Satellite finds methane leaks from gas pipelines
But remember to reduce your personal carbon footprint! /sWe're expected to shave off a few kilos of CO2 here and there, usually at significant personal expense, while nothing is being done about these releases that a) could be avoided relatively easily b) have a much bigger impact.The abstract mentions ~8 million metric tons of methane per year. Using a GWP of 28 (which seems to be the value from the IPPC's AR5) that's equivalent to around 224 million tons of CO2.That's 224 billion kg CO2e, or around 28 kg CO2e for every human on the world, just from the large leaks (not from the ongoing smaller leaks which are >10x as big according to the article). So yeah, go ahead and tell me (and everyone else) to go vegan for a month [1] or make similarly impactful changes just so companies can continue venting methane.To avoid being only negative: The obvious solution would be to require companies to buy emission certificates for those emissions, with a penalty factor that accounts for the probability of detection if they didn't accurately self-report and had to get caught. This would create an immediate incentive to reduce those easily avoidable emissions, and should be relatively easy to implement if we can get accurate enough data from satellites or aircraft. It would also ensure these emissions are accounted for in the emissions trading framework, so we don't emit the allocated amount elsewhere and are then surprised by the unaccounted-for emissions.[1] Assuming I replace 250 kcal from pork per day with Tofu (around 100g of pork which seems to be considered "one serving"), this would be savings of ~1 kg CO2e per day: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore