Scale of methane leaks from fossil fuel production and landfills exposed | Hacker News Reader

Scale of methane leaks from fossil fuel production and landfills exposed

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113 pointsLeary72 comments

Nimby + disassociation.

"That landfill is causing a lot of pollution". No, you caused that pollution. The landfill just collected it all in one place.

This is similar to "China's manufacturing causes a lot of pollution". No, you, the consumer, cause that pollution.

Just my $0.02.

Pollution caused by a factory is an (almost certainly) unaccounted-for externality, a market failure hidden from the consumer of a good but known to the producer. Pinning the blame on the consumer removes it from the agent who is both directly causing it and actually able to effect change.

I hear you, but if one maker makes you pay the real price of including the externalities, most consumers will by the equally good but much cheaper alternative.

In fact, at equal price, they will choose the most convenient form factor with beautiful and practical packaging.

We are not innocent in all this.

Nor are we at fault. Corporate consolidation has been happening for decades. They have psychologists on staff or contracted out to design products that sell based on inherent human bias and autonomic responses. We’re sold to at the subconscious level now.

I agree given only two choices the average consumer will spend the least, but doesn’t that suggest trying to make aware or change human behavior is the wrong approach to solving the problem?

I wouldn’t bother with land fills for a while. First on my list is standardizing electrical power at docks for container ships. They run the most polluting fuel on idle 24 hours per day while docked. The amount of carbon release is something like in the millions of automobiles per day. If they could plug into every port they can shut their engines off. They might not even need to carry the dirtiest fuel anymore.

> I wouldn’t bother with land fills for a while. First on my list is standardizing electrical power at docks for container ships.

There is some sort of effort going on, but IIRC it stalled as a consequence of covid [1]. Biggest problems are frequency differences (the entire world but the Americas runs at 50 Hz, but maritime+America runs at 60 Hz), and the fact that for the many megawatts a ship can use you need extremely high voltages to get that transferred at reasonable currents, which is a safety challenge on its own [2].

[1] https://sustainableworldports.org/wpcap/wg-3/our-mission/

[2] https://sustainableworldports.org/wp-content/uploads/Landsto...

Surely the consumption is reduced when they are sitting in port idling? And do ships really need a higher voltage than common industrial power? (480v, 3 phase) I realize 480v is dangerous but not unmanageable.

Container ships can have thousands of reefer containers on board.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerated_container

> Nor are we at fault.

Yes, we are. The vast majority of our (first world) consumption is not something we are forced to do. We (again, first world, but particularly here, in tech world) have comparatively massive disposable incomes and wide discretion about what we spend it on.

"I can't avoid plastics because it's what my sushi comes packaged in"

Don't buy the sushi.

You’re the delight of every B.S. oil company distraction campaign. You were precisely what the people who invented the term “carbon footprint” had in mind—an eager sucker.

Oil company revenues derive from the aggregate of consumer demand and behavior. Big Oil’s villainy in demand-generation campaigns and climate change denial is inexcusable, but this is a relatively small aspect of their nature. The majority of their activities are done because we consumers collectively ask them to do it.

Pretending that there’s a small number of bad-guy oil bosses is attractive because it makes the problem seem tractable. The inconvenient truth is that the collective action we seek amounts to collective change in our own lives.

Sent from my luxury smartphone.

Penalising polluting producers passes the price to the product purchaser.

That is a good thing

Yeah I agree, it's the best place to target it: the producers have the means, motive and opportunity to cut their pollution.

The real problem comes when considering imports. How to assess the emissions of overseas producers, and then track the "embodied pollution" in each product? Becomes very messy without solid international cooperation. So it probably then becomes necessary to tax certain things when they're either imported or at the point of sale.

The solution, of course, is to not permit any maker to foist their negative externalities upon the commons to unfairly undercut competitors. If you're going to blame a consumer for the producer's pollution, why not instead blame their landlord for charging them the rent that forced them to drive to work and so buy tires? Why not instead blame the landlord's bank for demanding repayment of the mortgage or the bank's shareholders for demanding profit instead of benevolent loan forgiveness?

I heard Santa had something to do with it too!

That's why regulation is better than leaving everything to the market in many cases.

…and it’s not like we don’t produce similar regulation all the time.

The conversation here makes it sound like this is unprecedented, whereas it seems to me completely normal. There are no CFCs in my deodorant any more, or lead in my paint, or whatever.

Once regulation is in place, producers have motivation to innovate and drive the cost of disposal and reuse down, which is a great application of market mechanisms.

money exchange cause pollution, the less you spend money, the less you pollute, simple

It's not really that simple -- there are lots of ways to spend less money while generating more pollution. I could spend less money by piling up my trash in my back yard instead of paying a waste management company to haul it away. But that's not going to reduce the amount of pollution I've caused, and will likely increase it.

If you don’t spend money, then you ultimately have less stuff to put in your back yard. Hauling it away doesn’t change the net amount of pollution - it’s still pollution in a landfill, just less unsightly. Perhaps if everyone had to put their waste in their own backyard people would opt for products that produce less waste!

I live rurally and have to take my waste and recycling to the transfer station. It’s free but a pain in the ass so I try to make decisions which produce less waste so I don’t have to go as often. Previously I lived somewhere rurally where you had to pay per pound brought to the transfer station - that was an even bigger incentive to cut back on waste.

If you don't spend money at all, then you've removed yourself from participating in modern society, so that's not a reasonable suggestion.

I spent more money to replace my aging furnace with a heat pump to reduce my emissions, so the mere exchange of money doesn't cause pollution. I could have spent a lot less money to repair or replace it with an equivalent 80% efficient furnace.

My point is that it's not as simple as "money exchange causes more pollution" since I could stop sending money to my waste management company while not doing anything at all to reduce my personal pollution. Yes there are ways you can reduce your pollution impact (i.e. by buying less unnecessary goods, traveling less, etc), but there are also ways you can spend less money (i.e. by buying cheaper produce imported from another country 1000 miles away than paying a bit more for more local produce) while increasing your environmental impact.

> No, you, the consumer, cause that pollution.

Substitute "contribute to" for "cause"

I think OP is correct by saying “cause”. The demand is actually causal, not merely contributory.

When I pay my waste management company to haul away my trash, I do so with the expectation that they'll dispose of it in an environmentally conscious way (as environmentally conscious as dumping it into a big hole in the ground can be). If they can't afford to do methane capture based on what they are charging, then they should charge more.

By not including externalized costs like environmental harm, cheap trash, just like cheap gas, leads consumers to use more of the product than if the environmental costs were factored in.

> I do so with the expectation that they'll dispose of it in an environmentally conscious way (as environmentally conscious as dumping it into a big hole in the ground can be)

Where does this expectation stem from? We all know they dump it in the ground as you mention but has there ever been a push for regulation to demand methane capture? I’ve never heard of such a push so I can’t imagine why anyone would expect them to have been doing it.

Regulation - you can't dig a hole in the ground and call yourself a municipal landfill.

https://www.epa.gov/landfills

Modern landfills are well-engineered and managed facilities for the disposal of solid waste. They must meet stringent design, operation, and closure requirements established under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

I'm not an environmental expert, if Methane emission causes significant environmental harm, then the EPA should be regulating it. It's hard to tell someone that they're harming the environment through methane emissions from trash while the actual environmental experts at the EPA don't bother to regulate it.

...this response rings so deeply and reverberating hollow to me.

You can't just presume that "regulation" is magically removing the externalities of your consumption, particularly given that the data show so convincingly that regulatory capture is endemic.

Of course the state occasionally displays the correct time as a broken clock would, but this is something that requires verification rather than naked presumption.

>You can't just presume that "regulation" is magically removing the externalities of your consumption, particularly given that the data show so convincingly that regulatory capture is endemic.

It doesn't matter what I presume, it matters what the other 330 million people in this country presume. Telling people to be better conservationists is not going to succeed, externalities need to be priced into products so people can make informed decisions at the time of purchase. Make durable, re-usable, and repairable products the more affordable option.

There isn't time in life to become expert on every last thing, nor is it economically efficient for people to do so. Maybe we would have less regulatory capture if a large chunk of our polity weren't dedicated to the proposition that government is bad and that they should be in charge of it (to show you how bad it is of course, not to line their pockets or anything ha ha why would you even think that).

Zero-trust societies are neither desirable nor sustainable. Paranoia is not hte basis of a healthy polity.

> There isn't time in life to become expert on every last thing, nor is it economically efficient for people to do so.

One needn't be an expert to open the Seafood Watch app and check if the fish they're about to buy is contributing to ocean degradation.

Or learn about local municipal waste management practices.

Or adopt personal habits consistent with antimicrobial stewardship.

And so on and so on.

...but to your deeper point: the information age _does_ beckon us to be our best generalist selves. It's now possible to scale up to very significant levels of understanding on topics which underpin social and economic policy in timeframes needed to meaningfully participate in debate.

I'm concerned we have over-corrected for dunning kruger effects in some areas, especially if our chief guardrail against release of greenhouse gases is the presumption that the EPA is ensuring form afar that your local dump is up to snuff.

You shouldn't just presume that "regulation" is magically <doing whatever>.

You should (as the citizen body politic) bake into your system of governance the means by which to independantly third party check the execution of policy carried out by the civil service and sub contractors.

You should also have the means to fire elected officials for corruption, failure to follow oaths of office, etc. and to similarly examine the integrity of civil servents and sub contractors.

This is all common sense, one hopes, for any G20 Government, ideally all governments.

None of which negates the need to regulate landfill to prevent ground water contamination and greenhouse outgassing.

Is your issue the regulation or that you are unable to access third party reports that verify regulated work was carried out as intended?

Exactly - I'm sure it's much more the latter than the former.

I think everybody on earth wants regulation, in the literal sense of a mechanism to achieve regularity. It gets tricky when that (sometimes difficult) task is handed to a state which has interests which are diametrically opposed to regularity, and which benefits from irregular human events like war and emergency.

So far we're mostly alright .. cracks are appearing but we're largely keeping on top of what our elected employees are proposing as policy and what our employed civil servants are doing to implement.

By 'we', of course, I mean my body politic for a state 3x the size of Texas with a population less than 2.5 million, running a Washminster hybrid system formed by modifying known flaws (at the time 100 years ago) of the US and UK systems.

Still, nothing lasts forever and it's on the collective 'us' to stay on top of what we've delegated.

> When I pay my waste management company to haul away my trash, I do so with the expectation that they'll dispose of it in an environmentally conscious way (as environmentally conscious as dumping it into a big hole in the ground can be).

Lol what??? Have you never seen how the cookie is made and discarded? It amazes me how so many people on this VC-sponsored forum hold such environment conscious expectations. Many of you are in a strange state of mind about the true cost of things. Nothing is made cheaper in consumption; costs are just offloaded to nature.

FWIW: I grew up close to a copper mine, and currently live about 2 miles from a landfill (as the crow flies).

>Have you never seen how the cookie is made and discarded?

I can't speak for your state, but in my state the cookie isn't discarded in a landfill, it goes to composting facility.

I live in a province where the cookie is picked up by the compost truck and taken to the landfill because both the composting facility and landfill are run by the Mafia and one costs less to operate than the other.

Feel free to email Jeff Bezos to put a country of origin filter on Amazon.com so I can actually reduce the carbon footprint of the products I buy.

Consumers have very few options within their control and the problem is not binary nor does its solution need to be zero sum.

The lack of information, which in turn affects consumer behaviour. Information is important to a well functioning market. Excellent point, and providing more info is often to the detriment of many sellers/producers.

That excellent point aside, I did want to say that international shipping is a much smaller contribute to CO2 emissions than road freight, so a simple toggle is probably not going to cut the mustard, and goods from China are not necessarily that much worse for the environment than goods transported from one side of the US to another.

The biggest problem with most goods produced these days is the disposable nature of them.

> No, you, the consumer, cause that pollution.

I disagree that the end consumer has so much agency. As a consumer I simply have the choice to buy product A or B - the pollution caused by the factory that the store ordered hoping you would buy it - is obscured by many levels.

The consumer is a small part of the decision chain

As a consumer, I can choose the plastic bottle in which my plasticised water is sold. I cannot choose deposit glass

You can choose not to buy a bottle of water at all. You can buy a reusable bottle and get refills.

I can also choose not to buy milk because they are no longer available in glass bottles.

I can also choose not to buy food which comes in a plastic bag or blister.

You can choose deposit glass if you look around. A local health food store or specialty shop surely sells water in large glass containers. I live in a very rural part of Missouri (not a very progressive state) and I know of multiple sources.

> This is similar to "China's manufacturing causes a lot of pollution". No, you, the consumer, cause that pollution.

This pretends that China's environmental standards and oversight are identical to every other countries or that worldwide shipping isn't one of the largest contributors to pollution on the planet. Which we all know is far from the truth.

So, no, China actually causes that pollution. The companies in the US who take advantage of China's lax environmental and labor laws to eke out a few points of profit causes that pollution.

As a consumer, I require goods to survive and thrive, and I have very little say in how that market functions, and I have zero say when it comes to setting policy. I'm happy to do more, and do as much as I can when possible, but I'm wealthy enough to play this game... most of America is not.

I wish HN would punch up nearly as much as it loves to punch down.

> As a consumer, I require goods to survive and thrive, and I have very little say in how that market functions.

You do have a say when/if you are willing to bear the cost of your decisions. If more people were willing to pay up the "manufactured in a place with strict environment and labor regulations" premium, then there wouldn't be so many companies flocking to China.

But consumers don't want to do it. They rather save some bucks to buy the stuff they want and hide themselves under "everyone else does it".

I think most everyone wants to do it, just the majority of people can’t afford to.

I don't buy it.

The iPhone is one of the most expensive devices and it is not due to a "not made in China" premium. It has close to half of the smartphone market in the US.

Homeowners in the US are educated to "buy the most home they can get credit for", not "a home they can pay afford and pay off as quickly as possible."

Cars in the US are growing in size. Consumers prefer the (false) safety of SUVs and trucks over the economy and fuel efficiency of smaller vehicles.

I could go on. Americans are the richest people in the world, but also the most wasteful and least worried about the consequences of their consumerism.

GP talked about who causes the pollution not where to punch (who to blame). Everybody has a little say in policies, at least in democracies. When you say that most of America is not wealthy enough to play this game then you basically admit this. And this is what is happening: people are not keen on making policies happen if those mean lowering their standard of living. But the thing is that, unfortunately, it is that very standard of living (i.e. consumption) that causes the problem.

You can punch up as much as you want, things are not going to change without people lowering their standards. And once we accept it we can easily force politicians to do the right thing. The tragedy of the situation is that everyobody is complicit and most people will not accept that they themselves are. Sure, everybody but them .

And I'm not saying this to blame anyone. Blaming doesn't make sense. Identifying the causes and what needs to change does.

> As a consumwr, I require goods to survive and thrive

An average person in US or EU consumes far more than what they “need” for survival or thriving. Half the ocean pollution can be directly attributed to the fact that most people want hundreds of pieces of clothing in their wardrobe. Yeah some people have less, but on an average, everyone consumes far more than they need, including the “poor” in these countries. You can’t just absolve yourself from all accountability.

> This is similar to "China's manufacturing causes a lot of pollution". No, you, the consumer, cause that pollution.

Except the China Effect of producing TrashOnArrival products is doing more than its fair share of amplifying how much must be produced to keep operational product in consumer hands.

the problem with this conversation is that it risks never landing anywhere; or landing differently depending on who is having the conversation. In order to be sure that Someone is accountable, we need an agreed framework for ascribing accountability. I think the way this might work is that the landfill is accountable, and the cost of accountability is passed on to users; that China is accountable for pollution from its manufacturing, and the cost of that accountability is passed on to consumers. The consumer only has a binary choice, (with cost a factor in that choice) whereas the producer can be incentivised to implement efficiency measures, alternative technologies, etc.

You can absolve Coca-Cola et al. switching to plastic packaging by shifting recycling and pollution blame onto the consumer.

You can just as well absolve PRC’s environmental policies by shifting blame onto everyone who buys goods made in China.

As a matter of fact, it’s what both want you to do: assume they have no agency in this, and hold yourself and/or free market responsible for all the damage.

There are several satellites focusing on human-driven methane emitters and monitoring that will be active in the next few years, like Planet's Carbon Mapper (https://www.planet.com/pulse/carbon-mapper-launches-satellit...). It's great to have active monitoring if we want to impose limits and hold offenders accountable.

Considering that merely existing creates carbon, the choice of "offenders" is concerning. Creating or "emitting" carbon and methane aren't crimes and attempts to "hold offenders accountable" makes advocates of this position sound authoritarian. You can't outlaw living and force people to buy climate approved products. The narrative and wording surrounding the climate movement get worse every year.

By "offenders" I clearly mean parties exceeding a legal limit (or any treaty-negotiated limits). It's a way to enforce laws and agreements. Of course I'm not implying that creating or releasing any amount of methane inherently a crime. We're talking about leaking pipelines (either by accident or negligence), biomass landfills that might be required to reclaim or capture methane (but aren't), things like that. Or even just identifying human-driven sources we didn't realize existed.

The methane emitters in the satellite image are doing far, far more than merely existing.

Seems odd the title even mentions landfills and the comments here are focused on them, since despite the largest hourly producer of methane mentioned being a landfill, they are largely glossed over! Based on the map, landfill emissions are basically a non issue outside of South Asia, so efforts to reduce those emissions can be rather targeted.

It’s worth noting that despite trapping nearly 30 times more heat, methane is only responsible for around 25% of global warming and only exists in the atmosphere for a decade vs 100s of years for CO2. Certainly reducing methane emissions will help, but CO2 will hang around long after the methane is gone (why the usual “suspect”, cattle, is a non issue).

With regards to landfills, the culprit is anaerobic decomposition. Diverting paper to recycling and most other organics to compost would go a long way.

But that's the thing about methane, it doesn't become "gone", it oxidizes into CO2. So not only does it trap more heat for the decade it's around, it also converts into CO2 to trap heat at the lower rate for centuries.

Sure, but CO2 is not the only product of methane oxidation and methane in the atmosphere can be stabilized if emission is stabilized. The same is not true for CO2 and the current CO2 warming contribution is worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

landfills in America have been regulated for methane for multiple decades.

Why don't Americans incinerate more trash? It seems like the way to go.

We need carbon tax now to fine, and reallocate funds for better processes.

We need to ban fossil fuels for most uses now. Like coal

We are doing too little too late

Well a carbon tax would essentially end coal.

I'm not sure "exposed" is the right verb here.

This issue has been known for quite some time.

The problem is that no one is doing anything about it...

Indeed it looks like a low hanging fruit.

The real comedy of all this navel gazing and head shaking is we could capture all this excess methane to use as affordable winter heating or turbine fuel but it would literally crater a very lucrative natural gas oligopoly in a fortnight. Artificial scarcity is a planned feature in western capitalism.

Bitcoin mining fixes this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNrrpbtHtpg

Pivot to ML workloads, much less money laundering in that use case.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/saving-the-planet-with-bett...

Much harder to deploy as the hardware and infrastructure is more complicated than simple asic bricks that can run on every oilfield in Siberia.

Also bitcoin is way more beneficial to society than ML training.

> Also bitcoin is way more beneficial to society than ML training.

Citation required, or at least an explanation.

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