en.Wedoany.com Reported - U.S. companies are significantly lagging in efforts to reduce superpollutants. Methane, refrigerants, and other high global warming potential gases contribute to approximately half of current global warming, yet most companies still focus their climate strategies on carbon dioxide.
Experts at the Trellis Impact 26 conference noted that controlling superpollutants has a more immediate impact on slowing global warming compared to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and companies are missing this critical opportunity.
Tristam Coffin, co-founder of sustainable engineering consultancy êffecterra, stated that the corporate response to the immense opportunity presented by superpollutants like refrigerants is far from adequate. Luke Pritchard, director of Beyond Alliance, believes a lack of awareness is partly to blame. Superpollutants have previously been confined to niche discussions among science enthusiasts and climate blogs.
Technical and accounting barriers also exist. Coffin explained that electricity consumption can be accurately measured and converted into carbon dioxide emissions, but refrigerant leakage emissions are harder to track because leaks often occur unintentionally during use and equipment disposal, and assets containing refrigerants are distributed across multiple facilities. Ramé Hemstreet, chief energy officer at Kaiser Permanente, pointed out that stricter regulations in the European Union are driving companies in the region to accelerate the phase-out of refrigerants from greenhouse gas inventories.
This topic has been pushed onto the corporate agenda by a few pioneering companies and non-profit organizations. Earlier this year, the seven founding members of the newly established Superpollutant Action Initiative—Amazon, Autodesk, Figma, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Salesforce, and Workday—committed to investing up to $100 million to reduce superpollutant emissions. The initiative is operated by Beyond Alliance, which also manages several related projects, including a Scope 3 refrigerant decarbonization investment opportunity in collaboration with êffecterra, and the Superpollutant Academy, established jointly with carbon credit rating agency Calyx Global.
At the Trellis Impact 26 conference, Hemstreet shared how he and his colleagues are eliminating superpollutants in cooling systems. He advised the audience to identify equipment due for replacement for operational reasons and seek alternatives free of superpollutants, but noted challenges in finding economically viable options in the U.S. For companies with smaller superpollutant emissions, solutions outside the value chain can be pursued. About a year ago, Google signed a contract to purchase a batch of carbon credits from a project that will destroy 25,000 tons of methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 2030, with the high warming potential of these gases making the credits equivalent to eliminating 1 million tons of carbon dioxide over a century. In 2024, Workday became one of the first buyers of carbon credits from a project preventing methane leaks from abandoned oil and gas wells.
The quality of superpollutant carbon credits varies, but a relatively high number of projects have received top scores from carbon credit rating agencies. This is due to the credibility that the gases are not re-released into the atmosphere, the relatively straightforward mechanisms for measuring captured quantities, and the limited alternative incentives for handling these gases. Focusing on superpollutants is one reason Salesforce and Autodesk rank high on Calyx's recent buyer list.
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