U.S. companies have been slow to act on super pollutants. Methane, refrigerants and other gases with high global warming potential are responsible for roughly half of the temperature increase the planet has experienced to date, yet most companies have made carbon dioxide the focus of climate strategies.
That’s a missed opportunity, experts said this week at Trellis Impact 26, because mitigating super pollutants can have greater near-term impacts on global warming than efforts to tackle CO2.
“There’s an overwhelming opportunity but an underwhelming response,” Tristam Coffin, co-founder of êffecterra, a sustainability and engineering consultancy, said of refrigerants, one class of super pollutants.
Why the U.S. has been slow to act on superpollutants
Lack of awareness is part of the problem, noted Luke Pritchard, director of the Beyond Alliance, which brings companies together to share best practices on climate on climate solutions. Until recently, superpollutants were a niche topic discussed mainly by science nerds and climate blogs.
Technical issues around tracking and accounting for some superpollutants also played a role. Electricity use can be metered and used to calculate associated carbon dioxide emissions, noted Coffin, but refrigerant emissions are much harder to track. That’s partly because the emissions are unintentional: They happen when the gases leak during use and when equipment is disposed of. Assets containing refrigerants are also frequently distributed across multiple facilities.
Regulation is an additional factor, said Ramé Hemstreet, chief energy officer at Kaiser Permanente: Tougher rules in the European Union have compelled companies in the region to act faster to remove refrigerant gases from greenhouse gas inventories.
How the U.S. is catching up
The previously niche topic has been pushed up the corporate agendas by a small number of first-mover companies and non-profit allies. Earlier this year, for example, the seven founding members of the new Superpollutant Action Initiative — Amazon, Autodesk, Figma, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Salesforce and Workday — committed to investing up to $100 million to cut superpollutant emissions.
The initiative is run by the Beyond Alliance, which also operates several other projects designed to help companies take action on superpollutants. These include a partnership with êffecterra focused on investment opportunities in Scope 3 refrigerant decarbonization and the Superpollutant Academy, a collaboration with carbon-credit rating agency Calyx Global that helps companies build the knowledge needed to support high-quality superpollutant mitigation through the voluntary carbon market.
What the companies are investing in
At Trellis Impact 26, Hemstreet described how he is collaborating with colleagues to eliminate superpollutants from cooling systems. He advised the audience to “shoot ahead of the duck” by identifying equipment that is due to be replaced for operational reasons and working to identify replacements that don’t use superpollutants. But finding cost-effective options in the U.S. can be challenging, he noted.
Companies with smaller superpollutant footprints can look to solutions outside their value chains. Around a year ago, Google said it had contracted for credits generated by projects that will destroy 25,000 tons of methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 2030. The high warming potential of the gases mean that the impact of the credits over 100 years will be equivalent to eliminating 1 million tons of CO2. In 2024, Workday became one of the first buyers of credits generated by projects that prevent methane leaks from orphaned oil and gas wells.
As with any type of carbon project, superpollutant credits vary in quality. But a relatively large number of projects have earned high scores from carbon credit rating agencies. The scores stem from confidence that the gases will not be returned to the atmosphere, the comparatively simple mechanisms used to measure the quantity of gasses captured and the limited alternative incentives available to deal with the gasses. A focus on superpollutants was one reason why Salesforce and Autodesk recently topped a buyers leaderboard created by Calyx.