The Invisible Catastrophe: Record Methane Leak in CA | Hacker News Reader

The Invisible Catastrophe: Record Methane Leak in CA

nytimes.com

281 pointshackuser101 comments

While this was going on, there was another smaller methane gas leak just north of Porter Ranch.

Whats interesting about this one, is the intentional effort to conceal it.

An airplane pilot using an infrared camera to record methane levels of the main leak noticed the second leak. Employees of The Termo Company snaked a 2.5-inch pipe away from oil pumping equipment to hide its opening under a tree.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/03/18/58697/during-porter-ranc...

That's fucked up, this stuff is so frustrating and pisses me off.....this stuff will keep happening until stronger fines are in place. Rather than setting petty fines, the fines should instead be something like 0.5% of the company's revenue. That'll get them listening because it's a substantial enough amount that the risk of getting caught isn't worth it.

If there were some kind of general carbon tax, I assume the fee for "greenhouse equivalent of 1.7 million cars for a year" would be pretty big.

Methane breaks down in around 10 years into CO2. So, it's not quite that bad.

And then CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by plants and algae, so it's really not bad at all!

My understanding is that if you release an extra tonne of CO2 today, there will be an extra tonne in 10 years, in 20 years and in 100 years, because the systems you mention are already working at full capacity.

The problem is that we're mostly releasing CO2 that has been captured by plants millions of years ago and turned to coal/oil/gas. Releasing the same amount of CO2 from freshly grown plants would be neutral.

CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time. A large part of the released CO2 will stay basically forever.

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.12...

While Methane is bad, releasing the equivalent amount of CO2 would be way worse.

http://www.internetslang.com/_2FS-meaning-definition.asp

Yes, but in the meantime, methane retains heat 84 times as efficiently as CO2, to the point where even though there is still 200x as much CO2 as methane in the atmosphere, methane still accounts for roughly a quarter of all global warming.

If global warming was a short term problem or if this was going to continue indefinably then sure.

But, in 10 years this is the same as an extra 2,000 cars for 10 years. 2,000 * 10 * 84 = 1.7 million cars for 1 year.

Methane basically forces you to see future climate change effects today. But, it's the ever compounding release of CO2 that's the long term problem without an obvious solution.

PS: IMO diluting focus is an issue. If two things are bad there is a tendency to stop thinking a that point. Even if knowing which one is 100x worse is very important.

Meanwhile the extra 10 years of 84x heat capture has powered the warming positive feedback cycle. Elevated temps put more moisture into the air, raise the temp, the raised temp causes trapped methane in the arctic to enter the atmosphere. The atmosphere (and the oceans) aren't a balance sheet.

Your vastly overstating effects. At 84x this may cause the next year to be ~1 hours worth of extra CO2 ahead, but that delta is going to drop down over time. (980 million cars in the world / 1.7 = 1:576, transportation is 30% of CO2, not sure what % is cars but 50% = 1:6,405 = 44 minutes:1year )

It's like saying a stunt jumper hit the ground sooner because they carried a camera on the trip. Yes, they might have been 'ok' for a few extra Nano seconds, but that's not why the parachute failed to deploy.

PS: For scale, if everyone in the US drove a Prius it would help and be useful, but not stop global warming.

I am aware that in the grand scheme of things, this "spill" is a drop in the bucket. It is also bullshit. If we are to reverse, not just stop global warming, we have to pull some serious magic out of our ass immediately. Thermal runaway in imminent.

There is, carbon credits, but they're a joke that are used to further line pockets rather than reduce emissions.

They won't reduce emissions until they're mandated by law. And yes, one would expect lots of people to get rich off them. That's kind of the point; it's a market solution.

That, or prison sentences.

That AND prison sentences.

What I find also very interesting is that the headline of the article states it as it was workers fault, while I'm pretty sure it was a top-down order to hide.

Owners/management doesn't seem to get the blame.

It is fun watchimg USA literally eat itself alive. Almost as fun as watching Titanic crash right from it's bow

This piece was a perfect opportunity for the New York Times to use data and charts to visualize the magnitude of the problem and the timeline of the discoveries and activities.

Instead we got a wall of text, and numbers without context like '97,100 metric tons'. I'm sure somewhere deep in there the context was provided, but it wasn't readily available for me as a reader to make a quick assessment of the issues importance, and whether to dedicate 15 minutes to reading it.

Specifically, the lack of subheads and figures made the article really hard to skim, which is rather inexcusable in the age of internet publishing. The only images are a guy with a rolls royce, an overhead shot of the area, a pool, and a gate. Not exactly compelling stuff, nor highly descriptive or additive. The article is very well researched and real journalism went into it, and its a shame it wasn't put together well.

EDIT: dove into this problem more on my blog -- http://www.nickpunt.com/2016/03/31/journalism-and-user-exper...

This is another example of "long-form journalism". Some people apparently consider the buried information and irrelevant fluff to be a feature, not a bug.

Cannot upvote this enough. Laughed out loud.

Yeah, it's not "news" as it's been going on for months and is largely "resolved" now.

There's really very little point in putting the information in a very concise, actionable form because the vast majority of readers are not in a position to do anything about it.

It's not a NYT-quality chart, but I've created a visualization of the problem here:

https://www.uscleanenergyfund.com/blog/visualizing-the-calif...

Spoiler alert: this "catastrophe" is a minor blip on our nation's overall greenhouse emissions.

Very nice, thanks for sharing! Definitely puts things in perspective. Even at its size though, its a preventable leak, and any intervention is going to look small compared to our overall output.

I'm confused by cow methane emissions.

This leak comes from the ground. So obviously it's a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere.

But cows get their methane from plants. Ultimately, are these emissions in the same sense that this leak was an emission?

Meaning that if you burn a tree, then plant a tree, your net emission is zero, once the tree grows large enough. Is it the same with cow methane emissions, ultimately?

Obviously, the methane is a short run problem, since methane is particularly impactful for climate change. I'm wondering if cows produce a long run net gain of carbon in the atmosphere, or if its merely transient.

I'll take a stab at answering: we produce more plants cows like to eat than we otherwise would, methane has a significantly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2, and if we didn't produce plants for cows to turn into methane, the same ground would produce different plants that get mixed into the soil (where bacteria will produce some methane, but likely not as much) and the carbon is thus removed from the atmosphere.

So to oversimplify, with cows we turn CO2 into methane, without cows nature turns CO2 into soil.

Does intensive agriculture have a similar effect? It sounds like the net carbon increase is due to intensive grazing depleting soil capacity.

Of course, a forest would have more carbon than pasture, just wondering about the net impact of cows vs. some other kind of agriculture.

Adding carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4) to the atmosphere are two completely different things. CO2 can be re-captured by plants and photosynthesized to separate carbon + oxygen. So as you pointed out, planting a tree and burning a tree cancel each other out in theory (if you burn the tree 100% cleanly).

CH4 breaks down into other stuff, but it doesn't go back into plants.

To answer your last question, methane is transient (~10 years or so). But as long as the cows are around, that really doesn't matter.

It's a bit more complicated than that. A lot of diesel fuel and natural gas goes into the feed cows eat.

Unstoppable Gas Leaks in Texas Even Worse than California’s, Media Silent: http://theantimedia.org/unstoppable-gas-leaks-texas-even-wor...

This one makes a better story because of the concentration of the problem. The Barnett Shale is 5000 square miles. A huge distributed gas leak on an area that big is harder to impress people with.

So I loaded up Google Maps to get a visual of the neighborhood, and found that someone has conveniently tagged the leak location as a "tourist attraction".

https://www.google.com/maps/place/2015+Methane+gas+leak,+Cal...

The Walmart shopping center is here:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Walmart+Supercenter,+19821...

That is roughly equivalent of the farts of 6 mill cows, just standing there.

Just saying for comparison, not for some "don't eat cows" agenda.

Cow fart source: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3054212/collecting-cow-farts-the-...

(208l of methane farts = 135g/day. 120 days = 16.2kg. 97 x 10^6/16.2 = roughly 6 x 10^6.)

Just smell that dairy air...

Yup.

Imagine all that methane coming from ~1.5 billion cows on a yearly basis. I don't have to, it's happening already :D

Methane is 80 times more potent (long-term) than CO2 for global warming.

I personally can't wait for the economic prosperity of India and Africa. The beef and dairy business will top the oil one as the biggest pollutant, if it isn't topping already.

Why are there no regulations and taxes for them?

> The beef and dairy business will top the oil one as the biggest pollutant, if it isn't topping already.

It isn't.

Agriculture accounted for an estimated emission of 5.1 to 6.1 GtCO2-eq/yr in 2005 (10-12% of total global anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs)). (IPCC AR4[0], slightly revised to 5.0 to 5.8 GtCO2eq/y in AR5)

That's all agriculture, including livestock, this (IPCC AR5[1]) is just "cow farts":

Enteric Fermentation. Global emissions of this important category grew from 1.4 to 2.1 GtCO2eq/yr between 1961 and 2010, with average annual growth rates of 0.70% (FAOSTAT, 2013).

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-ch...

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_a...

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

Here's an 18% estimate while transportation is 13%.

Here's a 51% estimate, trumping everything else.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294

No one can say with certainty.

Although, raising 100 billion animals yearly, most of them having over 250lbs, I'd say it's pretty close for CO2.

When it comes to methane, cow farts are 65% of our methane emissions.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

To get technical on you, 95% of methane from cattle is from burps, not farts.

Thanks for this clarification.

The last time I made this argument it got like eight upvotes and ten downvotes without any of the naysayers explaining themselves, so I'm going to make it again.

A carbon tax imposed by a majority of industrialized countries would be net profitable for countries that aren't large net petroleum exporters at the expense of countries that are.

The carbon tax reduces consumption (i.e. demand) for petroleum, which reduces its pre-tax market price according to supply and demand. In other words the higher after-tax price of oil causes more people to buy electric cars and build out non-fossil power generation, which means less burning of oil and coal, which means less buying of it.

So you have a $2/gallon tax but the resulting drop in demand reduces the pre-tax price of petroleum by $1/gallon (or whatever), which means you're only actually paying $1/gallon more for gas. Meanwhile you have $2/gallon worth of tax revenue which you can give back to the people paying the gas tax via a negative income tax or whatever you like. The extra $1/gallon is money not paid to Russia and Saudi Arabia, which we get instead.

It's free money at the expense of antagonistic countries. The fact that it also happens to save the world is just a nice side benefit.

If you subsidize people buying gas with taxes from buying gas, isn't that a net equilibrium, and people (if perfectly rational) should buy the same amount of gas (since it costs the same in the end)? I understand that some people would buy less because there's an aversion to spending more, or people that just can't afford it in the moment, but I'm not sure it makes sense, economically, as you've explained it.

The tax credit is fixed, not based on how much gas you buy. The average person pays $2000 in tax (but the oil now costs $1000 less pre-tax) and then gets a $2000 tax credit. If you burn less oil than average you still get the $2000 credit but pay only $800 in tax, so switching to oil alternatives puts that much more money in your pocket.

It's a sad comment on the state of our media and body politic that this has not been headline news. But no signifying image of the enormous damage means that it's hard to get and hold people's attention.

I've been hearing about it since the beginning but maybe it's just "local" news? I live an hour-and-a-half away.

Man... it's so disheartening to read about these things. I feel like even if I reduce all my emissions to the best of my ability - use only renewable energy, don't eat meat, don't drive etc - my net effect is only a drop in the ocean compared to catastrophes like this. And this is a total accident: it's not something that could be blamed on apathy, or laziness. Maybe negligence? But it feels like the expulsion of carbon gases is so hard to stop even with good intentions. I can't help but feel so powerless against this.

You're right, your personal contributions don't mean a lot because you're making choices in an economic system engineered, physically and politically, to favor fossil fuels. Something like a decade ago, activists switched gears from "consumer choice" campaigns to regulatory and physical sabotage of fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure.

Don't worry about your car, but do help those committed nerds showing up to regulatory hearings in your area. The Bay Area has several of these infrastructure fights going on as we speak.

You are a human. You are capable of going to a different planet. Communicating with me over a temporal and spacial gap is trivial to you. You are likely a programmer; creating tools which allow for that communication is within your ability.

We're made in God's image. Making planets that are habitable, therefore, is within the ken of our image. Also we're responsible for having dominion over this planet and all the critters and plants that are in it.

In China, they have a program to help clean the air in which they shoot the pollution out of the sky with water cannons. A hundred years ago there weren't any cars or commercial planes. There are solutions. There are even solutions that we would be blown away by; whats to stop a drone collection army that re-collects released emissions or a bio-logical version which does something similar? We aren't powerless.

In the tower of Babel, man wanted to build a tower that would them reach the heavens. God stepped in and put a stop to it, confusing language. We can do things that are amazing and we can do things that are terrible. Humans are so capable that when they set their mind to do something, it takes an act of God to stop them. Do you see fish getting out of their cage and walking on the moon? If you do, your species put them there.

I'm going to go back to writing out things which make the world behave as I order it to now. I want people in one location to be able to watch things in another location without going there; and I want them to see invisible features of the things like an audit log of what occurred there. Not clairvoyance though, just our usual so every day that it has become normal science-fiction-like world.

Generally people are not evil. They don't want to destroy the planet. But there is a powerful force at work that makes it difficult for most people to see clearly: culture.

People like to do things the "normal" way. I once gave a workshop to a group that demonstrated this. I gave the talk in Japan and half the people were Japanese. The other half were from western countries (mostly the US). I asked them to get into groups and debate the best way to take a shower. In Japan, people tend to shower while sitting on a small stool. In the west, people tend to shower standing up. I had to stop the discussion after 10 minutes because I was really afraid that some people might come to blows.

Why do people react so strongly to such a stupid subject? Is there really a "right" way to shower? The answer is culture. There are things in your life that are normal to you. You have done them that way your whole life. All your friends do them that way. Even your identity can be wrapped up in doing things that way.

In my talk I gave a fairly challenging definition of the word "culture": it is the set of things that you do or believe without question. They are the things that are "common sense" or obvious. Everybody does them that way. When pressed, most people will devise reasons for why their way is best, but really it is just a deep rooted belief. If someone holds a cultural belief that entrenches the opposite view it can literally lead to war.

What you do personally is only a drop in the bucket, as you say. If you wish to make a large difference, you will have to convince others to join you. But this is where you will run into problems.

For example, one could encourage people not to eat meat. This will have many environmental benefits. But eating meat in the west is normal. Most people grew up eating meat. Most people's friends eat meat. Many people have friends or relatives that depend on the meat industry. Some people can get violent if you suggest that they should be sitting down while having a shower. Imagine the reaction to telling them they shouldn't eat meat!

Most people shouldn't have a car. Maybe nobody should have a car. That would make a massive difference to the environment. But a car is normal for most people. Driving every day represents freedom and is really part of their identity (especially in North America). Telling people not to drive is like telling them to chop off their left hand. "Because it is better", is just not going to cut it even if you give a thousand examples of how it is better.

So what can you do? I think there actually is a way. Why do Japanese people sit down when they shower? I could come up with hundreds of reasons, but the reality is that in Japan this is the way you do it. It doesn't matter. You could stand up, sit down, lie down, hop on one leg. If it were normal, then people would want to do it that way. In Japan it became normal to shower sitting down.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to make the things necessary for a good and clean environment "normal". We can already see this happen over time. When I was a child, recycling wasn't a thing. In many places in the world it is now "normal". In Japan, if you don't separate your garbage your neighbours will actually yell at you. I have to separate my garbage into 7 different categories!!! But that's normal in my town.

All of these other things can be normal too, but it may take generations. If you wish to be a pioneer, you can just live your life and be happy with the decisions you make. You can show your friends and relatives that you can live a "normal", happy life this way. If it really does make sense, then someone else will try it. Help them succeed. Keep doing that and eventually the world can change.

It might not be fast enough to divert some bad things coming down the road, but it's better to start late than to sit around being depressed that you can't do anything ;-)

We need another Teddy Roosevelt.

Or for the general population to start giving a shit.

About anything, really.

Those are both terrible strategies for trying to fix the problem.

How about doing more science or more journalism? Those things have the dual benefits of helping solve the problem and actually being possible without zombie time travel.

The science and journalism are both clearly there, it's that people don't pay attention to it, or even intentionally ignore what it's saying.

What is journalism for if not that?

The American general population unfortunately tends not to care overly much about things that don't directly impact them in the short term. People have so many immediately pressing things in their lives, like unemployment, debt load, putting their kids through school, etc. that a thing like climate change which might have ramifications for their grandchildren are too easy to ignore.

What we really need is more science-based governing policies with respect to environmental impact, but that again relies on the public electing officials with that stance. I don't have a good solution, but it's a broad enough problem that there isn't a simple fix.

I have family in the midwest. The problem isn't that they don't care or aren't busy, they don't know what's going on most of the time, or they know the wrong thing because they just skim one newspaper and occasionally listen to the radio. Yes tgey have computers, internet, and smartphones, but they're not using them to investigate issues or much at all.

Teddy Roosevelt was the last President to not be bought by the 1%. I am looking forward to President Trump being the 2nd. The 1% spending tens of millions trying to stop him tells you how afraid they are of him.

What about FDR? I can't imagine his New Deal policies being too popular amongst the rich.

And in the modern day we also have Bernie Sanders, who actually has a demonstrable, 30+ year track record of integrity, unlike Trump. Just a thought...

You are right about FDR. I like Bernie but he has some grand plans with taxes that might be a little too much. If he could scale back some that would be good. Bernie might have to be the candidate because the Clinton email thing really does have legs. At first I thought the email thing was no big deal but copying secure data from one system into emails on another system ends up to be technically breaking the law no matter how good the intentions are.

The vast majority of Bernie's tax increases will target the ultra-rich and Wall Street speculators.

For the middle class, taxes will rise a noticeable amount, but that will be more than offset by free healthcare and free college.

Plug your numbers here to see an estimate of change on your disposable income: http://www.bernietax.com/

Trump is not going to be president.

It's nearly statistically impossible.

Great leaders can do nearly impossible things we can only hope he comes through.

Hillary is your next president, its a done deal.

Trump is the president you deserve though. He seems closer in personality to the average american.

The average person that builds skyscrapers that is. While Hillary is the average person who has dedicated her life to public service and is worth tens of millions of dollars to show for it.

From the article: “Climate change is not a real thing for most of these people,” Stern said. “But you change your mind quick when your kids are puking.”

Air pollution != climate change.

I would argue that air pollution is definitely a kind of climate change, when you interpret the phrase literally.

Whatever gets people believing...

Downvoters, seriously, what could possibly be wrong with that? Maybe you see it as being snarky? It wasn't.

Methane == climate change.

> Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.

https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.ht...

This is heavily discussed in a documentary I watched recently, "Cowspiracy."

Right, but it's not climate change that is causing the puking. Put it this way, if we didn't have a greenhouse gas problem, the parents would still be pissed if their kids are puking.

The ConocoPhillips leak in the San Juan Basin is larger. And not so easily sealed.

https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.15/in-the-southwests-four-corn...

Not directly related, but another interesting potential catastrophe in St. Louis.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/midwest/ct-st...

There's one fact that is never mentioned in this story.

Methane is lighter than air (about 0.7th the density of air). The methane leak is above Porter Ranch (about 1200 feet, a fact that is mentioned).

You know that and I know that. But do most NYT readers know that? If not, why doesn't the writer mention it? He does mention elliptically that the town residents are smelling mercaptans, not methane. He doesn't mention that the methane can't possibly be reaching them. It seems like this simple science fact would bring a lot of clarity to the picture.

(In related news, the greenhouse effect is O(log n), as a function from greenhouse gas concentration to thermal forcing. I'm sure everyone here knew this as well.)

Jailtime. Jailtime. Jailtime. Long sentences.

I wonder why this is downvoted. Industrial and white collar crimes are generally orders of magnitude worse, in terms of physical destruction and financial loss, than street-level property crime. Why aren't the sentences (and enforcement, and prosecution) proportionate to the impact?

Let's be honest, it's the power of money.

How many times more powerful than CO2 is methane as greenhouse gas?

Directly from the article...

> Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide.

Approximately 21x.

Ok, so set the gas plumes on fire, should be better for greenhouse effect.

and whole world is doing it, like they really care :)

http://skytruth.org/viirs/

btw, notice how activity decreased in 2015 vs. 2014 with oil prices falling

It's actually done to prevent clouds of flammable gas, mixed with air, from forming around the vents. The environmental benefit is a plus on the side.

reminded - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufa_train_disaster

"The explosion occurred after a pipeline began leaking liquid natural gas[1] (mainly propane and butane), creating a highly flammable cloud that was soon ignited by wheel sparks from two passenger trains heading in opposite directions near the site of the leak. "

"liquid natural gas[1] (mainly propane and butane)

That doesn't make sense to me. Either it's natural gas, or propane-butane. Where I live at least, there are requirements for what natural gas is supposed to be. There can be some amout of impurities in it but it's still supposed to be mostly methane.

Maybe they meant that the propane and butane impurities stayed low while methane escaped?

On mobile chrome the page randomly reloads and the article disappears after about 5 minutes of reading. The mobile web is a sad state of affairs if nytimes can't even get a page reliable enough to read a whole article!

>The mobile web is a sad state of affairs

after almost 10 years of the release of the iphone, still can't get my head around that people willingly choose that inconvenience in the name of the dictated cool.

Methane creares half as much CO2 per BTU of energy as gasoline. However methane its self is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2. So if more than 2.5% of methane leaks into the atmosphere, it cancels its relative cleanness.

I dont think anyone knows how natural or idustrial leakage there is. But some groups are attempting measure.

Is there any liability for this?

If I spilled toxic waste on your land, I'd have to pay to clean it up and possibly more for mishandling it. If I spill invisible toxic waste in the whole world's atmosephere, do I get to impose the costs on everyone else?

The latter. The atmosphere is generally viewed as a convenient place to dump whatever with no consequences. Like the ocean!

No consequences at all, nosiree.

There are laws to penalize leaks if the leak is caused by misconduct like not following safety protocol or not built with safety measure. But the penalty is so lightweight corps just ignore. There are too many drilling leaks every day, so what? $250,000 fine? Fuck that. Easy money and it is the practice of energy company to sub-contract the drilling so fault will never end up on them. Sub-contractors sub-contract and more sub-contract. Yeah, a merge sort, but penalty never bubble up. Also, there aren't enough human resource available to do inspection.

In practice the entity which actually spills the toxic waste conveniently has no assets to recover. See many many historical cases of US vs. Cult of The Invisible Hand, Incorporated cases since the 80s. You need federal-government-scale investigation and prosecution resources to go after the money behind the shell companies. Also it's quite possible for anyone to cause an ecological catastrophe far beyond their ability to recompense.

There is a dead simple solution to this which we've known about forever. Require companies that drill for oil to carry adequate insurance.

The paper on the economics of this is The Problem of Social Cost by Ronald Coase. It's dense but readable, and a masterpiece of economic reasoning.

Yes, CA law states that SoCalGas has to account for the leak by cutting emissions in other places. I think even before the government mandate SoCalGas said they will do compensate for the leak by cutting back in other emissions. So the net effect should be zero after some years.

What will it take for us to recognize there is only one Earth. We all share the same air.

"Daddy, did it use to be hard to breathe when you were little too?"

The timeline for the damage is longer than the timelines that pretty much any of the large institutions that could affect change is setup to handle. Add the need for collective action across the world and it's a really hard problem.

Any problem that takes more than a lifetime to take effect is going to be difficult to make people take action on.

April fools!?

Can we talk about the visible catastrophe of the exurban development? I'm a lot more upset about the total lifetime cost of the depicted subdivision than I am about the one-time industrial calamity.

We can, maybe you should submit an article instead of trying to redirect the conversation?

I'm discussing the photographs that are in the linked article. Am I supposed to not see the juxtaposition between a complaint about the global warming effects of a methane release, and the guy who is depicted in front of his Rolls Royce, in front of his 3-car garage, on one of the many culs-de-sac in the space filling graph of an unwalkable carscape? Am I supposed to feel like Charles Chow gives one flying handshake about global warming?

Part of me feels like the Times is doing a subtle, sly job here, and part of me feels like they missed the whole story.

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