Oil giant fined just $780k after 'one of biggest ever' methane leaks | Hacker News Reader

Oil giant fined just $780k after 'one of biggest ever' methane leaks

independent.co.uk

78 pointsljf13 comments

While the fine seems extremely cheap in my book, I don't think this kind of environmental damage issue has been elevated to an international court yet. Meaning this is an issue at the country level, each country is responsible for determining the punishment and how to use any money from a fine.

Other countries don't really have a say here directly, though trade embargoes could be used if we really disagree strongly enough to refuse to do business with Kazakhstan over the issue.

The country in question is Kazakhstan so not exactly somewhere any country that cares about the emissions has much influence over.

I do not think anything remotely like this is handled by international courts? The ICJ only deals with disputes between nations AFAIK, all the others have a limited number of signatory countries and none really have any ability to enforce anything except so far as countries choose to do so.

Yeah that was effectively my point as well. The article, and what I'd expect to be a common reaction, would push for this fine being way too low and that something should be done about it. We simply have no leverage though, and frankly how another country decides to regulate or punish companies there isn't another country's problem or responsibility.

Nordstream was the biggest ever and it wasn't an accident that we know for sure.

Geopolitics seems to be biggest polluter of them all. There isn't anything dirtier. War has no emissions limits...

Nordstream happened once and released the equivalent of four days of the US's industrial methane emissions. One-time events and wars generally happen for short periods of time, while industry happens continuously.

Compared to human industry, every war in history is basically a footnote at planetary scale. Global nuclear war might be the only exception, but even the resulting nuclear winter would be very brief compared to the many-millenium impact of industrial climate change.

Exactly, I didn't see any fines for the US over this. But of course, it was Russia blowing up their own pipelines, of course it was. Cui Bono?

Not even a slap on the wrist.

Par for the course.

Nordstream was also pretty big...

3 times as much in fact - but nobody wants to talk about that one, then again - both of these events are only a tiny, tiny fraction (like 1/3 of 1%) of the methane released in a typical year.

We need fines for methane leaks on trains.

My commute home yesterday was awful when the person behind me leaked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com