NASA finds super-emitters of methane | Hacker News Reader

NASA finds super-emitters of methane

smithsonianmag.com

767 pointswalterbell357 comments

To put this in perspective, the 18300kg per hour from the Permian site is equivalent (over a 100 time horizon global warming potential) to a 500 Megawatt coal power plant's CO2 emissions (~1kg of CO2 per kWh of electricity) burning 24/7. Or, to put it another way, it accounts for the same emissions as about 0.3% of the entire US electricity grid.

It's hard to take this comment seriously when you haven't provided any of the relevant facts or sources to back this claim.

https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/co2_article/co...

Same for your baseless snark, maybe provide some facts yourself

They're not refuting the point or providing counterarguments, they're just questioning the lack of sources, which is valid.

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.

> you haven't provided any of the relevant facts or sources to back this claim

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.

Easily googleable numbers for total us electricity, about 475GW averaged over the year, about 1000 grams of CO2 per kWh for coal also pretty easily googleable (and can be derived with just basic facts like the heating value of coal of 35MJ/kg for nice anthracite, the fact that anthracite coal is nearly all carbon, the relative atomic mass of carbon and oxygen and therefore 12 parts coal will release around 44 parts CO2, the fact that a coal power plant thermodynamic efficiency is around 35%, etc). (44/12)/(35MJ/kg * 0.35) in grams/kWh = 1078.grams/kWh.

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.

Just to confirm the numbers myself;

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?

At 25x CO2 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?

The 100 year global warming potential seems to be a pretty common way to compare greenhouse gases. It makes sense when you discuss things like, say, limiting warming to N degrees by 2100 or long-term climate change, but I agree that the caveat that "it's much, much, much worse on shorter time scales" should be emphasized way more than it is. Especially given the current situation.

It was just my first google result for "methane co2 equivalent", and so the number came from this link (am Australian) - https://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/NGER/About-the-Natio...

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").

HN'ers seething - you can't beat cheap fossil fuels for base load capacity (ask Germany)

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?

What does this have to be with satisfying base load capacity without fossil fuels? Or USB-C?

"What does this have to be with satisfying base load capacity without fossil fuels?"

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.

> 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

It turns out they can do more than one thing at once.

It's even worse than that, since that's the effect over 100 years and we don't have 100 years. Over 20 years, 1 ton of methane is equivalent to about 80 tons of CO2 (compared to ~25 tons over 100 years), so about 3x worse than your numbers.

By what parameters do you think we don't have 100 years? When I read the IPCC reports, it seems that during the next 50 years, we may see moderate increases in temperatures (1-3C, depending on scenario). While this may be bad in some areas, it's nothing compared to the worst case scenarios for 2200-2300 (up to 12C).

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.

Sorry, I shouldn't have written it like that. I suppose what I really mean is that it makes sense to look at the CO2 equivalent over a 100 year period when thinking about long-term climate change, but we're going to see large effects in the coming decades. The full sentence I should've written is something like, we don't have 100 years before we start seeing major changes, so the short-term impact should be a part of the conversation.

> we don't have 100 years before we start seeing major changes

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).

Thank you: kind of incredible that the author of the article didn't think to include that kind of information.

"Or, to put it another way, it accounts for the same emissions as about 0.3% of the entire US electricity grid."

And what % of US energy needs does that site supply to the grid?

None comes from the leaks themselves. That’s just wasted energy.

Wow, that's an important point. Nevertheless, it all adds up and keeps getting more.

Several questions ask to contextualize this measurement.

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.

My Orange County suburb recently mandated putting food waste into a separate can.

It's a statewide mandate (well, the separate can part isn't- some regions use the same cans for food waste and lawn clippings)

Who are they selling them to, and how will they get out from the responsibility?

Companies that exist only to enter such risky markets.

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".

One of the companies they sell them to is DEC, which I invest in. These old wells are still profitable but only for organizations with lower cost structures that specialize in handling these sorts of end-of-life regulations and maintenances. State governments subsidize them to maintain the wells long into the future.

https://www.div.energy/

You made me think of this DEC [0], which of course is another thing. Which one is the DEC you are referring to, and how do you invest in it?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation

The link I posted is DEC's website. The name is Diversified Energy Corporation, DEC is their ticker.

Bottom feeder companies that will squeeze some money out of them before declaring bankruptcy. Because of inadequate bonding requirements taxpayers will wind up footing the bill for cleanup.

Its deja vu all over again with the coal industry.

> 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

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.

I keep my food scraps in a bag in my refrigerator until it's time for curbside pickup. It definitely helps keep the smells and gnats away!

Same here in Portland - we only have trash pickup every other week but the green bin weekly. Works nicely and the trash stays pretty fresh!

We have compostable bin pickup twice a week in my hometown in Italy, a ton of things are compostable with industrial composters these days which you could not easily compost at home, also thanks to regulations (e.g. shopping bags, tea bags, some food packaging etc), so the other bins stay pretty empty.

Important to note that, at least in my experience, most of the 'plastic bags' in Italy are the compostable kind. In the UK they're still in the minotrity (I've only seen our version of the Co-Op offer them, for instance).

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... .

I see entire apartment complexes that don’t have recycling options at all, whatsoever.

I live in the country and I throw whatever the hell I want in my compost and my garden loves it. Next time you get a hyper specific instructions page about what to compost and not, do what I do: chuck it in the compost with everything else organic! :)

Industrial compost is not the same as a garden compost though.

Be wary of rodents if you try to compost things with a high fat content. I hope you have good rat control.

I outsource rat control to the neighborhood foxes and cats.

Green bins for food waste don't work if you have Airbnb nearby.

How could a 2 mile long methane plume in New Mexico have been undetected for any significant amount of time?

From what I understand basic environmental monitoring is done in 2022 around all major industrial facilities in the U.S.

Or simply „How come we are finding out about that now and not in last 20 years…”

what interesting is there is nothing there. The only something are gas wells which the whole area is dotted with, so my only guess is leaky gas wells? https://www.google.com/maps/@32.3761968,-104.0819087,4787m/d...

Looks like Marathon Oil is the company

Curious, how did you figure?

Just the fact that every well I saw on street view was from that company.

Good call. Thanks for clarifying.

holy crap there are a lot of oil wells in that area.

True story. I have worked oil and gas for a while and am familiar with this area. It can easily be a well not properly P&A'd (plugged and abandoned) - quite common down there. It is most likely a Marathon well (HARROUN COM #002), or it could be Eastland Oil (HARROUN A #007). If you want to get a better idea for yourself, you can check the EMNRD - https://ocd-hub-nm-emnrd.hub.arcgis.com/

Is there a way to IDK 3d earthen print a geodesic dome over the site and capture the waste methane (natural gas) into local tanks?

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 hear what you are saying, and there is a ton of room in the E&P space for improvements of all kinds. You would be shocked at how incredibly we are behind technologically (I remember just last year over hearing someone say, "We just figured out our cloud strategy."). In terms of a dome over fields or units to collect stray methane, that may be an issue. We are loathe to construct "enclosed spaces" for gases as that can be a safety issue. It doesn't take much stray anything to kill you out there. We have all sorts of stories of people going into an enclosed space, passing out and dying, only to have more people die trying to get them out. Sounds bad, I know, but this is coming from someone who has come across a few dead bodies out in the field for various reasons - mostly just being stupid. Fees are funny in oil and gas - we complain about how much money we don't have and then spend it frivolously elsewhere. That inflation act, at the state level there are all sorts of those out there and some companies care and some don't. If you want to see something crazy, check out the NDIC (North Dakota Industrial Commission). In terms of oil and gas data, theirs is the most centralized, easily accessed, and complete in the country (NM isn't bad, CA used to be better, TX is garbage-which is odd, LA is god awful, and PA is meh). The NDIC keeps really good track of flaring, so to see how much natural gas is just burned up at the cost of getting the oil out (not such a great infrastructure for moving gas and historically the price hasn't been a good inducement to build any). To get the well level data, it is $150/year, but well worth it if you are working that basin and also in comparison to all of the data services out there. https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/statisticsvw.asp

So there only needs to be a bit of concrete in a smaller structure that exceeds bunker-busting bomb specs and 'funnels' (?) the natural gas to a tank or a bladder?

Are there existing methods for capturing methane from insufficiently-capped old wells?

Are the new incentives/fees/fines enough to motivate action thus far in this space?

OpenAPI is one way to specify integrable APIs. An RDFS vocabulary for this data is probably worthwhile; e.g. NASA Earth Science (?) may have a schema that all of the state APIs could voluntarily adopt?

Presumably the CophenHill facility handles waste methane? We should build waste-to-energy facilities in the US, too

FWIU Carbon Credits do not cover methane, which is worse than CO² for #ActOnClimate

Natural gas isn't stored on site, it needs to be piped to the nearest plant to be processed and put into a sales line. Capturing methane from insufficiently capped old wells would not be economic in most cases. If a company was called out on it, they would just go dump more cement in it to make sure the gas is contained. 90% of the time, wells that are plugged are plugged well, the ones that aren't and are just abandoned maybe leak only 1-5 thousand cubic feet per day - nothing worth doing anything about (to the company financially). Fines typically mean nothing to E&P with where they are now - though some have gotten clever about it - example being North Dakota keeps flaring down by whatever you are flaring you have to cut your oil production in some proportionate manner (oil is the more desired product) - though that was rescinded during the last big price down turn and am not sure if that is back in effect. To your statement about APIs - that is one thing the oil industry is terrrrrrible with. Our data collection and cleaning is abysmal. I agree with your statement, and I would be all for it, but E&P companies can't even get their own production numbers right - a good example is if you check out the fracfocus database where companies volunteer up their fracturing job compositions. Generally it is useful, but the people who input the data, similar to who would probably be handling this can barely spell and data cleaning would be a nightmare. waste to energy facilities are great, and there are some interesting things out in the oilfield but, like everything else, there needs to be more financial incentive for companies to build them/use them.

So, in 2022, it's cheaper to dump concrete than to capture it, but the new fines this year aren't enough incentive to solve for: capture to a tank and haul, build unprocessed natural gas pipelines, or process onsite and/or fill tankers onsite?

Data quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_quality

... Space -based imaging.

How long should they wait to up the methane fee if it's not enough to incentivize capping closed wells?

It is totally cheaper to dump some cement (it is mostly gel with a topping of cement). To P&A older wells maybe runs $12-25K (assuming, like, a 5-8k ft. depth conventional well)...and I may be running a little high on that number. That gets a small truck out there with a small crew to pull tubing and dump alternating layers of cement and gel (cement goes on the top and across formations that would be ground water bearing). Fun fact, if you have to go back into an abandoned well and you come across red cement at the top, that is indicative of someone losing a nuclear based well tool in there and to call someone before going further. A typical 7.5-10k foot lateral unconventional well (horizontal wells) down that way will run about $7-8 million depending (and 6 wells on average on a well pad), but aren't really the issue, but just giving you some numbers to sort of show that fining someone $100K for something serious isn't that big an expense and not really a deterrent. Natural gas lines are always a big deal to oil and gas companies - if you build it they will come. Most space in pipelines for operators is spoken for before they even dig the first trench.

Options:

A. Privately and/or Publicly grant to P&A wells

    ($25k+  * n_wells)
  + ($7-8m+ * m_wells)

B. Build natural gas pipelines that run past those well sites (approval,)

C. increase the incentives/fines/fees

Shouldn't it be pretty easy to find such tools with IDK neutron detection and/or imaging at what distance?

Sadly, the environmental monitoring is woefully inadequate, even next to the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex (Freeport, TX ... though its a bit better of an example to use or include Deer Park / Houston Ship Channel as well because it's part of America's 3rd/4th largest city). Below the dashed line is a copy/paste of a comment I made two months ago on a post of ProPublica's dispersion model and public health impact modeling of self-reported emission events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549653

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 is probably inadequate by design.

> We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us.

It seems to be succeeding for the plant operators, though.

Familiar with trace quantities of Brutal Acrylate? How about 2-EH?

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.

They passed laws 2 years ago to penalize this. Goes into effect next year.

This wasn't a surprise. Laws had been previously passed specifically to allow this to continue.

The BBC broke some news about a month ago regarding flaring emissions not even being included in the inspection numbers for oil.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62917498

Its not in the US, but once its in the atmosphere, the whodoneit is long gone.

It's been known for a while. Some resources I found on it: https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/new-mexico-methane-a... and https://earth.stanford.edu/news/methane-leaks-are-far-worse-...

Huh so I guess:

"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...

Carlsbad, NM isn't a big town. Head Southeast from there and it's quite a large stretch of land that's not used for much besides oil exploration, some cattle grazing, and the WIPP site. The population density is so low in that area that it seemed like a good place to test ways of storing nuclear waste long-term. This is one of the places where they're working on figuring out a way to warn future civilizations not to try and dig up what is buried there.

I'm not the least bit surprised it took aerial surveys to notice the situation.

In Turkmenistan a pit has been burning for over 40 years.

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-...

COP27 is about to start, that would be a good time for countries to agree to do something about these starting this year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63083634

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.

China and the US have already committed to take no serious action. Here in the UK we have the same policy. The EU prevaricates (who can blame them). India also isn't planning to do anything. COP27 is a giant waste of time with champagne.

> is a giant waste of time

It accomplishes politicians making themselves look good to the electorate. Of course, the champagne doesn't hurt ;-)

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapp...

Project site: https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/

Looking forward to AR apps that map pollutant emissions from such data and project it as you travel about, making the invisible conscious. There will be more public pressure for reform if the public can see the see the point-source IRL.

If popularized that data could move real estate prices, with political fallout.

Have they published a global map we can look at?

They are still in the process of mapping: https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/mission/destination/

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

Note that the map they produce will be of surface properties (like mineral composition), not methane.

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?

Yeah, let's name these super-emitters!

Since Turkmenistan was mentioned, mandatory link:

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.

I'm not quite sure, does burning it make it less harmful?

Yes, burning methane converts it to CO2, which is much less harmful of a greenhouse gas

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63083634

It looks like cancer and leukaemia for surrounding populations too, so capping or capture protocols may not kick the can as far.

In general CO2 is a far less potent greenhouse gas than CH4, largely because there is already a permanent low level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a few decades the methane will oxidize to CO2, but in the meantime it’s like 40 times more potent. Better to burn it.

(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))

My layperson understanding was that the more atoms/bonds a molecule has, the less transparent it was to IR. Diatomic molucules like oxygen and nitrogen were pretty much transparent, molecules like CO2 and H2O were in the middle, and bigger ones like CH4 were less so.

I have a hazy understanding from the atmospheric radiation course I took a decade back, but if I recall correctly the vibrational states of a two-atom molecule are simply not at affected by infrared. To be a greenhouse gas, you need the, uh, rotational states provided by three or more atoms. Or something like that? I was always more of a dynamicist and barely scaped by in atm chem (it’s almost all free radical chemistry). Anyway you definitely need a third atom.

Not an expert but quickly googling: Methane is 84x more contributing to the warming than CO2 over the first 20 years, per kg emitted.

It persists in atmosphere shorter than CO2 though, so a 100 year coefficient is 28x.

Source: https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...

Any other use of methane besides combustion most likely ends up releasing the exact same amount of energy as burning it.

For instance, nitrogen fertilizer eventually breaks the hydrogen bonds and ends up back in the atmosphere.

Burning it at the source means thatuch more gas will also be extracted and (ultimately) burnt for the other use.

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.

Was there not some point where someone might have thought it a good idea to sink a gas wellhead half a mile away to drink that milkshake instead of letting it burn for 50 years?

These are the same people that thought draining the Aral Sea for cotton was a good idea.

YouTube is full of trash burning tutorials. Some of them are exceptionally stupid and talk about "clean burners", which is essentially a burn barrel connected to a leaf blower, such that the smoke is dispersed, creating the illusion of "clean" air.

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.

While I sympathize with the sentiment, that creating some kind of censorship dystopia will magically solve the problem, the idea has no traction when most of the people doing so make less than $1 a day somewhere in a remote corner of the world. This is the problem I have with climate activism.

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.

We are not talking about energy, we are talking about waste disposal.

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 normally much easier to buy e.g. a computer, a mattress, various household chemicals than to get rid of them properly. We need to tackle one or both sides of this equation, or people will just dump stuff in their local river if you censor the burning video.

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.

A bad analogy for this case, because pirating mp3s doesn't give you, your family and your neighborhood cancer and doesn't generate fat soluble toxic chemicals that accumulate in wildlife, livestock and humans for decades.

Oh, really?

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us...

They don't incinerate waste in open air, unlike backyard burn barrels. Also, burning happens at high temperatures, and emissions are captured.

It's a completely different process than simply just burning trash in a barrel.

This is why trash pickup should be free. That way it will be disposed of properly instead of dumped on the side of the road or burned in backyard barrels. Yet most cities charge for trash pickup and are looking to charge even more or move to quantity-based fees.

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.

True, but then you have a different problem: you incentive people to generate more trash.

There must be a balance.

Never have I felt “incentivized” to produce trash. Most of my trash is because the government doesn’t curb overpackaging of products.

Well, if you want to look for alternatives, join /r/zerowaste.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroWaste/wiki/index/

My family lived outside the city limits of a rural town and trash service wasn’t even available to us. Us and every single family in that situation used a burn barrel. There are a huge number of people in America that have never done it any other way!

There was a waste dump / transfer station you could haul your trash to...

Have you heard of dioxin?

Will be interesting to see how this capability unfolds. They’ve proven this can be done using an instrument not even designed for the task. A specialized instrument may be able to detect other greenhouse emissions. Imagine the kind of high resolution accountability that might be possible. But does the political will exist in the US to expose ourselves that way? Our political donors that way? Our country as one of the largest emitters?

Such as this CO2 measurement, made from a dedicated instrument for the last ~8 years: https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/science/

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.

It's now possible for independant charities to do this:

https://www.methanesat.org/

A reminder that Bush II redefined NASA's mission statement to exclude monitoring & observing the earth.

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-...

What would happen if this information was public?

If the information was public, after remedying all of the methane leaks, we would still maintain above normal temperatures for a decade or two, then we would normalize temperatures around 2050, if all of the leaks were capped by tomorrow.

Due to the toxic nature, I still wouldn't recommend sunscreen without knowing exactly what is in it.

> Due to the toxic nature, I still wouldn't recommend sunscreen without knowing exactly what is in it.

What? Are you a bot?

It was a simple gesture implying that due to the hotter temperatures, sunblock may actually compound the problem.

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

Yeah I'd rather get some "potentially unsafe" chemicals in my body than definitely get severe skin cancers all over my body

https://www.cancer.org.au/iheard/are-chemical-sunscreens-saf...

You grow old with your own body. Thats obviously your problem

I use a hat.

The government would only publicize the emissions that benefit us politically, which are likely the primary polluters we already know about (China, India, etc).

Corporations are multinational. The atmosphere doesn't care if that methane plume came from a plant in the US or a US-owned plant in Nigeria. Or on an rig in the North Sea.

Corporations are multinational, but politics still plays favorites.

The Primary polluters are still China and USA. India is a far 3rd and emits 50% less CO2 than the USA. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271748/the-largest-emitt...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/06/22/ranked-the-top-10-...

India can be #1 in most plastic dumped into the oceans. We're all #1 in our own special ways :p

I’m not sure what those figures are for. They list India with 126.5 million kg of plastic “dumped”, yet the Phillipines is #1 with nearly 3x that amount of plastic waste going down its rivers into to oceans: 360 million kg (3.6 × 10^5 Metric tonnes) of plastic waste according to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803

In other news, its obvious which region has trash problems

There are a lot of countries out there, even if the us is unwilling to, it would be in the interest of many middle powers to do so.

The history of remote sensing is more or less a 50-year long series of events like this:

-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.

I find the cognitive dissonance on emissions stunning: we've made basically no effort to cut emissions for over 40 years, now people are shocked that there are a LOT of emissions happening. WTF did anyone expect? The power of people to believe "someone else is fixing it even though there is no reason they would" is incredible.

And now what ?

Anyone knows what actions will be taken based on this data ?

My plan is to move a bit north before the wet bulb temperatures in the southern US get too bad. I'm thinking ruralish Michigan for my retirement.

The Great Lakes area is a good place to be to shield yourself from natural disasters of any kind, including any extreme climate events to come, other than maybe another ice age.

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.

Yep, South Texas here, but I wouldn't call it the Gulf Coast, though I do go fishing there once in awhile. I'm sick of the humidity and locally speaking we break temperature records nearly every summer now. The Great Lakes are my best bet for the future, yes.

Everyone has always had the option to vote with their dollars. If we allow ourself to be eco-capital-realists for a moment, we have to conclude that living on a habitable planet is simply not that important for most people.

I think this is an extremely privileged perspective.

For a brief moment before civilization-wide collapse, we'll be able to generate a lot of shareholder value.

I don't see how that's related. My point is that not everyone has the luxury of choosing to buy more expensive, eco friendly, goods. Some people have to pull from the bin of mass produced garbage food, rather than going down the street and paying 4x for something sustainably sourced.

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.

I don't think anyone is upset with those people. Generally people on HN are wealthy.

That's not what people think. They don't care because it won't effect them.

Let me get this straight. You're saying that markets cannot optimize for futures beyond the lifetime-horizon of their participants?

That's clearly incorrect. 43% of Americans think global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime[1]. If they could just "vote with their dollars" then the US would have seen immense changes in renewable energy and EVs in the past 20 years.

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...

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Some people don't care, enough that we can't change right now. You detailed more clearly what I wasn't trying to say.

I care. I went vegan.

> Everyone has always had the option to vote with their dollars.

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.

A lot of methane comes from animals. See here: https://www.iea.org/reports/methane-tracker-2020

If you care about this, you should stop eating meat, or reduce your meat consumption.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Scr...

Hmm?

Done already, been vegetarian for the past 5 years, what's your next suggestion ?

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I don't think it is whataboutism to say please go vegan!

Next suggestion, get other people to go vegan :)

This is why I want to work with GIS based on satellite data. Seems like great positive impact.

Stupid question: How much is this actually contributing to climate change?

Any climate scientists who make active predictions about how much we don't know?

> Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere

It's a pretty potent greenhouse gas.

https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas compared to CO2, but also stays in the atmosphere much less long (on the order of a few decades).

The way methane "exits" the atmosphere is by becoming CO2, so it's strictly worse.

CO2 plus H2O (water vapor is also a highly potent greenhouse gas).

Methane becoming CO2 means it also produces H2O + a lot of heat, correct? Enough heat to use it as energy source for example.

Yes, biogas is primarily methane, and it's one possible energy source that can be (is?) used while transitioning away from fossil fuels.

When methane is released, each molecule casues 120x more warming than a CO2 molecule. As it decays (with a half life of ~10 years), it falls exponentially towards a floor of 2-4x worse than CO2 (it's 4x after 100 years and continues to decay from there). This is called Global Temperature Potential (GTP).

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...

The 25x number is already accounting for the fact that methane doesn't stick around as long. It's based on 100-year GWP calculations [1]. If you look at shorter timescales methane is relatively much worse.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas. But the upside is that it doesn't stay in the atmosphere for long. The half life of it is something like 9 years.

At which time it turns into CO2 which stays around longer, and water which I believe is a more potent greenhouse gas than either

Water falls to the earth as rain

warmer atmosphere == higher capacity to hold water vapor.

Something like 90 or 95% of the greenhouse effect is from water vapor. The only reason we really care about atmospheric CO2 is because we think that it triggers more atmospheric water which is the real driver of global temperature change.

Would it be ecologically responsible to set these leaks on fire?

Depends on who you ask. Today it's tomato soup and epoxy, tomorrow it's C4 and a cell phone. It won't be long before we have conversations about nationalizing fossil fuel companies.

According to the article, it lasts shorter time in the atmosphere compared to CO2.

> 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,

Worth mentioning that CH4 ultimately turns into CO2.

At which point it reacts with ozone to form carbon dioxide and water. It's like saying the best way to destroy water is by freezing it.

Scientists tend to talk about greenhouse gases' global warming potential (GWP). A common figure used for methane is it has the GWP 20x that of CO2 over 100 year period. This takes into account that the methane at first traps a lot of heat and then it breaks down to CO2 and traps less heat.

Another consideration is that as the concentration of methane in the atmosphere rises the rate at which it breaks down slows.

The answer is actually not that easy to find when searching for less than 5 minutes.

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.

440PPM?

Yikes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12608421 seems like yesterday

As of 2015 it was estimated that methane made up 16% of the human contributions to global warming [0] So, significant but by itself not necessarily worrying.

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.

[0] https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/

It looks like if methane emissions were completely capped, we would still have above normal temperatures for decades before 20th century temperature norms were restored.

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.

Remember That Huge Methane Plume? https://www.kunm.org/local-news/2016-08-23/remember-that-hug...

I was looking for a lazy man's view - a map of all the super emitters of methane with color gradients or size coded spots. I was disappointed that it was purely technical and aimed at those who work in the field.

What is crazy to me is that Bitcoin mining may be the only viable solution to this problem. Its the only profitable way to incentivize the capture of this methane, regardless of location.

»Meanwhile, recently published studies set the estimate for total global methane emissions from the industry at 80-140 million tons per year, while the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) methane tracker estimates emissions at the lower end of this range.»[1]

[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

This whole topic raises a bunch of questions:

- 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)?

Our economic system has no built in incentives to stop these leaks. Considering how massive these leaks are, the budget to plug them shouldn't be a consideration. We're ruining our planet's livability with leaks like this, but since it's not profitable for anyone to do anything about it, we won't do it until there's enough political will behind it.

Companies do have health and safety groups out there working on these things. Of course, the bigger the company the slower, more inefficient, and incompetent they tend to be. Prices can range - some things can be patched, but many times the reason for the leak is age and it requires a new piece of equipment. So, there you would have permitting to handle, expensing the equipment at either the field level or, most likely, well level, which would kill the "economic-ness" of said well/well pad which never sits well with a company and may make them rethink it and just plug the wells - equipment could be low to high hundreds of thousands - really depends on the piece and size. In terms of frequency, People are fixing these things daily, small projects to fieldwide initiatives. In terms of someplace like Turkmenistan, anything can be fixed with money. In that part of the world, your best bet is financial incentive. I mean, it is unethical, but just pay the "expediting fee" for the local warlord/mayor/president - usually a "donation" to an orphanage or fund that doesn't really exist. The cancer rates thing is interesting - the well in question is possibly a Marathon well. Their record isn't the greatest (Look into Paw Creek, NC and Marathon's "small leak" at their terminals there). No scientific data on this at hand, but as a person who works in oil and gas and chemicals with an oddly high number of friends who have had some type of severe cancers, I would say this would be hugely helpful to the general public.

> - If it's relatively cheap and easy, why hasn't it been done in the past already?

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.

Really hoping this was outside our solar system and indicative of life, TBH.

Related project/visualization: https://carbonmapper.org/

Quality science and discoveries are reasons why NASA should be given an increased budget to work with.

But is the world going to do anything about those spots?

Seems like this should be on the nightly news...

I for one am glad the US is finally looking into who on earth is causing these awful climate problems. Turns out it is Turkmenistan and "likely Russia".

It's not just Turkmenistan.

>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.

fart joke

Worth noting that EMIT wasn't funded for this purpose. It was greenlit to measure and track dust (arguably still for climate-related purposes, but still!). This is a relatively minor example of why funding space-based science is so important. We're still seeing "accidental benefits" of deploying technology there.

Cynical me thinks that if NASA tried to get funding for a project that could detect large scale methane plumes which might be used against the oil and gas industry they might just not be able to get that funding.

Cynical me is always impressed in how much funding goes to find emitters outside the develop world:

> "...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

> 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.

All the more so for switching to wind and solar (and reducing usage). Nobody is saying cancel energy. Just that switching away from coal is probably a good idea.

Can the current energy demand of the United States be met cost-effectively with wind, solar, and batteries?

I'm a huge proponent of these technologies but the answer to that question in 2022 is still no.

"Ending" domestic coal production would cause a drop in GDP that would make 2020 look like child's play.

Speaking as a non-American who doesn't fully understand the factors at play: why can't you guys just get your military-industrial complex to build you some nationalized nuclear plants on federal land in the middle of nowhere, where there aren't any NIMBYs to get in the way? (You could even just reuse the 'federal land in the middle of nowhere' that all your since-decommissioned nuclear-weapons testing facilities are sitting on!)

We should. I would be a single issue voter for almost any candidate who proposed this. We should fill the state of Nevada with nuclear plants and export the energy as far as possible.

We can’t even agree on a place to store our waste in the middle of nowhere. Billions of dollars have been spent since the 1980’s on Yucca Mountain and that still hasn’t happened.

Too many NIMBYs (where "backyard" refers to the whole country)

  > build you some nationalized nuclear plants on federal land in the middle of nowhere, where there aren't any NIMBYs to get in the way?

I'm not in the US, but I guess for the same reason why Sahara desert is not yet became world largest solar power plant. You can't just build power plants in the middle of nowhere since energy transportation infrastructure isn't free and there some laws of physics involved.

Also I pretty certain that US government and especially military are well aware that centralization of power production is not good for resilience of the grid and national security. One huge centralised nuclear facility would be much easier target than hundreds and thousands of smaller power plants.

Who said anything about (geographic) centralization / "one huge facility"? Federal land is everywhere in the US (see the diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands). There's lots and lots of "middle of nowheres" owned by the federal government, in pretty much every state, dispersed enough that each one is not too far from easy grid connection.

If you've ever seen what is done to wire up a hydroelectric dam in a "middle of nowhere" river valley to the grid, this wouldn't be all too different: clearcut a narrow straight-line path through a few hundred miles of wilderness, up and over and mountains/rivers/etc, and run some ultra-high-voltage transmission lines over them. Here's what that looks like in the abstract (https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...), and in practice (https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/powerlines-across-mountains-...)

(It especially wouldn't be all too different, because most Federal land is in the Rockies, so these nuclear plants would likely be mostly built in almost exactly the same terrain as hydroelectric dams are built in, and so dealing with basically the same grid-routing challenges.)

And while all those middle-of-nowheres would provide room enough for hundreds/thousands of those https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm..., if you like, you really don't need to go against efficiencies of scale; 20% of power in the US is already covered by just 54 plants, and those only in 28 states. Presuming some real "this land has no land value" places where you could build as big as you like, you wouldn't need to more than double that number to cover 80% (because you could do quite a few reactors per site.)

Why would this be okay? Well, remember, nuclear is base load generation; meaning that it doesn't compete with (most) renewables, only with other base-load generation — mainly oil/coal and hydro-power. All that distributed solar/wind/etc infrastructure that's good for grid fault-tolerance would still be there if China lobbed some missiles at the big plants.

I'm not from the US, but the normal situation is that on places where nobody leaves there is also not enough water to cool down nuclear plants.

World Uranium production: 45,000T

Natural Uranium required to start a 1GW nuclear reactor: 7500t

New Net Renewable generation in US: 5GW (this is hilariously low. Compare 75GW in china)

Cost per GW of nuclear: $10bn -- maybe half that without NIMBYS if we assume how much the military industrial complex charges for stuff is the sameas tye juclear industry.

Us military budget: $750bn

Proportion of US military budget to match China's current renewable growth: 50-100%

Proportion of World Uranium production to match US renewable growth: 80%

Proportion of World Uranium production to match China's current renewable growth: 1200%

Proportion of world Uranium reserves to match China's current renewable growth for 1 year: 7%

I mean, building nuclear reactors you never turn on is a better use of money than what they normally do, but they can hardly be out bringing democracy to Niger, Namibia, and Kazakhstan to get free fuel if they're busy building something useful.

It would still massively reduce emissions though, simply by virtue of the fact that they wouldn't be burning millions of tonnes of oil for normal operations.

Still better to build wind if you want electricity. If you've figured out how to make electricity teleport, then renewables can do it with almost no storage.

I think your key assumption here is wrong: uranium isn't fundamentally expensive. It's expensive because there isn't enough current demand for it to bring more uranium mines and enrichment facilities online. Uranium used to be cheaper (adjusted for inflation) per gram than it is now, because there used to be more of those facilities online than there are now. With increased demand, it would be cheaper again.

> Uranium used to be cheaper (adjusted for inflation) per gram than it is now, because there used to be more of those facilities online than there are now.

This is both false and entirely irrelevant. The costs are driven by capital (and require supply chains that don't exist) not fuel. Minerals get more expensive to extract after you extract the easy stuff. Building out 100s of GW of new nuclear would require extracting the stuff that costs several times more than present -- to the point where fuel costs would be equal to the LCOE of solar.

What is relevant is the entirety of world reserves are not enough to provide even US electricity + transport energy in PWRs. Loading 800GW of reactors uses almost all of it. Reprocessed MOX and what's left might buy you 20 years of operation. Mines take quite some time to come online so the pace of production of new nuclear would be small compared to even the torpid rate of US renewable production.

The PWR industry is nowhere near the scale of renewables, and it's impossible for it to get there.

If you want to blow a trillion more dollars on trying to make it happen, put it into liquid sodium FNR research. At least that kinda-sorta works. You'll be quite disappointed when you finally get a design that is safe and scalable and see the price tag though. And even if you do go all in it will take decades to breed enough fissile material to make a dent.

Stanford's Mark Z. Jacobson started writing papers a decade ago [0] that answers that question yes. The GDP will be immaterial if we continue to ignore the obvious.

[0] https://energy.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9971/f/mark_...

https://seec-tonko.house.gov/sites/sustainableenergyandenvir...

Dont forget about nuclear. Still a great energy source.

Wait, why? Isn't solar or wind, depending on location, typically the cheapest form of power generation?

Most of Europe is off coal. It's not really a necessary part of an energy mix.

They're off coal because they're on Russian natural gas. Until this winter, I suppose.

Natural gas is a biproduct of oil and coal production.

Not really? Germany is a mid-range, slow-moving sort of country, and they get about 40% of their energy from renewables. They still get 30% of their energy from coal, but it's being fairly steadily phased out.

Energy sources are fungible. Solar power is cheaper than coal in a lot of places, as is wind, and the US has a ton of natural gas to make up for the intermittency problem.

I think you're mistaking a political problem for a technical one.

I think you're mistaking political problems for being implementation details that are easily fixed.

Versus the reality in which they are the hardest problems that exist for humanity at the current moment.

Russian gas is literally not replaceable by liquid natural gas, or any other energy source, as imports for most of Europe this winter.

It's theoretically fungible on an infinite time frame. We do not live in a theoretical universe.

Sure, politcal problems are hard problems. However, your original post asserted that the current energy demand of the US cannot be met without coal. You did not say they will not, because of political pathology.

It is, however, patently obvious that they can - many countries in Europe are doing that right now, and not all of them depend on Russian natural gas.

Further, the only reason why EU states in the east depend on Russian natural gas is because Russia is close. The US is a gas exporter. They would need no such overseas supply.

> Most of Europe is off coal. It's not really a necessary part of an energy mix.

This is not exactly the best time to be talking about Europe's superior energy infrastructure.

I think there's a great deal of hysteria about Russian gas cutoffs. German bills are projected to be lower than UK energy bills over the winter[0][1], even though the UK has basically no dependence on Russian gas.

A war is an unusual and extreme event, and when it's started by your major gas supplier, it's unsurprising that prices go up. It is, however, obviously not enough to write off the whole european energy policy just because when you stress test it, there are higher bills.

It's no use if your 'sensible' energy policy results in 3 degrees of global warming: that will be far worse than a high energy bill, or a war for that matter.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-22/uk-energy... [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-energy-bills-...

Switching over slowly and let the market adjust. Why must everyone make this argument as some sudden disruptive change?

We are switching over slowly. That's literally the status quo. The argument of "we could end coal for X dollars" is what introduces the idea of a discrete value into this discussion.

How can you know what we will spend unless you specify a time interval? Clearly we won't be burning coal in 100 years. Maybe not even 50. Or 30.

I left out a variable that you hinted at so let me redefine what I meant.

We need to move to green energy and not count sources of energy from unstable situations. Meaning Germany shouldn't have shut its coal plants relying on gas from Russia as replacement.

The cold war ended in 1989 and first invaded Ukraine in 2014, with obvious hints at being authoritarian prior to that. Russia is not a friendly country and shouldn't have been considered one this quickly.

They said "could" not "should." It was, for me, context, a reference point. Such statements help push back against what is often misguided conventional wisdom. They shine light on our priorities, or the lack thereof.

The way that the USA would "close all of its coal mines" would involve replacing that production with different domestic energy production; not by becoming reliant on foreign energy markets.

I never realized the southwestern United States was outside the develop world.

Seen Arizona lately? People are standing outside the polls with guns.

> Together, the Turkmenistan sources release an estimated 111,000 pounds of methane gas per hour

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.

Maybe I'm misreading something, but I don't understand the discrepancy. According to the wiki article, human output is 363 megatons/year. 111,000 lb/hr = 55.5 tons/hr = 0.5 megatons/year. Still a lot though!

Turkmenistan produces ~2.2% of global natural gas. Scaled across all producers, the result would be 20.2 MT/yr. Also, this is from a tiny part of Turkmenistan.

> 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...

I think you are right! Apparently I was misreading. Still a lot unnecessary waste one might say.

From some Google Searches...

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)

Quoting here but;

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.

Also, the extra warming from methane can trigger unrecoverable tipping points, such as melting ancient glaciers and permafrost, whose effects will last for thousands of years.

What is meant by 25% of today's global warming? 25% from what baseline? From what median? From what time period?

I'm guessing: rate of carbon-dioxide-equivalent being added to the atmosphere each year.

It is somewhat deceptive framing, because methane can not accumulate in the atmosphere the way CO2 does. Its levels in the atmosphere will break down relatively quickly if we reduce output, unlike CO2. But the present level of methane in the atmosphere basically captures about 30% as much heat as the present level of CO2. That still leaves CO2 as significantly larger immediate problem and the much larger future problem. We must do what we can, observing that every little counts - a little, and every lot counts a lot.

Don't forget what methane breaks down into... Water vapour and co2. So it's not like it breaks down and is no longer an issue n

Yeah but that CO2 is already part of the ppm that is measured. And water vapor of course, has the ability to cool or heat depending on the position in the atmosphere and amount of particulates for it to condensate on (to form clouds).

You shouldn't formulate the system like that - without any proportion. The proportions are what matters.

I'd assume the previous 10,000 or so years wherein humans created civilization up to about 1980.

No, we don't have anything close to a precise global temperature over the entire Holocene (the period you describe, that we are presently in, coinciding with the end of the most recent glacial period). We at best have spotty tree rings, ice core samples (which are inherently limited to arctic regions), and other various rough proxies which have a higher margin of error than we have observed in even the past 100 years.

Good, broadly available, consistently measured temperature data from daily mercury record keeping was mainly only really done in UK and colonial U.S. until the late 1800s. Even then most of the world did not maintain standards for temperature stations until the early to mid 20th century. Global temperature estimates that actually span the whole globe were not really possible until the weather satellite era, around the late 1970s. So there is a big problem when comparing the precision and breadth of modern temperature data with historical estimations for a number of reasons. Not least of which is that we do not really see the sample rates of historical data necessary to estimate the periodic, even as small as decadal, swings to any high degree of accuracy.

No, 80x is about right for the 20-year time horizon; Wikipedia lists it as 86. You're right that the 20-year Global Warming Potential is lower than the 100-year, but the 20-year is already what the poster you were replying to was using. The 100-year is around 25 to 31.

They edited it after my comment, as they note.

The issue is that this methane is not being oxidized. Burning the methane as it is released is an easy solve. Yes this increases CO2 at the ratio your specify (~1ton Methane to 2.75 CO2) but that is still much better than releasing it as Methane gas.

Methane gas in the atmosphere causes 80x the greenhouse effect that CO2 causes.

>In 2019, [the President of Turkmenistan] appeared on state television doing doughnut stunts around the crater to disprove and correct rumours of his death.[14]

Interesting proof of life.

Turkmenistan is a country that keeps John Oliver excited. That's saying a lot.

Another example of why we need the 'regulation' that is so demonized.

Hmm but if we make businesses do something that is not the most short-term profitable choice, then the shareholders may not be able to extract maximum value!

This isn't a very good take. Business leaders are generally fine with reasonable regulations that are evenly applied and easy to comply with. The operations out there spewing methane are essentially free riding, and their competitors who don't do that probably want better enforcement. Obviously this isn't universally applicable to all conceivable regulations, but its true enough in this case.

I personally don't care in any way about what business leaders are comfortable with. Our planet is burning. They should be uncomfortable.

My point is that businesses aren't even necessarily against this kind of regulation. The reality is that controlling methane requires a lot of unsexy followthrough and monitoring, and international deal making. This is a political failure.

We need it at the worldwide level, which is especially difficult.

Not if you use force

it is strictly impossible to establish a one-world government through force, at least given our current technology.

If a country has the army of robots needed to make it happen, then you have two problems.

It’s impossible to establish a one-world government without force.

Good luck doing that on renewables and positive vibes!

We can sacrifice for the greater good.

That ‘we’ sure is carrying a lot of weight. From the context of this thread, it seems likely most of the sacrifice would be from folks in Turkmenistan, who would be told to change at the point of a gun no? Likely leading to a non trivial death count from violence or starvation.

I’m pretty sure you didn’t ask them if they were Ok with that sacrifice.

To quote C.S. Lewis - “ Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

In a democracy the population is responsible for voting in the government.

In a dictatorship the population is responsible for not overthrowing the government.

You’re still being incredibly vague on who you expect to sacrifice and how for the course of action you propose.

Mind giving more than platitudes?

I'm sorry. Let me throw out the hypotheticals in my head and these are not based on any real situation.

1. What if a small Eastern European country created a large nuclear reactor but didn't care about safety meaning that the probability of a meltdown that would effect Europe was X percentage. At what value of X is it acceptable to invade assuming all other methods of persuasion have been attempted.

2. If a country is polluting Y amounts of something that increases global warming by X and all methods of persuasion have stopped is invasion ever justified at some values of X and Y. You are considering the probability of and level of suffering of two events.

A. The invasion B. The suffering caused by environmental damage.

There has to be some conditions in which it is morally justified to invade a country

Considering Russia did #1 in Chernobyl and all they got was their own (well Ukraine’s) land irradiated and a lot of strongly worded letters, the bar is practically a lot higher than you seem to think it should be.

Worldwide treaty to impose import duty carbon tax based on average country-level per-capita emissions. So exports coming out of Australia or Canada would cost the most. These two countries lose their international competitive advantage. Companies in these countries get angry at their local government. Local government acts to reduce emissions.

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.

Yes, but that shouldn't prevent us from implementing it where we can first.

Perhaps it should not, but it will. Who is going to accept heavy regulation when their competition is not so encumbered?

Lots of countries do this. It just takes leadership.

This sounds great and all, but there is no evidence thus far to indicate any of the nations that actually matter for climate emissions care one bit about your nation's leadership.

I'm not sure what nation you are referring to. I was also not proposing my nation was the leader so I'm confused.

I would say the the US is one of the largest polluters on the planet and leadership in the US would change world wide pollution levels. Leadership is just that, leading. It's very easy for other countries to just point at the US and say "they don't practice what they preach, why should we do anything". And they are right. Why should they do shit when the richest country in the world isn't interested in changing their behavior.

> I would say the the US is one of the largest polluters on the planet and leadership in the US would change world wide pollution levels

You might be surprised if you look into this a bit. On a Per Capita basis, the US is barely in the top 10.

Regardless, developing nations are not burning coal and petroleum because they hate the environment... they need cheap energy production - which is currently a failure of the green energy movement (ie. there is nothing cheap about it, it's a luxury at the moment).

Not if all your efforts are wasted because other nations won't follow in-step or do not care.

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...

Well if the options are:

1) Try to improve what we can and hope others follow. Outcomes are either a global improvement in emissions or significant adverse climate effects.

2) Don't do that. Outcome is significant adverse climate effects.

What's the argument for choosing 2)?

Okay we might be at an economic advantage for 20, maybe 50 years? But then what?

PS: I agree with your last statement. But I don't see how reducing excess methane emissions prevents us from pursuing those solutions as well. Nor would I categorize that as an emotional "feel-good" solution.

Of course it would matter. Just because it's not a solution doesn't mean it wouldn't give the rest of the world more time to follow suit.

It's really scary to me how common this kind of false dichotomous thinking has become. It's everywhere, in politics especially.

Nirvana fallacy. Your efforts aren't wasted if others don't follow suit. A partial solution is better than no solution. At the least you're buying the world a few extra years to figure it out.

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.

The "problem" countries are not going to start setting up wind farms just because the US can do it. These countries are burning coal for a reason... it's exceedingly cheap.

Make something else exceedingly cheap and they will use it. Anything else is just a distraction and made to make you feel good at night while not accomplishing anything significant.

Firstly, many poor countries are doing some of that. Look at China. They don't like being covered in smog all the time and the respiratory problems that creates.

Secondly, the cost curves are decreasing for a reason. It's because of investment in these technologies by richer countries. The richer countries pave the way by making the technology so cheap that it's irresistible and a better deal to poor countries. The way you make it cheap is by funding the transition yourself. The cost decreases naturally follow as part of R&D.

Thirdly, rich countries should subsidize the energy transition of poor countries. They've emitted much more than poor countries per capita since the Industrial Revolution, so a de-facto retroactive carbon tax to fund poor countries' transition on an expedited timeline is only fair.

> Firstly, many poor countries are doing some of that. Look at China.

China is far from a poor country... by some measurements they outpace even the US.

> Secondly, the cost curves are decreasing for a reason

This is true - however we also need to recognize the technology is not ready today. It might be tomorrow, but throwing everything out and going full-in on green tech today is foolhardy. Some prominent states in the US already struggle to keep electricity on year round... how on earth can we expect new tech to not only do better but be cheaper in that environment? What chance do developing nations have if the wealthiest nations cannot solve this already?

> Thirdly, rich countries should subsidize the energy transition of poor countries

I agree on some level. However I do not agree with pushing unproven technology just because it makes us feel good day. That will just burn developing nations and make them less likely to trust us next time we come up with some amazing new solution to all their problems...

Who is throwing out non-green power? My electricity in the US comes from majority gas and coal as it ever has.

To make a significant change over 20-50 years requires big investments now. Making those investments does not mean we are throwing away everything else immediately.

I don't know what state you're in, but California is really struggling with this at the moment.

You can get green energy as-is (from your utility), but it's at a premium. Which means most don't opt-in for it.

This is going on while the state already struggles to keep itself energized year round. The current state of green energy will only exasperate California's problems, since storage tech still has a lot of catching up to do.

Is the root cause of California's energy issue because they are shutting down non-green energy production?

One could make a pretty darn strong case the root of California's energy issue is because they've refused to build anything except "green" energy production facilities, despite current-day needs.

No new hydro-electric dams in my lifetime. No new nuclear reactors (that I'm aware of at least) in my lifetime. Just either status-quo, or gobbles of unproven renewable tech that has yet to actually live up to expectations (affordable, always available renewable-power).

People like to throw around big numbers showing CA's increased production over the years... but they don't throw around storage capacity which is really what matters for renewables. There is no storage capacity to speak of...

I would consider both hydro-electric and nuclear to be beneficial power sources if both local air quality and global climate effects are the primary factors.

I hear you that some "green" initiatives are poorly targeted but I don't think that means we should hit the brakes on regulating the things that are known climate issues (ie excess methane releases) or investment in improving our grid emissions.

So california brought online 30GW of gas since 2000, and it's the 5GW net of renewables that's the problem?

Sounds like the issue is the fossil fuel lobby. Weird that delaying new renewables by a decade to build new nuclear or hydro aligns exactly with their interests.

In Tucson, with 350 days of Sun, until fairly recently, electricity was generated from COAL. Now natural gas.

> This is true - however we also need to recognize the technology is not ready today. It might be tomorrow, but throwing everything out and going full-in on green tech today is foolhardy.

It is ready today. Look at Denmark. It's more expensive than coal but it's cheaper if you factor in the externalities, and it's cheaper than nuclear. Therefore, it's ready. Also, your second sentence is a non-sequitur. If it really was true that it wasn't ready, that's all the more reason to throw even more money at it in order to figure out how to make it ready.

> That will just burn developing nations and make them less likely to trust us next time we come up with some amazing new solution to all their problems...

How are you burning developing nations by subsidizing their energy such that they are financially better off doing it than not doing it? This reasoning does not make sense.

> It's more expensive than coal but it's cheaper if you factor in the externalities

Developing nations do not care about your supposed externalities. Caring about these things is a luxury they cannot afford in the literal sense.

> and it's cheaper than nuclear.

This is almost entirely the fault of deliberately crushing regulation... but that's a political choice not a technical one.

> Therefore, it's ready

Hardly. Nobody as-of yet has developed a reasonably priced, long-lived and efficient means of storage. Without this missing key, all the wind farms in the world will not keep the lights on when the wind doesn't blow...

> This reasoning does not make sense.

You'd have burned them pretty badly if you compelled them to install solar even 10 years ago because of how inefficient it was compared to other cheaper means of energy production. Even in the past 10 years solar tech has come so very far... that is my point about it not being ready yet. We still have a long ways to go in renewables before they can realistically replace energy production in mandatory environments, ie. environments that don't have the luxury of trying out new expensive unproven tech and changing it as the technology develops.

Developing nations don't need to care about externalities if wealthy countries subsidized their transition. I also note that we've pivoted from "problem countries", which I assumed to mean large countries like China or India, which themselves are fairly poor on a per-capita basis, to exclusively extremely poor countries, which excludes China and India probably because it's inconvenient for the narrative that they're transitioning by themselves.

> Nobody as-of yet has developed a reasonably priced, long-lived and efficient means of storage

You don't need storage to get the grid to 80%+ renewables. Storage as a blocker is a political talking point that is not substantiated and not true. Denmark is the case study that shows why. Also, storage costs are linear decreasing on a log scale.

> You'd have burned them pretty badly if you compelled them to install solar even 10 years ago because of how inefficient it was compared to other cheaper means of energy production. Even in the past 10 years solar tech has come so very far... that is my point about it not being ready yet. We still have a long ways to go in renewables before they can realistically replace energy production in mandatory environments, ie. environments that don't have the luxury of trying out new expensive unproven tech and changing it as the technology develops.

You're repeating the same things that I've already addressed. You're not "burning" poor countries if you're paying for it. You can't "burn" a country by making them financially better off. It is not a logically coherent point. Also, the tech is proven -- in actual practice, in reality, today, already implemented -- after you factor in the costs of externalities. And that picture will only get better and better as more money flows into R&D and the cost curve continues to decline as a direct consequence of that funding.

> Developing nations do not care about your supposed externalities. Caring about these things is a luxury they cannot afford in the literal sense.

Then WE (the west) pay for the cost to eliminate the externalities. We will pay for them either way and the only reason they can't afford it is we stole all their shit.

Utter nonsense. Slap in a combined CSP + PV station and call it done. Where >50% of the people live it's more reliable than coal or nuclear, the marginal costs stay in the local economy rather than going to rio tinto and paying half (unconditionally, no loan) costs significantly less than the externalities that reach us from a coal plant.

There are areas where this doesn't work, but 1 coal, 1 wind, and 2 solar is cheaper than 2 coal, and having ~2 units of constant power and 1 unit of intermittent has more uses than 2 units of constant.

China GDP/person 1/5 that of U.S. Don’t confuse the Chinese urban elite, who indeed have a Western level of income and wealth, with “China.”

"The United States accounts for only about five percent of global population, but is responsible for 30 percent of global energy use and 28 percent of carbon emissions."

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/u.s.-leads-in-greenhouse-...

And the USA is responsible for something like 25% of the world's GDP. So, the USA is much more efficient at per-capita economic output than the much of the world. You can manipulate statistics to rationalize all kinds of viewpoints.

Um, if you're responsible for 25% of economic production but 28-30% of harmful emissions, that doesn't sound like you're doing particularly well.

That seems like a silly way to look at those numbers. It doesn't matter particularly how much stuff we make if the stuff we make is slowly creating an existential crisis for our species. The argument that 'well other people do it too' is an excellent way to make sure that nobody ever cuts carbon emissions. Someone has to be first, and the richest nation on earth is probably a great place to start.

To me the obvious solution seems like it would be to impose targeted tariffs on imports from countries that do not act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, alongside taxes on domestic emissions.

Does this happen? What are the difficulties with it?

The countries producing majority of the world's emissions are doing so because they are using the cheapest forms of energy production available - not because they are evil doers or something nefarious.

The only way to convince these nations to "go green" is to make green energy cheaper than the alternatives. Tariffing goods from these nations will not have the desired impact - the nation still needs cheap energy production and will not stop just because the US made their goods more expensive for it's own citizens.

> The only way to convince these nations to "go green" is to make green energy cheaper than the alternatives.

Or make greenhouse gas emissions more expensive.

So you set the tariffs proportionnal to the assessed level of greenhouse gas emissions. Set them at a level where governments are incentivised to act to reduce the tariffs.

The tariffs only hurt your own citizens.

The nations that matter for emissions are not going to care about US tariffs...

Well, in the same way higher energy costs hurt your own citizens, in the short term. But we need the price of greenhouse gas emissions to include the externalised costs involved, otherwise the market just makes the wrong choices.

The measures can be revenue neutral - just reduce other taxes by an equivalent amount. Folks will have more money, and face higher costs, but will be incented to direct their spending to less polluting imports where possible.

> The tariffs only hurt your own citizens.

The tariffs hurt the producer country if the cost of their imported goods becomes significantly more expensive than other sources, because then your own citizens will buy other goods. Yes, this does still hurt your own citizens, but it also hurts the producer country as well, if they can't find a market for their goods.

Of course, this only works if most/all of the significant consumer countries all impose similar tariffs. And there are hopefully just better ways to achieve what you want.

>Of course, this only works if most/all of the significant consumer countries all impose similar tariffs.

The problem always seems to be one of international action. If we wait for global agreement, I think we're screwed. Every time I hear the argument "there's no point in us acting while China is building a coal-fired power station every nanosecond", I think of this. Half the problem is that we're effectively exporting a good proportion of our emissions - we can't wash our hands of that and use it as an excuse not to clean up our own act as well. This seems like the obvious answer to those objections to me.

I think this is something that could be designed to work incrementally. Obviously the more countries do it the better, but every time you increase the cost of burning fossil fuels, more marginal renewable energy sources become economically viable.

> And there are hopefully just better ways to achieve what you want.

It's been a couple of decades and we're still waiting...

I would disagree, in this case, we have a combination of 2 issues:

1. Climate change due to CO2/etc. emissions

2. Fossil fuel (oil/gas/coal) peak

Even if we do not care about climate change, as fossil fuel addicts, any decline of fossil fuel production would be catastrophic for the world wide economy.

So, in this race to avoid fossil fuel, the sooner you are out of it, the more resilient you will be when pumping oil/gas/coal would be too expensive.

Capturing all those methane gas, if not for the climate, but for usage is good for the national security.

So sick of hearing this. It's a leaky ship. You gotta plug all the holes. Arguing about the order is losing time.

If regulations make cleaner and more advanced industries less competitive, pushing production to cheaper places with less regulation and higher emissions intensity of production, then that could actually increase CO2 output.

Instead of the geopolitically-driven western trade regime we have today we should be basing trade relations on environmental standards.

'Regulation' is not a solution for countries that do not answer to the morals of the West, such as Turkmenistan, China, or Russia. Regulation should be demonized, for many situations it ends up being a hammer to a screw.

There's always leading by example, as well as incentivizing via aid.

This is not to dismiss the challenge, just that we shouldn't avoid hard problems just because they're hard.

"Leading by example " having heard that in a long time I believe it's called "virtue signaling " now. That should tell you how well that would work

If the haters had any virtue to signal then they'd just do that instead. You hate the game not the player, but that's just because you're* losing it.

* you referrs to people that use that stupid phrase, not you

It's interesting how so much of what we used to consider 'being a decent person' is now 'virtue signaling'. It's the most cynical, worthless meme to come out of the last 50 years and that's saying a lot.

My understanding of the phrase "virtue signaling" is that it's a slur: somebody pretending to be better than others.

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.

US, EU, UK and friends are still buy most of China's export and no doubt US corporations also capture majority of profits from all polluting manufacturing.

To regulate Turkmenistan, you first need to rule it.

Regulation? This is government overreach. NASA isn't part of the Department of Justice, so where do they get off scanning my methane emissions? They should get a warrant. Before you know it, the government will set up cameras to catch speeders.

Also, my gaseous emissions are protected by the First Amendment, so not even Twitter can stop them.

Tangential weather info here. October 2022 was the hotest October ever recorded in France, 3.5°C above normal, 1°C above previous record. It was essentially 30°C a few days ago, with moskitos and all. Records have been pulverized this years every month since June in France. We've had 40°C for weeks (it was almost never the case in the 80'/90' when I was a child, 34°C was rare and considered very hot everywhere but in Corse). And Ive noticed a mind-blowing 36°C at 11:30pm in late June.

Cant refrain myself to say Im worried. Feels like things might go Hollywood in no more than 10 years really.

Turkmenistan gas extraction company right now:

"Gee, thanks for finding our leaks guys! You won't believe how much money we were just leaking into the atmosphere there."

</dreams>

is it okay to say this is hilarious

>NASA finds super-emitters of methane

I hope EU finds a way to regulate that and add more taxes.

After regulating cow farts, this would be an appropriate extension.

If things get really bad and these things are deemed bad for the planet, could a nation demand the facilities be shut down or else be destroyed by military strike?

This concept is so strange. I'm not sure what country you are from, but I'm going to assume the US. Would you think it was OK if another country destroyed something in America because they thought it was damaging the environment. How about if they tried to force you to change your ways because of the environmental damage you were doing? Because guess what? The US is seriously over represented in pollution. Destroying the US might just solve the entire climate problem, I doubt that would be palatable ?

In addition, not that an addition is needed: please do not try to "fix" environmental pollutant sites by bombing them. It will not accomplish what you hope to accomplish.

(No matter what it might look like while playing your video game.)

So what do you propose, let super polluters keep burning and destroy the whole planet? I’d rather we just blow them away. Something has to give.

The US had 215 atmospheric nuke tests. Shall we blow that country away, too?

Neal Stephenson's latest novel sort of explores this idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)

In a (without spoiling too much) remarkably ironic way vice this article's concern!

All of the emissions reductions in the US aren’t going to do anything if China keeps emitting at pace. We should not be doing anything unilaterally.

At least they're building fission plants. The US hasn't figured out that little hack yet, like it's some big mystery. Also, Chinese emissions wouldn't be so high if every other country hadn't offshored all their production to them.

It's a leaky ship. Arguing over who has to fix their holes first is pointless dithering and finger-pointing.

Yes, arguing about who fixes their holes "first" is pointless, but who fixes their holes "ever" is very important. It doesn't any sense for me to fix my holes if you have your finger in your ears saying "la la la I can't hear you" when I ask when you're going to fix yours.

> It doesn't any sense for me to fix my holes

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."

As if it needed more nails in the coffin, but the comments here are one more such nail for the myth that techies are staunch defenders against the surveillance state. Our beloved nerd-org NASA breaking new grounds in monitoring citizens, all for the right cause - what could possbily go wrong?

So - looking at this it seems Turkmenistan [a repressive, North Korea style dictatorship] is destroying our climate system at an order of magnitude faster than anyone else. I'm well aware of the legacy that Iraq/Afghanistan have left in terms of international interventions into other countries; but if it is our common future on the balance, shouldn't we do something? Something more than just politely asking to stop?

Bring them democracy!

Why don't we forget that since it's expensive. How about "fix the leaks or we'll bomb presidental palaces"

I've often imagined a dystopian future, hotter world where bombs are dropped on unauthorized coal / cement plants to prevent more sea level rise / super hurricanes, rendering those with no other options into partisan stone-age tribes.

You might enjoy this book which features similar events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

Like offering to pay to fix the leaks in their gas pipeline?

Prob way cheaper than invading the country

> Prob way cheaper than invading the country

But they have oil....

> Like offering to pay to fix the leaks in their gas pipeline?

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.

It’s a little over 1/1,000th of human released methane, so on it’s own not that critical or that far above expectations for a country with a little over 1/2000th the global population.

The issue is mostly that it’s presumably cheap to fix unlike a billion cows all farting.

>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.

Even just killing all a billion would be quite expensive by comparison. You can’t exactly do it for 0.01$/ cow and fixing this would likely cost significantly less than 10 million.

You have forgotten that all of those cows will already be killed, with a profit.

Not everywhere and especially not anytime soon. India has more than 3,000 institutions called Gaushalas maintained by charitable trusts that care for old and infirm cows. It’s a whole religious thing.

Also, enforcing rules isn’t free. Trying to enforce a cow ban would get really expensive.

Tax their oil profits with a methane tax? Stop buying their oil, while they didn't fix leaks? How about this?

What's the carbon cost of yet another idiotic hostile intervention?

Modern corporate raid how-to:

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

Please relax, my dear downvoters, things like this never happen in your ideal world.

> The instrument can look for methane in the same way. “It turns out that methane also has a spectral signature in the same wavelength range, and that’s what has allowed us to be sensitive to methane,” EMIT principal investigator Robert Green said at a press conference, according to Space.com’s Mike Wall.

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.

I read that as "we built the detector to be sensitive to the wavelengths of the minerals we wanted to monitor, and methane's spectra are in that range, so it works well for picking it up".

Of course they could have known that beforehand, but it sounds like they weren’t designing a methane detector so the fact that it works so well as one is what “turned out” I think. Also articles are really good and taking one quote from a big technical answer and making the speaker sound stupid

Yeah, but CH4 detection was not why the mission was flown, so the PI is being careful to make this distinction.

Although methane does not survive for long within our atmosphere, it can trap more than 100x the heat for the same volume.

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.

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