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NASA finds super-emitters of methane
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Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
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.
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.
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#165»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
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#166YouTube 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.
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 catchin…
Is the root cause of California's energy issue because they are shutting down non-green energy production?
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#169Another example of why we need the 'regulation' that is so demonized.
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Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not what people think. They don't care because it won't effect them.
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...