I’ll note that while methane is responsible for something like 30% of the observed warming oil and gas leaks are only part of that.
Edit: Washington Post coverage
Edit: New York Times coverage
I’ll note that while methane is responsible for something like 30% of the observed warming oil and gas leaks are only part of that.
Edit: Washington Post coverage
Edit: New York Times coverage
It’s just going to be a map of the most industrialised countries and areas within those countries? Is it going to tell us anything we don’t already know?
If these polluters had any shame they would have already done something about it.
It’s going to provide the locations and rate of leak for major new emissions sources, to a pixel size of 100m x 400m, and detect those leaks within 95 minutes. That’s enough to find major new leaks quickly and enable a response to them.
In the US, a new methane emissions tax which just went into effect will provide a powerful incentive for infrastructure owners to fix big leaks like this.
There are a lot of natural sources of methane and the biggest human sources are oil and gas wells and some coal mines. So Europe for example tends to have low methane leakage. However that is using the current satellites, which are not able to detect smaller emission sources.
The other really big one are methane deposits in permafrost and the ocean depths, which could be released, when we reach certain temperature increases. Especially permafrost starts to release methane today, which is one of the earliest tipping points. So we really want to know when that starts to happen.
EDIT: Also methane does not stay in the atmosphere too long. So it lowering emissions would decrease temperatures relatively quickly.