[Manuel_D]

> The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2.

This is only true in the short term. Methane has a half life in the atmosphere of less than a decade. By comparison, CO2 has a half life of thousands of years. Methane's greater immediate warming is drastically overshadowed by CO2's long-term persistence.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The GWP (global warming potential) which is what people talk about is calculated over the next 100 years, so "short term" is a bit misleading.

[Manuel_D]

Global warming potential can be calculated over any chosen time frame, some use a 20 year time frame [1]. One hundred years is indeed short term when some greenhouse gases have a half life of thousands or even tens of thousands of years.

!. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

[jabl]

My understanding is that in the athmosphere methane slowly oxidizes to, well, CO2 (and water).

So in the short term (whether you use 20 or 100 years) methane is much worse, in the long term it approaches that of CO2.