things we know how to do today. This includes some of the things that Susan was talking about. We have a lot of heavy duty vehicles and ports and such like that. We can electrify those. Those emissions have direct impacts on people. We know how to do those things. So we need quick steps to put R&D in the things that we may need and we know that we need down the road. And that includes technical. I think don't tackle changing habits, but there's also policy things. We have the global methane pledge over 150 countries have signed up to that. And now we need to move from that voluntary framework to sectoral agreements such as supporting that kind of low emission methane, creating that market for encouraging to stop those leaks because we know we can do it. It's plumbing. I'm glad you mentioned the global methane pledge. That was a major source of I think optimism coming out of the most recent cops recovered as well. We have one last question in the back of the room. So Tyler, we hand you the mic and thanks for joining us today. Thank you for doing this. This question is for Debbie, I guess. I'm a reporter for a Japanese national newspaper and I last year I covered the methane hunter who should videos of leaking methane from the oil and gas facility in Texas. And she said the oil and gas company releasing methane intentionally because they want to protect their facility. My question is, is it possible for them to stop to releasing methane protecting their facility? Yeah, so it's interesting how things are changing. Historically oil has been the commodity of value and oil and gas are in the ground together. They're produced together. You rarely find an oil field that has no gas or a gas field that has no liquids or oil in it. So, historically the design of these systems has been to maximize profit. I will produce my liquids, sell it at a premium and I will throw my gas into the atmosphere. I will just vent my gas and a lot of systems are designed to do that. In fact, a lot of offshore platforms or oil platforms are designed to do that because it is methane explosive when it's actually contained but think about offshore. It's very windy and it just goes right into the atmosphere. What I was going to say is a double-edged sword of hopefulness here. Gas has gone global. Gas is now poised to reach $1 trillion in global trade next year. Gas used to be a regional fuel through pipelines and you could only really get it around your neighborhood. Now gas look at what's going on in Ukraine. Germany is building all these import terminals for gas. We are moving and we are building a lot of export terminals for gas in the U.S. The double-edged sword there is gas is getting an increasing value. When it has an increasing value it means it's much less likely to be leaked purposefully because you can actually sell it. That's a different state of affairs than historically it has been. Because gas is going global we're building a lot more infrastructure for gas and we have to be really careful that we build infrastructure that doesn't leak. There's no way that an operator will get away with satellites. We'll get away with purposefully venting large volumes of gas in the future because this will be seen. And once it's seen it becomes and following someone with an IR camera being able to see it. Once this is seen you become a bad guy. So I think that the hopefulness of these satellites also will help from these past ways of getting around to do business. Thanks and thanks for the question too. We are at time unfortunately and that means we have to do a few things. My colleague Dan O will come up here and help us put some stuff back on the screen. Sorry about the rustling of papers. I don't know why I took this long to do that. I'd like to first start by thanking our four really tremendous panelists today. Gabby, Susan, Debbie and Eric. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. Our audience today was fabulous presentations. Thank you so much. I'd also like to once again say special thanks to Representative Tonko and his awesome staff with the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Coalition. They were instrumental in helping us be here today. So thanks very much to them. I'd also like to thank Dan O and Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, Molly for all their hard work putting the briefing on today. Those are my ESI colleagues who basically do all the work to bring congressional climate camp to you all. We also have three awesome interns one of whom is here today. Tyler, thank you so much. Linley and Madeline, thank you also for all the work you do behind the scenes with live tweeting and summary notes and all that great stuff. Thank you so much. We have some briefings coming up. The next one is two weeks from today that's going to be on IAJA and IRA implementation and then we're going to get into some firm bill briefings on March 3rd. We'll also be working with our friends with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy to do a briefing about their Sustainable Energy in America Factbook on March 15th. If you are new to climate or energy that resource, the Factbook is tremendous. It is basically a one-stop shop for all sorts of really great data about the energy sector in the U.S. It's really, really excellent. Can't recommend that enough. And we're back in April with a briefing about DOE nuclear programs as well. I think those are the only briefings we have on the calendar with actual dates. But stay tuned, sign up for climate change solutions when you visit us online and you'll always be in the know. This survey link we read every survey response if folks here in the audience or on the livecast if you have two minutes and you'd like to share feedback with us about how today went. I know we had the hiccup with the livecast, sorry about that but if you had any other issues, if you have any other feedback or questions or comments about our briefings we really, really appreciate that and like I said we really do read every response and it means a lot. We'll go ahead and wrap there. Thank you so much. I hope everyone has a moment to enjoy the unseasonably beautiful day here in D.C. and we'll see you back in two weeks for the fourth installment of Congressional Climate Camp. Thank you so much.