Oil companies and governments have pledged to slash methane emissions in recent years, but so far have little to show for it. Emissions of this potent greenhouse gas by the fossil fuel industry continued to climb in 2022, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.  The group condemned the oil and gas industry for failing to address this problem even as it saw record profits last year, driven up by a tighter energy market following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The technology needed to eliminate most methane emissions already exists and would require spending only a tiny percentage of those profits to deploy, the agency said. “Methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, said in a statement outlining the findings. “There is just no excuse.”  About one-third of the global warming to date can be attributed to methane emissions. Many human activities are to blame, including agriculture and all the rotting waste people throw out. But in the U.S., energy production is the biggest culprit, according to the IEA. Methane, the main component in natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere accidentally and is also intentionally released during the production and transport of fossil fuels. The IEA estimates that the global energy industry released nearly 135 million metric tons of methane in 2022, which is higher than the previous year and only slightly below the record seen in 2019. Methane traps nearly 90 times as much heat as carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The good news is it breaks down within decades. That means curbing its release could slow global warming in the short term while the world moves beyond fossil fuels.  Fortunately, 75 percent of energy-related methane emissions can be eliminated with readily available technologies, the IEA said Tuesday, at a cost of about $100 billion. That’s less than 3 percent of the profits that oil and gas companies earned last year, the group pointed out.           https://grist.org/energy/big-oil-record-2022-profits-methane-emissions-iea/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=beacon