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Scale of methane leaks from fossil fuel production and landfills exposed
- rzimmerman 3y agoThere 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-satellite-program-to-pinpoint-methane-and-co2-super-emitters/ 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.
- headsman771 3y agoConsidering 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.
- rzimmerman 3y agoBy "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.
- Sabinus 3y agoThe methane emitters in the satellite image are doing far, far more than merely existing.
- cyanydeez 3y agolandfills in America have been regulated for methane for multiple decades.
- f321x_ 3y agoBitcoin mining fixes this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNrrpbtHtpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNrrpbtHtpg
- consumer451 3y agoPivot to ML workloads, much less money laundering in that use case. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/saving-the-planet-with-better-ai-data-centers-with-crusoe-ceo-chase-lochmiller https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/saving-the-planet-with-bett...
- f321x_ 3y agoMuch 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.
- consumer451 3y ago> Also bitcoin is way more beneficial to society than ML training. Citation required, or at least an explanation.
- llsf 3y agoIndeed it looks like a low hanging fruit.
- example5458 3y ago[dead]
- profsummergig 3y agoNimby + 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.
- thfuran 3y agoPollution 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.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoI 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.
- notjoemama 3y agoNor 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.
- 3y ago
- jeffbee 3y agoWhy don't Americans incinerate more trash? It seems like the way to go.
- 1cvmask 3y ago[dead]
- JoshTko 3y agoWe need carbon tax now to fine, and reallocate funds for better processes.
- Erratic6576 3y agoWe need to ban fossil fuels for most uses now. Like coal We are doing too little too late
- irrelative 3y agoWell a carbon tax would essentially end coal.
- johnea 3y agoI'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...
- nimbius 3y agoThe 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.
- jwagenet 3y agoSeems 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.
- jpk 3y agoBut 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.
- jwagenet 3y agoSure, 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.
- jpk 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane