this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant | Methane levels in the atmosphere are rising. An armada of satellites could help identify leaks (grist.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Mind you, identifying leaks isn't enough; it takes actively fixing them and decommissioning the infrastructure which resulted in methane release in the first place.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Great! So then regulators can increase their finger wagging rate. If only there were some way to assign cost to pollution, based on output. But that would decrease profit, and we can’t have that….

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

In the US, the biggest oil and gas industry sources have a significant emissions tax ($900/tonne, rising to $1500 in 2026) attached to them. So they can do a bit more than wag for the worst cases.

It'll take shifting that down to include smaller sources though, and enforcing that kind of penalty worldwide.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unfortunately these satellites don't have a high-enough resolution for oil and gas source attribution in most cases. They're great for CAFOs and landfills, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My understanding is that the plan is to use a mix of high-frequency-low-resolution imaging with less-frequent-higher-resolution images to pinpoint specific leak sources.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

That's true, but because oil and gas emissions are stochastic in nature, it's expensive and difficult to get enough measurements from airplanes and drones to really fill in the gaps. There are also only so many planes available that can do this kind of measurement. MethaneAir is one. The state of Colorado has funded these kinds of flights, but only for a few weeks per year and only for a small subset of the oil and gas industry in the state.

These flights also have to be planned long in advance and it's difficult to react to emissions seen from satellites. This part will hopefully improve as time goes on.