NASA finds super-emitters of methane
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
18,300kg methane per hour * 24 hours * 365 days = 160,308,000kg (~0.160 million metric tonnes). At 25x CO2 equivalent, that is 4,007,700,000kg (4 million metric tonnes).
This link about US electricity generation: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 shows 767 "million metric tons" from coal, or 1.55 "billion metric tons" from all sources.
4 / 767 ~= 0.5%, so in the ballpark of the parent comment. Also possibly the second link is ton (~1016kg) vs tonne (1000kg), further tweaking the numbers.
And just about the Permian basin, Wikipedia says it "accounts for 20% of US crude oil production and 7% of US dry natural gas production" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(North_America)#... So if all sites like this were measured, it might be more like 2.5% coal-use-equivalent?
Where do you get the 25x from? Wikipedia says it's 80x-100x:
> over a 20-year period, [methane] traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 105 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane)
After that 20 years, methane decomposes into CO2 so its long-term contribution is 3x CO2 equivalent (due to the higher mass after acquiring the oxygen atoms), so its lifetime CO2 equivalence can be higher or lower than 25x depending on which timescale you're looking at. Is the 25x an oft-used figure in the industry/literature?
You are right that there are different valid factors to consider, as can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
But also, 25x vs 100x is a 4x difference, which doesn't affect the comparison to coal that much (it's still single digit % "at best").
Only thing that trumps fossil fuels is nuclear - instead of the EU chasing Apple over USB-C ports, why don't they come up with some subsidies for better reactor designs?
If you think inflation is high now, try making this a reality.
The EU isn't a serious political body - instead of getting everyone at the table to solve hard problems, they chase nonsense.
As opposed to gridlock in US congress or UK changing 3 prime ministers in 1 year?
There has been a marked decline in the quality of western political leadership, its not just EU
A temperature increase of ~2C may at worst be comparable with a large pandemic or even WW2, just with the damage spread out over 2-3 generations. 12C, on the other hand, will leave large parts of the globe uninhabitable without technological assistance, and could wipe out a non-trival fraction of humanity if our tech doesn't keep up (still less hostile than Mars or Venus, though).
But for the scenarios that go 150+ years into the future, methane is a pretty small contributor compared to CO2.
I think perhaps (please correct me if you think I'm wrong) you're overestimating short term changes. Environmentalists tend to blame every disaster, flood or hurricane on climate change. This is like a mirror image to how the climate change deniers use every cold winter (or summer) as proof that climate change is a hoax.
If you look at the data, the current effects of climate change is somewhere in the middle. At present, one could argue that the net effects of climate change are actually slightly positive. Deaths due to heat is going up slightly, but deaths due to cold is going down faster than the deaths due to heat is going up.
By 2050, the adverse effects of the warming is probably greater than the positive ones, depending on scenario. Still, provided there is some technological and economic growth over the next 100 years, people living in 2122 will most likely be wealther (and more food secure), healthier and safer than people that live today, even if the improvement will be less than over 1922-2022.
> so the short-term impact should be a part of the conversation.
But by then, the impact of methane released today is already much LESS than the 25x quoted. More like 10x, and falling rapidly from there.
Also, there is the fact that changing policies takes time. One might even argue that there is an advantage to having a component to the warming where we will actually get a somewhat "quick" effect from cutting. Methane will contribute quite a bit to warming in the very short term, but as soon as we are able to stop releases, the effects will be gone within a generation, give or take (while CO2 hangs around for centuries).
And what % of US energy needs does that site supply to the grid?
https://www.google.com/search?q=(44%2F12)%2F(35MJ%2Fkg+*+0.3...
Global warming potential of CO2 over 100 year timeframe also googleable. These figures are all basic and pretty objective. (You May quibble about me choosing 100year timeframe vs 20 year, but that’s fine… it is still about the same order of magnitude.) More complicated to measure methane’s atmospheric lifetime and infrared absorption proportions, but nothing really controversial.
The EIA website also shows this stuff.
It's down to the person making a claim to provide evidence. If someone points out that there is no evidence provided, that someone doesn't need to provide evidence themselves.
I mean yeah it's snarky, but it's a comment section on the internet.
It should be pretty clear that no sources are needed beyond using your eyes and looking at Robotbeat's comment - unless it's been edited, then it's rather obvious that no sources were provided, which was the claim being made.
Saying "what are your sources" without further elaboration is typically a little rude and combative, but this kind of "no you" comment is flat-out ridiculous.
Here's a highly-cited paper in Nature (including some of the researchers quoted in the OP) that describes how an earlier survey of California methane emissions went:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1720-3
If I remember right, the state of CA asked for this survey. It was carried out by an instrument similar to that of the OP, but airborne, not on ISS as in OP.
California has standards for methane emissions (e.g., https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/fact-sheets/oil-and-gas-met...) that are now covering landfills and oil and gas infrastructure, and dairies -- three of the largest categories of large emitters.
(One effect of these regulations, that lay people may have noticed, is trying to get food waste out of the landfill stream, and into composting, so that it doesn't decay anaerobically and produce methane. In LA, for example, the LADWP is test-driving a program where food scraps - vegetables, but also meats and fats - are diverted into green bins.)
Strengthened regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure are part of this - I'm not saying the studies motivated these regulations, just that they are all part of policies heading in that direction.
It is believed that large oil companies are aggressively selling off oil pumps/fields to get out from under this responsibility. (https://www.propublica.org/article/california-oil-wells-shel...)
The ISS measurements in OP have covered (and will continue to cover) a much broader area than the California airborne survey - but with less spatial resolution - so presumably a broad survey of mid-latitude super-emitters will be possible in the coming months.
Moved to SF from LA area. Sf does the green bins and it’s actually surprisingly nice to separate the compostable scraps out of the other trash. It keeps the trash bin much cleaner and much less stinky.
If I moved back to an area that didn’t require it, I’d still keep them separate and only re-combine at the curbside bin.
You might wish to be wary about tea bags, mind - here in the UK our tea producers are still struggling to release bags free of thin heat-pressed polypropylene sealing strips... .
The upside is turned into dividends. But if a law gets passed to make the owners clean up, poof, bankruptcy.
The very definiion of "Limited Liability".
Its deja vu all over again with the coal industry.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
From what I understand basic environmental monitoring is done in 2022 around all major industrial facilities in the U.S.
I'm not the least bit surprised it took aerial surveys to notice the situation.
This wasn't a surprise. Laws had been previously passed specifically to allow this to continue.
"Among the dozens of plumes of methane spotted by EMIT so far, one stretches for about two miles in the Permian Basin, a massive oil field southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico. This source of methane emissions was previously undetected, writes Grist’s Avery Schuyler Nunn."
was incorrect.
Odd for the Smithsonian magazine to not fact check this...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62917498
Its not in the US, but once its in the atmosphere, the whodoneit is long gone.
TIL about CBG: Cleaner Burning Gasoline
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1564443689623195650 :
> In September 2021 we covered a new "green gasoline" concept from @NaceroCo [in Penwell, TX] that involves constructing gasoline hydrocarbons by assembling smaller #methane molecules from natural gas
From https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opi... :
> The Inflation Reduction Act imposes a fee of [$900/ton] of methane starting in 2024 — this is roughly twice the current record-high price of natural gas and five times the average price of natural gas in 2020.
> These high fees present a strong incentive
... "Argonne invents reusable [polyurethane] sponge that soaks up oil, could revolutionize oil spill and diesel cleanup" (2017) https://www.anl.gov/article/argonne-invents-reusable-sponge-...
FWIU, heat engines are useful with all thermal gradients: pipes, engines, probably solar panels and attics; "MIT’s new heat engine beats a steam turbine in efficiency" (2022) https://www.freethink.com/environment/heat-engine
I am very much looking forward to more and more satellites like this one and ESA's SENTINEL-5P and SCIAMACHY. But AFAIK they'll never be able to tell the difference between, say, ethyl acrylate vs. butyl acrylate (both incredibly toxic) or ethyl mercaptan vs. methyl mercaptan (both noxious/cause headaches at unbelievably low concentrations; ethyl mercaptan has an odor threshold of 0.35 parts per trillion).
So if one plant makes one chemical, and another plant next door makes a similar chemical, these satellites might let the public know that one of the plants is leaking, but both still would have deniability - "it's the other guy across the street". And you'd still not actually know which chemical you've been exposed to.
For that, you'd need monitoring stations with comprehensive sensor combinations at the property boundaries of each chemical plant.
------------------------
I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond/Renton/Tukwila. This massive area has only 3 air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they often show no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But the 3 monitoring sites over 10 miles from me showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem.
We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us. They need to spend about $1 million per air monitoring station and build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected. ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]
0: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...
It seems to be succeeding for the plant operators, though.
A number of days after the water receded from hurricane Harvey I didn't need an instrument to smell the lingering 2EH that had washed in with it. Probably from Bayport and reached as far away as at least Genoa.
In 1971, when the republic was still part of the Soviet Union, a group of Soviet geologists went to the Karakum in search of oil fields. They found what they thought to be a substantial oil field and began drilling. Unfortunately for the scientists, they were drilling on top of a cavernous pocket of natural gas which couldn't support the weight of their equipment. The site collapsed, taking their equipment along with it [...] Natural gas is composed mostly of methane, which, though not toxic, does displace oxygen [...] So the scientists decided to light the crater on fire, hoping that all the dangerous natural gas would burn away in a few weeks' time.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/giant-hole-ground-has-...
The article indicated a 20% rise in cancer rates in populutions around these oil sites from 2015 to 2018.
We can only wonder how many decades this has been occuring in oil-rich countries with poor recordkeeping.
It accomplishes politicians making themselves look good to the electorate. Of course, the champagne doesn't hurt ;-)
If popularized that data could move real estate prices, with political fallout.
I posted the original NASA article a few days ago, which has better info than this Smithsonian article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33349999
The surface properties are the main intermediate product on the way to the climate-related overall goal (https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/science/objectives/). Namely, does the dust lofted from these deserts heat or cool the Earth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater
> One of the more popular theories is that Soviet geologists intentionally set it on fire in 1971 to prevent the spread of methane gas, and it is thought to have been burning continuously ever since.
(Not sure if CH4 is inherently stronger than CO2 because of more possible quantum states, but I suspect atmospheric abundance is the main factor (without looking it up))
It looks like cancer and leukaemia for surrounding populations too, so capping or capture protocols may not kick the can as far.
It persists in atmosphere shorter than CO2 though, so a 100 year coefficient is 28x.
Source: https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...
For instance, nitrogen fertilizer eventually breaks the hydrogen bonds and ends up back in the atmosphere.
2xNH3 -> 3xH2 + N2 is fine, only excepting that more NH3 will need to be made. In the future it will be made with wind or solar energy, but that is still a few decades off.
Such dumb tutorials have hundreds of hundreds of thousands of views. Each video has dumb comments on them like "Oh yeah this burner is awesome, I made the same thing at home and it worked, thank you". YouTube declines to remove the videos.
A burn barrel burns trash at a lower temperature than an incinerator and doesn't do any sort of filtering. A burn barrel can generate more pollution than a small city, including harmful chemicals like dioxin and furans.
YouTube should ban all trash burning content. The makers of those videos should be deanonymized and be reported to environmental authorities. There should be a large crack down on stupid backyard burning content. It should be made illegal and each one of those residential superpolluters should be hunted down and thrown in jail.
It is so upsetting to watch those videos, with people saying "I saved $50 burning my trash at home, I am so smart". Fuck!
Also, the government should require garden equipment to have a fucking catalytic converter. But they won't because that will hurt their numbers. A gas powered leaf blower pollutes as much as a multitude of cars.
You get what you incentivize. If you want people to dispose of trash in the least damaging way, you have to make that the easiest and cheapest option.
There must be a balance.
The best way to reduce pollution is to raise the standard of living for people around the world. People who are wealthy can afford cleaner forms of energy, they can afford to dispose of trash cleanly, they can afford to recycle. People that are poor have nothing to lose and don't care about "environmental authorities". "Let's ban X", "Let's force people to do Y" and "Throw them in jail" is not a reasonable or effective way to solve problems. It also further divides people and does more to hurt your cause than to promote it.
And not having money is not a excuse for burning trash. In part, because burning some types of trash (pretty much anything other than yard trimmings, including food) will make you and your community incredibly sick, causing you to spend more money in the end.
It's already illegal to burn trash in almost every jurisdiction on earth. I am just calling for the removal of content featuring activities that are already illegal.
https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/html/i...
Then, is censorship a solution here? fuck yes. Let's fucking do it. I am all for the censorship of that content. The less of it, the better. Will that inconvenience some people? Fucking fantastic. No ad revenue for the morons working against society, making residential super-polluting videos. They should be in jail, not on YouTube.
It's the old piracy argument again, loads of money was spent trying to take down pirate mp3 sites without results, then Spotify comes along. But maybe recycling some of this stuff is really difficult, in which case the cost of dealing with it should be factored into the price.
It's a completely different process than simply just burning trash in a barrel.
This is part of a long & still alive political agenda, which, best I can tell, attempts to bring apocalypse to this planet. There's money to be made now, & even the end of the world is not to stop that. Ignorance & fantastical belief outweigh reason & observation in much of the political world, & when in conflict defunding observability & evidence gathering has been alarmingly popular in a vast vast amount of said political world.
Heavens only knows how much more we'd know (and how much ealier) if this wasnt a mis-use of an instrument intended for other science, and instead an accepted & responsible & up-front role encompased in NASAs mission statement & their programme.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nasa-earth-removed-mission-...
It uses broadly the same technique as in OP -- spectroscopy to detect the absorption of sunlight from the presence of that particular chemical species. Because the above instrument was designed for the purpose, it's much more accurate and able to distinguish small variations in CO2, not "just" large plumes.
-Sensor system is designed and launched for specific mission goal
-Someone finds an unexpected and important use for the data, completely unrelated to the original mission goal
-Eventually a specialized platform for the unexpected use case is developed and launched
-Someone finds a new use case for this data
And the process repeats. LANDSAT 1 (formerly ERTS-A) was originally conceived to find undiscovered deposits of minerals. Turned out it was useful for a hell of a lot more than that.
India can be #1 in most plastic dumped into the oceans. We're all #1 in our own special ways :p
Due to the toxic nature, I still wouldn't recommend sunscreen without knowing exactly what is in it.
What? Are you a bot?
We can expect the above normal temperatures for a decade or two after the methane is contained. Don't toxify the body with sunscreen and make it worse.
https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/the-trouble-with-sunscr...
Perhaps biddy biddy biddy :p
https://www.cancer.org.au/iheard/are-chemical-sunscreens-saf...
Anyone knows what actions will be taken based on this data ?
For what it's worth, I live in the Gulf Coast, which is home to some of the highest wet-bulb temperatures in the country; and temperatures here appear to be moderating, if anything. The average temperature in the state of Mississippi, for example, remained virtually constant over the last century, rising by 0.1ºF, compared to the nationwide average of 1.8ºF.
Imagine for a second that this was an actual election. To vote for fossil fuels, people just have to call a phone number or drive to a polling place (gas station).
To vote for carbon neutrality -that is, to be actually carbon neutral- a voter has to buy a new, more expensive car. They have to stop flying. They have to change everything they eat. They have to plant a bunch of trees. They have to spend hundreds of dollars on renewable electricity to ensure at least someone is getting renewable power, even if it isn't them personally. Or they can just stop using electricity, I guess.
Imagine an election where you had to fulfill all those requirements for a year in order to vote annually. Would you say that voters "had the option" to vote? I wouldn't.
Money has unequal power depending where its spent. You personally, trying to buy renewable electricity, have to spend hundreds of times more than a large scale coordinated action. Think of it as like the economy of scale.
There are 3 factors:
Market forces make it extremely difficult to create large change at the personal level. You can't crowdfund grid-scale renewables. Even if you have the option to pay extra for renewable power, it does almost nothing- renewable power has zero marginal cost, so it will always be sold anyway. Your impact on how much supply is built is marginal, unless you can pool your money into a huge fund, which is not a program that exists, because people instead want to take advantage of existing political processes, but unfortunately...
Political forces make it extremely difficult to create even small changes. 30% of Massachusetts voted for Trump. Every state has a relatively high proportion of conservatives, and our political systems are all designed to make compromise very difficult. At its absolute worst, in the US congress, only 2 bills per year can be passed without a supermajority, due to budget reconciliation. Surprise, not much gets done.
Finally, 30-40% of the US just flat out thinks its bullshit and are against it on principle. Many of them are quite happy to actively fight against the majority, and it's spectacularly easy for them to do so. Not being wasteful is in fact much harder than being wasteful, so one asshole can wipe out the careful effort of many good people.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/355427/americans-concerned-glob...
The very first consequence of being poor is that you have to live further from work. Burning up 4 extra hours a day, on a bus, isn't possible for everyone.
The statement
> Everyone has always had the option to vote with their dollars.
is privileged nonsense.
If you care about this, you should stop eating meat, or reduce your meat consumption.
Next suggestion, get other people to go vegan :)
Any climate scientists who make active predictions about how much we don't know?
It's a pretty potent greenhouse gas.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
Even after 50 years, it's "only" 10x worse than CO2.
GWP is the average for all years, compared to CO2. For methane, most of this is contributed within the first 20 years after release. GWP is primarily useful for estimating the effect of constant steady state emissions. For instance, if we emit both methane and CO2 at constant rates from now to 2122, the heating from the methane is about 25x worse than from CO2. (CWP100=~25). (calculating this gives the same integral as averaging over 100 years).
However, if we're not looking at constant emissions, but instead large bursts where all the gas is released at once, it makes more sense to use the GTP curve.
Here is a nice plot that visualizes this: https://pubs.rsc.org/image/article/2018/EM/c8em00414e/c8em00...
Edit: strictly speaking, the above reasoning assumes the Earth cools rather quickly. Actual cooling once heat has been trapped can be 10-20 years, however, meaning the maximum temperature is reached about 10 years after the release, and it will take 20+ years for all the heat to escape Earth after the methane itself is gone.
https://pubs.rsc.org/image/article/2018/EM/c8em00414e/c8em00...
However, there are a number of other factors that do make methane particularly worrisome. First, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is going up much faster than CO2, this despite the fact that it decays into CO2 after about 10 years. Further, the higher the concentration of methane the slower its rate of decay, so it stays in the atmosphere trapping heat for longer.
Finally, and most worrisome, there appears to be a feedback loop with warming and methane release from permafrost.
> Since methane only lasts in the atmosphere for about ten years, compared to the centuries that carbon dioxide sticks around, reducing methane emissions could contribute to slowing global warming sooner,
Another consideration is that as the concentration of methane in the atmosphere rises the rate at which it breaks down slows.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is apparently 440 ppm. CH4 (methane) is 1.85 ppm.
At identical concentration levels CH4 is 84 times more impactful greenhouse effect than CO2 over the course of 10 to 20 years and 28 over 100 years. So it should be about 35% of the global CO2 effect short term (which is not the total but close, probably ?), so highly significant. Curiously the number that I found is around 10-20% so either my numbers are wrong or other graphs I found use confusing units.
Yikes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12608421 seems like yesterday
Who would be best to explain that in laymen terms?
Organics may offset some co2, so rainforest regrowth in brazil and other largescale projects may manage the aftereffects better.
[1] Progress on methane emissions by energy companies, but numbers still don’t add up: UNEP | 31 October 2022 | https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1130047
- How hard is it to stop these leaks? How expensive?
- If it's relatively cheap and easy, why hasn't it been done in the past already?
- How can we excert pressure on emitters like Turkmenistan to stop the leaks?
- How long does it take to do this?
- How much of a difference will it make for the climate (and perhaps local cancer rates)?
It provided no benefit that the shareholders cared about.
There's a long history of resource-exploitation companies doing horrible things to the environment, and conveniently going bankrupt when they are near the end of operations. The system does not prevent that behavior well enough, nor does it punish the people who do it.
>These facilities, equipment and other infrastructure that emit methane at high rates span central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States.
What I am curious about is how do we actually hold these large scale emitters accountable and enact change? It's not enough to simply know about the problem.
> "...emit methane at high rates span central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States. By finding these sites from space, the satellite is bringing an important perspective to climate accountability,"
USA could close all of its coal mines with the same money spent in emergency Covid vaccines
Have we not recently been reminded that the true cost of reducing domestic energy production is much higher than the mere bottom line estimate of shuttering the production facilities?
Germany and France might like a word. With Ukraine slowly shaking their heads in the background.
If this is happening all the time, then the number of global methane emissions due to human activity on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions) Wikipedia page can't be valid.
Crazy how human negligence and greed might end humanity.
> In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar.[1]
That's around 50 miles away from the eastern edge of a 750 mile wide country which is covered in oil fields and refineries[2].
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapp...
[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ippa-Uca/publication/31...
111,000 pounds of methane, multipled by factor of 80x, equal around 388M tons of CO2.
A car produces around 4.6 tons of C02 per year. So this makes the emissions equal to about 84M cars driving around for a year. Google says there are around 1.46 Billion cars in the world.
So this amount of greenhouse gas is around a 5.7% increase in our overall car emissions.
(edited based on feedback below)
Methane gas in the atmosphere causes 80x the greenhouse effect that CO2 causes.
Methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere. Even though CO2 has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term. At least 25% of today's global warming is driven by methane from human actions.
Interesting proof of life.
This isn't grade school were trying your hardest gets you an 'A' for the day... in reality trying your hardest and failing is still failure.
The US could do all the magical things and net zero emissions next year and it won't matter one bit. That's just reality... without a globally concerted effort, it's all just waste.
But I realize there is a non-trivial amount of folks that believe doing something, anything is better than nothing - even if it is not logical and has no beneficial outcome.
Perhaps we should put those energies into productive means of solving the problem instead of emotionally "feel-good" solutions. Why does developing countries use dirty energy production? What can we do to make it cheaper to use renewables instead? Can we make biodegradable plastics more attractive than traditional plastics? That's just scratching the surface...
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/u.s.-leads-in-greenhouse-...
Also, being the leader makes it easier for other countries to follow suit. Every country has a large bloc of cynical reactionaries within their borders pointing their fingers and saying "why would we do anything if other countries aren't?". If you do things first, you disarm that narrative that's going on in other countries, which makes it easier for their progressives to get change done locally.
A nice thing about this is it doesn't even punish poorer countries that much, despite the fact that they haven't transitioned as quickly as richer countries. Because they're poor, their economic activity is lower and they don't generate as much emissions, so the import duty would be lower.
If a country has the army of robots needed to make it happen, then you have two problems.
Also, my gaseous emissions are protected by the First Amendment, so not even Twitter can stop them.
This is not to dismiss the challenge, just that we shouldn't avoid hard problems just because they're hard.
* you referrs to people that use that stupid phrase, not you
The intention of "leading by example" was that it's ridiculous to ask poorer countries to make sacrifices that we ourselves are not willing to make.
Cant refrain myself to say Im worried. Feels like things might go Hollywood in no more than 10 years really.
"Gee, thanks for finding our leaks guys! You won't believe how much money we were just leaking into the atmosphere there."
</dreams>
I hope EU finds a way to regulate that and add more taxes.
After regulating cow farts, this would be an appropriate extension.
(No matter what it might look like while playing your video game.)
It always makes sense to fix your holes. The ship is taking on water, yo. The sooner the better. Then you've got a whole hell of a lot better argument to make me fix mine. Instead I can just turn around and point right back at you and say the same damn thing about you, and we get nowhere. Which, incidentally, is exactly where we have been getting because of lazy excuses like this. Which is why I described it as "pointless dithering and finger-pointing."
The issue is mostly that it’s presumably cheap to fix unlike a billion cows all farting.
It's even cheaper to fix the farting cows: Just stop raising cows.
Of course, if you want to supplement beef and dairy products, it's not that easy. But if we would believe that global warming and methane were a problem, we could make a difference within weeks.
Prob way cheaper than invading the country
But they have oil....
It's a nice offer in theory but I could imagine that would lead others to intentionally break their pipelines in order to get "fix-it" money.
I'm reminded of the story of British Raj paying Indians for catching cobras.
1. Define target
2. Draw plumes of methane over the target on satellite imagery
3. Set Greta at the target and take it over, pleading climate change
4. Remove the plumes from imagery
5. Continue target's operation as usual
6. Profit
Lol "it turns out". Did they troll Congress and sell them a mineral detector? Of course they knew methane had a spectral signature.
EDIT: No idea why people downvoting, I think it's hilarious and good we can detect it.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-compare-methane-ca...
Note that this article points out the potential contribution of the methane to climate change, but this would not be anthropogenic climate change as the gas is already in its natural form, just being released from underground.