Kaj Embrén

11/10/2026

The 1% Steel - Issue 21 of The Methane Brief https://bit.ly/4yfXFUL

Every wind turbine tower is steel. Most steel starts with metallurgical coal, and mining that coal vents methane equal to roughly Japan’s entire annual emissions.

The UN says it could be cut for 1% of the cost of steel. We ran the numbers, and the real cost may be even lower.

So what’s missing? A rule, a price and a buyer who asks. COP31’s two hosts could supply all three in November.



World Resources Institute UpLink - World Economic Forum Climate Reality Climate Group Inside Climate News Richard Mattus UN Environment Programme UNECE Guardian Environment

By Juneia Mallas & Kaj Embrén · The Methane Brief · Issue No. 21 · October 2026 · 7 min read Every tonne of blast-furnace steel carries methane that could be destroyed for a few euros.

07/10/2026

🚨 The countries hosting COP31 are among the world's worst coal polluters.

Turkey and Australia — the two co-presidents of the 2026 climate summit — have together been responsible for over 75 million tonnes of CO₂ from coal since the Paris Agreement was signed.

That's not irony. That's a crisis.

Australia gets 30% of its national methane emissions from coal mines alone. And methane is 80x more potent than CO₂ over 20 years.

Here's what makes this so frustrating: the fix already exists.

Coal mine methane abatement is the cheapest available climate solution on the market today — peer-reviewed by CSIRO, proven in the field, and ready to scale. One underground coal mine emits the equivalent of 50,000 tonnes of methane per year. That's the same as 2 million fossil fuel cars — from a single mine.

COP31 in Brisbane is an opportunity. But only if the hosts lead by example.

Read the full story https://bit.ly/3WbjgjK

More on why coal mine methane is the overlooked climate fix:
🌐 methanebrief.org
📰 Methane Brief on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/newsletters/methane-brief



Climate Group UpLink - World Economic Forum World Resources Institute Richard Mattus Climate Reality Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade UNECE

06/10/2026

Indias coal methane problem isn't only a steel problem. Purva Jain and Saumya Nautiyal at IEEFA are right: Mission Coking Coal needs a methane plan. Visit: https://bit.ly/4dI960f

But thermal coal needs one too, and heres why it's urgent. India is offering foreign cloud firms a tax holiday until 2047 to run global services from Indian data centres. Capacity is forecast to grow more than fivefold by 2030. Those servers will plug into a grid that still runs on roughly 70–74% coal, with another 97 GW of coal capacity planned. More data centres mean more thermal coal mined. More thermal coal means more methane, a gas that warms the planet 80 times faster than CO₂ over 20 years. Thermal coal is less gassy per tonne than coking coal. But India mines more than a billion tonnes a year. Coal methane abatement should be a condition of every expanding mine, coking and thermal alike. A data centre tax holiday shouldn't become a methane holiday.



Climate Group OpenAI Sustainable Energy for All Climate Reality UpLink - World Economic Forum World Resources Institute Indian National Congress

India is preparing to double its coking coal output by 2030, especially to meet its steel manufacturing needs. While carbon emissions from coal use are well known, coal mining also produces methane emissions, which warrant early attention. If monitoring and abatement measures are not incorporated at...

07/09/2026

05/09/2026

Explore this gift article from The New York Times The New York Times You can read it for free without a subscription.

Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster?

A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.

bit.ly/46G2R8Z



UNECE Inside Climate News Climate-KIC Climate & Clean Air Coalition Climate Group

A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.

03/09/2026

The Lever the Overshoot Report Didn't Name

UNEP says the height of the coming overshoot will be decided by how fast the world cuts methane, not by how much carbon it later removes. Coal mine methane, the fastest and cheapest cut on the table, is still not in the room.

Read the full article in the new Methane Brief No. 17 https://bit.ly/4dkmeIq



UNECE Inside Climate News Environmentalist Climate-KIC UN Environment Programme

UNEP says the height of the coming overshoot will be decided by how fast the world cuts methane, not by how much carbon it later removes. Coal mine methane, the fastest and cheapest cut on the table, is still not in the room.

03/09/2026

UNEP's new Limiting Overshoot Spotlight Report https://bit.ly/4guteVi says plainly what many of us have been documenting for years: 1.5°C is no longer a line we might avoid crossing.

It's a line we're living through the crossing of. The report is clear that overshoot isn't a single moment but a pathway — exceedance, peak, and (if we act) decline — and that every fraction of a degree we add to the peak, and every extra year we spend above it, raises the odds of hitting thresholds we can't walk back from.That's the sobering part.

Here's the part that should make us move faster, not slower: overshoot is not a verdict. It's a call to urgency. The report is explicit that mitigation and adaptation have to advance together, starting now — because the depth and length of overshoot are still, today, a matter of choice.

So where do we get speed on mitigation, fast, at scale?

Coal mine methane.
Methane from coal mining — a super-pollutant with outsized near-term warming power — is one of the few levers we can pull immediately, with existing technology, at meaningful volume. Abating it doesn't wait on a decade of infrastructure build-out. It bends the curve now, while the slower decarbonisation of the power and industrial systems catches up. If the next years are about limiting how high we peak and how long we stay there, methane abatement earns its place at the very top of the list.

This is exactly the gap the Clean Exit Campaign exists to close — turning coal mine methane and ventilation air methane abatement from a technical afterthought into a financed, credited, investable climate strategy.

The window UNEP describes is real, and it's still open. Let's use it.
Read more / get involved with Methane Brief on LinkedIn https://bit.ly/4x5ImNM Website: methanebrief.org
hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag

31/08/2026

Turkmenistan just fixed 8 super-emitting methane leaks — proof that visibility changes behaviour. But oil & gas gets satellites and headlines; coal mine methane, one of the largest sources, gets none. No valve to photograph. No alert system. The orphan of the methanes.
Full article: https://bit.ly/4invgYP


Guardian Environment UNECE Inside Climate News Environmentalist

Turkmenistan just did the impossible: it started fixing its methane leaks. Eight super-emitters plugged. A government once too secretive to admit the problem now responding to UN satellite alerts. The Guardian is calling it a breakthrough — and it is. But here's the uncomfortable question we asked...

29/08/2026

Read something this week that’s stuck with me — an essay by Ingmar Rentzhog, who’s spent the last decade working on climate issues full-time.

https://thebiggestlie.wedonthavetime.org

His core point: the biggest obstacle isn’t people who deny the problem. It’s the comfortable, reasonable-sounding belief that we still have plenty of time to fix it — a belief held by good people, including himself.

He backs it up with hard numbers on what delay has already cost, and what’s still possible to prevent.

I’d love to know what people think — as parents, grandparents, community members, whatever lens feels most real to you. Give it a read this weekend and share your honest reaction below.



Inside Climate News UNECE Climate-KIC Climate & Clean Air Coalition Yale Climate Connections

Not carbon dioxide. A lie, spoken calmly in parliaments and boardrooms, only four words long.