As doom-and-gloom as this article is, there is a very positive interpretation of this. The climate change effects we have been documenting and experiencing imp

As doom-and-gloom as this article is, there is a very positive interpretation of this. The climate change effects we have been documenting and experiencing implicitly include all of the methane from these leaks. It's not like discovering these means climate change is worse than we realized. We've already been measuring the consquences of climate change -- the total sum of everything harming the environment -- so discovering a new component doesn't change that total sum, it just changes the relative proportion of other factors that go into the sum. So what this is really saying is that a major contributor to climate change is a methane leaks that no one is using. That's good news. It means we can fix these without having to make any sacrifices other than the (admittedly very large) cost to plug the wells. That's a lot easier than stopping CO2 production caused by useful things like energy production and transportation. To reduce those causes, you have to actually take away real benefits from people. But these leaks are just going into the air. No one benefits from them, so no one will be harmed by their absence. We can just fix them.