Climate change is upon us.

It can be seen in melting Antarctic and mountain glaciers, multi-year long droughts in the North American West that spawn year after year of devastating wildfires, floods in Germany where this spring a year’s worth of rain fell in a few days and record heat seen across most of the northern hemisphere.

The risk side of this question is pretty clear. Simply put, while there is much less methane in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it carries quite a global warming punch–roughly 28x that of CO2 over a 100-year timescale and 86x more over a 20 year one.

The opportunity comes from its shorter lifespan in our skies, approximately 12 years, vs carbon dioxide which can stay there for many hundreds of years. That means if we curtail the amount of methane going into the atmosphere now, it will have a significant impact in terms of reducing global warming in a relatively short time period. Before going into more detail on this, however, let’s get some of the basics established about methane.

In my recent article on the role capitalism can and must play in dealing with climate change, I mentioned that other articles would follow looking at specific industrial issues that need to be faced in the climate battle. This is the first of these articles about steel.

Let’s start with what this article is not: it is not about specific solutions to arrest the problem of global warming. That will be the target of some later blog posts. Rather, my purpose here is to focus specifically on the role of capitalism in climate change. To do so, I have decided to frame the debate by reviewing a book: “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate”, Naomi Klein, 2014.

In my article on plastic in September (The Story of Plastic), I ended with a look at some of the measures being taken to reduce the use of plastic or to replace it with biodegradable alternatives. This follow-up piece looks at some of the latest positive developments and a few other bits of news on the topic.

This is the first of a series of articles on the theme of redesigning agriculture to bring about positive effects for the planet and its people, while also enhancing economic opportunities for farmers.