Methane is just as troublesome as carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for longer, methane is 25 times as effective at trapping heat compared to carbon dioxide over the initial 20 year period. It’s pure sleight of hand to say we should concentrate on reducing carbon dioxide while extolling the virtues of methane.
The examples you cite are attempts to reduce the emissions of methane in existing industries by giving those industries an economic payoff. Often, those industries can’t readily reduce the amount of methane being produced. For example, garbage dumps can’t be eliminated: they’re an essential public service. By persuading the operators to capture methane and burn it to power the site, we make the best of a bad situation. Do nothing and the methane leaks into the atmosphere and poses a fire risk. Capturing it and burning it produces carbon dioxide which is unfortunate, but you have to make hard decisions. The operators reduce their energy costs so the reduction of methane pays for itself.
Livestock farming inevitably produces methane. It isn’t realistic to reduce the demand for meat and the like, so we have to make the best of it by reducing the methane emissions. Scientists are working on doing so by creating feed that will reduce the amount of methane being emitted by livestock. Apparently, adding seaweed helps to do this. And if livestock producers can be persuaded to capture the methane and use it as fertiliser or the like, that’s great (although does this merely delay its emission into the atmosphere?).
However, I don’t think there’s much doubt that governments would prefer to eliminate methane byproducts rather than persuade businesses to capture them. If governments were presented with a button they could press that would make businesses methane-free without incurring any cost, they wouldn’t be able to push it fast enough. Unfortunately, in the real world we can only try to make the best out of a bad situation.
But you aren’t proposing ways to reduce the methane emissions from existing industries. You are pushing the creation of an entirely new process which will create massive amounts of methane. And the joke of it is that you justify this by saying the end product, hydrogen, will combust without creating any greenhouse gases (which is of course true). But you want to use a process that produces heaps of carbon dioxide and methane. That wipes out the environmental benefits of hydrogen. When green hydrogen has the same benefit but without the downside of blue hydrogen, why?
The examples you cite are attempts to reduce the emissions of methane in existing industries by giving those industries an economic payoff. Often, those industries can’t readily reduce the amount of methane being produced. For example, garbage dumps can’t be eliminated: they’re an essential public service. By persuading the operators to capture methane and burn it to power the site, we make the best of a bad situation. Do nothing and the methane leaks into the atmosphere and poses a fire risk. Capturing it and burning it produces carbon dioxide which is unfortunate, but you have to make hard decisions. The operators reduce their energy costs so the reduction of methane pays for itself.
Livestock farming inevitably produces methane. It isn’t realistic to reduce the demand for meat and the like, so we have to make the best of it by reducing the methane emissions. Scientists are working on doing so by creating feed that will reduce the amount of methane being emitted by livestock. Apparently, adding seaweed helps to do this. And if livestock producers can be persuaded to capture the methane and use it as fertiliser or the like, that’s great (although does this merely delay its emission into the atmosphere?).
However, I don’t think there’s much doubt that governments would prefer to eliminate methane byproducts rather than persuade businesses to capture them. If governments were presented with a button they could press that would make businesses methane-free without incurring any cost, they wouldn’t be able to push it fast enough. Unfortunately, in the real world we can only try to make the best out of a bad situation.
But you aren’t proposing ways to reduce the methane emissions from existing industries. You are pushing the creation of an entirely new process which will create massive amounts of methane. And the joke of it is that you justify this by saying the end product, hydrogen, will combust without creating any greenhouse gases (which is of course true). But you want to use a process that produces heaps of carbon dioxide and methane. That wipes out the environmental benefits of hydrogen. When green hydrogen has the same benefit but without the downside of blue hydrogen, why?