Slashdot Mirror
Damage Report: LA Methane Leak Is One of the Worst Disasters In US History (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: A week after the ruptured natural gas well in Aliso Canyon was finally declared sealed, we have a full account of the damage — and it doesn't look good. In total, 97,100 metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere over the course of 112 days — the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
112 days for half a million cars is really not that much...
It used to happen all the time but we are worrying more about uncapped wells now. So while a bit of a disaster, avoidable and not a good thing to happen at all I don't think it deserves the hype.
From reading TFA, they say its the equivalent of a half million cars for a whole year.
everything is that...One Of.
Can we PLEASE stop using these radicalized leftist enviro-whackjob websites for "news?"
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
Is half a million cars a lot in a nation that has over 230 million cars on the road? LA County alone has over 7 million cars and trucks registered.
Having more cars than licensed drivers in the USA sounds like more of an environmental disaster... and worse yet, China already has more drivers than the entire population of the USA, and the numbers are still climbing.
Worst disasters in US history? Bull Shit.
How many died? How much property damage?
This doesn't even rank in the top thousand by any objective measure.
Every last bit of that methane was due to be burned. It was at the last step before retail use. You only get to count the extra from being unburned and if this was really such a fucking disaster it could have been flared.
Welll, that sucks for sure, but it's a rounding error in annual methane emission calculations.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Please see here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even discounting the deathtoll component the rebuilding costs in environmental terms would far exceed the environmental impact of this methane leak. Stupid.
This is all good.
The enviro-left is burning through what credibility it has left like tripping hippies.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When I first heard about it last Nov/Dec, my first few thoughts where "wow, that's a lot of gas". "They don't plan to cap it for 6 months? wtf?". "Dang, must be costing them a lot of money to relocate all those households", and "dang, the company just doesn't seem to care".
Then the media picked up on it, and suddenly the company decided "uh oh, this is really bad PR for us we better fix it".
Kinda eye-opening how they didn't really give a shit until the media picked it up. That's a lot of lost gas, and a lot of affected people, and a ton of bad PR.
When automakers do this I usually hear that its directly possible to calculate this in terms of human lives lost.
So I'd like to get this regurgitated into an "X lives died prematurely due to the gasses" figure.
Thanks.
Coal Oil Point off of Santa Barbara, a NATURAL methane/oil seep, leaks 40 tons per day. Been doing it for hundreds of years. And will continue doing so. And that's just one natural seep in California - there are hundreds of them off-shore.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What disaster? Wouldn't a disaster be something that is in "late breaking" news? Something on everyone's lips, something everyone knows about? This is the first I've heard of it. Deplorable? Yes. Disaster? Uh, not yet...
"LA Methane Leak Is One of the Worst Disasters In US History"
Fricking news headline hyperbole. {rolleyes}
"equal to the greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars." Worst disaster? There are over 250 gas sucking vehicles in the US alone. Do the math and tell me what the worst disaster is....oh, this is the Car Culture, I can't possibly be suggesting..... Of course not.
Having more cars than licensed drivers sounds good for the environment - it means some aren't being driven...
Anyhow, that "fact" isn't true, at least as of the given dates.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
emissions falsification scandal so are the American authorities going to throw the book at them and the unlimited multi billion dollars fines to?
Oh wait they are American no way.
I guess the oceans weren't rising enough.
Needed to get a pop into the mother earth to fart up some global warming gas.
Where's Mikhail Moore?
Thanks Al Gore.
Right. And if you follow through the links, you'll find a statement that the leak was the equivalent of "burning 300 million gallons of gasoline." That's a nice round number, and I'd bet they rounded up.
/13476 = 445236 cars. So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Even so, that's 600 gallons for each of those 500,000 cars. New cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average when including older ones. That's 12,000 miles per car. US DOT says the average miles driven per year is 13476, so they're overstating the equivalence. 300,000,000 * 20 = 6,000,000,000 miles,
Looking at it another way, the EIA says the US consumed, "In 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons..." So, that leak was equivalent to less than 0.22% of US gasoline consumption. That seems to be a more honest indication of the scale.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As opposed to the tax evasion and cost-cutting of the right-wing billionaire beggar class? I'll take the occasional histrionic screed over that.
This is not only not the worst disaster in US history, it's not ever in the top 25.
But things are always bigger in Texas. The L.A. leak gets more attention for its location
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
But if you say "half a million cars" without providing context, it seems like more than it is, which I believe was the intention.
"People hit by falling pianos up 100% this year."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So, how many non conforming TDI golf does this equal ? For all those tortured at the State Inspection Station for a non OE air cleaner, what does this equal ?
cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average
So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Only as dishonest as you make them seem.
I eat a brand of breakfast cereal that claims "Since 2006" their factory used enough wind energy to account for "taking nearly 6,200 cars of the road!" Note the exclamation point in what I am quoting, you cannot advocate for a cause or advertise a commercial product or write a fake ransom note ("Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals representing a small foreign faction" ) without one.
The alternative is eating a competing brand that requires me to exercise by serious swimming, bike riding, or tennis playing -- sweating in the summer heat sending tennis balls careening off the edge of the racket and over the chain-link fence and then trudging over to retrieve them, I did that in college P.E., but who needs that?
You mean to tell me that by taking only 6200 cars off the road I might as well be eating Lucky Charms?
Let's hope future "worst disasters" are as benign as that.
who said, (channeling a deep Southern-Illinois accent) "A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and pretty soon it runs into real money."
Yeah, a gas leak in L.A., one in New Jersey, a couple in New Orleans, and pretty soon you have some serious environmental impact.
"the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars."
Or the equivalent of the methane output of person at SXSW '15 for a 24 hour period.
Which breakfast cereal generates more methane released by the bodies of those consuming this cereal? That cereal may be putting thousands of car-equivalents back on the road.
That "enviro-left" you speak of has been gradually vindicated every year on the mattee of climare change, so i'm not seeing much credibility loss. But leave it to a shill to claim that seeking responsibility as to what we put into the atmosphere just makes you a "tripping hippie"
That math seems reasonable but, it doesn't change the fact that a company released an enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere for no other reason than incompetence. It's a small percentage of the overall pollution produced by the US but, generally, that pollution at least has some purpose other than, "Ooops". Ignoring or dismissing this as a minor incident just tips the risk/reward scale for corporations further towards "Fuck it. Who cares if it leaks".
The article (and summary headline) is not justified by the article.
The summary headline says "One of the worst disasters in U.S. history". The first paragraph of the article says "one of the largest environmental disasters in US history." Big difference.
But even that is not ever discussed in the text of the article; the article never discusses the environmental consequences or whether they are "a disaster." It does give a number, 97,100 metric tons of methane emitted--- but that's trivial. World methane emissions are hundreds of gigatons. A hundred kilotons emitted in a leak is irrelevant. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/m...
Junk.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Right... instead of a headline about who was responsible, who's heads are rolling, we get another lame duck topic on how clueless we are as a nation in caring for the environment we live in. Corporations once again buying the media to dodge not only the blame but the attention. Well done I say. Ldts just harp on the words terrorists and disasters, death and mayhem. Forget about the real problem.
I'd suspect there is more methane released by the cattle on the ranches of the US West in a month than was released by this background noise blip of a "disaster".
It said it was the worst disaster in US history which is what it was compared to.
Comparing the disaster to a yearly average makes any of them look minor.
Don't believe me? Compare the highest death toll of any disaster in US history, now compare that to the national average year's deaths in the nation and see just how small it is by comparison.
Using the CO2 car data from here: https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cons... and the CO2 to methane values here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I get either 1.9M cars (20yr time horizon) or around 750K cars (100yr time horizon)
> Trolls like you deserve
It's sad you can't tell the difference between his innocuous comment and your own explicit trolling.
I lol'd, honest. The idiots modding you down simply don't understand such an electrifying joke.
graph
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close. If they practised science at this point you would trash your hypothesis and come up with a new one. Since they are anti-science and reality doesn't matter, only their agenda, they ignore this reality and tell you the models are what matters and reality is only an inconvenient truth to them.
It's bad enough California has to fill this country with shit heads, now they fill it with shit air. Great job, liberals.
1 day in the life of a large industrial plant of almost any heavy industry.
Not to let them off to easily but private cars are dwarfed in the production of 'bad' gasses when compared to fleets of diesel trucks, heavy transport equipment or industrial production facilities.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Surely that can't be less gas than from Trump?
Or, as I like to call him, "Trumpet."
So cute that you're using a model that's more than 25 years old.
Now step away from the keyboard, put Koch back in you're mouth and keep sucking.
Terrible room for error. Does your calculations include times of these cars? new vs old make cars? so on and so fourth. Is the environmental damage stat saying 1/2 a million diesel trucks or 1.4L hatchbacks? and how about the official numbers? how doctored or modified is your 253 million cars stat back to it?
We only have one planet. And trampling all over it and making a god damn mess and then claiming "whatever", you've just lost your heart man. People got sick from it, people are suffering economically from it. And the US is supposed to be the country always taking the moral high ground in matters of climate change against other nations like China.
It is not only is this an embarrassment to the US but its just another tip in the scales for the US to lose more international credibility as it has over the past 10 years. So if people such as yourself speak such things perhaps "you" and "your government" are not so different.
As no time reference is given, nor is there any scientific proof of this opinion this is another millenial masterpiece of shitl
That calculation could be misleading because the time period is not taken into account.
The equivalent of 500000 car emissions for a year, when adjusted for the number of days of the leak, would be 1.63 million cars over the 112 day period for which the leak had not been sealed. Under the assumption that there are 253 million cars on the road in the US, the correct percentage would be 0.64%. Now, this doesn't seem like much, and I grant you that. 0.64% represents the proportion of pollution caused by the leak as a percentage of the number of cars on the road in the US over the same time period.
Had the well not been capped, this percentage would reflect the percent contribution to greenhouse gas emissions compared to automobiles on an ongoing basis. As the well was capped, the study chose to express the equivalent cumulative amount of pollution in units of car-years. Both are legitimate. Even your calculation is legitimate as long as it is made clear what it represents: 0.2% is the percentage contribution of the leak compared to the total annual greenhouse gas output of US cars.
As for whether this is a significant amount, I say it still is, because the loss is twofold: not only was there atmospheric pollution, there were economic losses as a result of a failure to burn the lost fuel. In other words, it could have heated homes and fueled industrial processes, instead of going to waste and causing a lot of inconvenience to the public as well as costs to cap the well. If you were very rich and had a billion dollars, and a hacker or thief somehow stole 0.2% of that wealth, most people would still be upset by losing 2 million of that billion, because it's money they could have used to buy something they wanted, even if in the big picture it only represents a small fraction of your total wealth.
"Fuck it. Who cares if it leaks".
Not sure what the going rate for methane is but if they accidentally burned 300 million gallons of gasoline the bean counters who have to account for $300M of product might care a little.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Force every employee, investor, and family member and future generations to use only SHARED public transportation until the equivalent emissions have been 'saved' hehe
How many generations would it take, hmmm.
Enforcement could be left to those bureaucrats trying to justify their jobs.
Snort. You must not be familiar with the level of yellow journalism or political hyperbole around.
This won't even make a wave, nobody gives as much of a crap about it as they do the local girl who make 10,000 dollars working at home.
We already are used to filtering through the crap. It is a necessary survival skill.
..was going to avoid scientifically illiterate click-bait.
Oh wait, that was last week.
OTOH, that's about the number of cars in Romania or Sweden. So this was like creating a European country where people did nothing but drive in circles.
This is all good.
The enviro-left is burning through what credibility it has left like tripping hippies.
So you are saying all of the wasted gas that wasn't sold and not servicing the stockholders is a good thing?
That's their money just escaping into thin air. You a commie or something?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Didn't it take a court order for them to finally shut it down?
Maybe they are counting the actual production and transportation of that methane in the first place. It didn't just magically appear in that location by itself. And do they really know exactly how much was released, and what the average mileage is for the entire US is lower than 20mpg I would bet. Even my former car went from 35mpg in the Summer to 23mpg in the Winter with more city driving. I bet there are people who don't take very good care of their cars either.
Anyways, it is a lot of pollution, and at least some of us don't like our air and water being polluted by the fossil fuel and argriculture industry.
a hell of a lot more concentrated? Imagine if all 253 million of those cars were idling in your city right now. You might, just might, have a problem with it.
Their car analogy was stupid, but don't let that distract you from the enormity of the disaster.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
But for context, VW has half a million cars in the US that fail emissions on one test point. For that the EPA is considering a $22.5bn fine, the DoJ is suing them for $48bn, and multiple states are suing them plus they got class action lawsuits. Why isn't it a bigger issue?
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
Thank you. Finally a voice of reason. The liberals and the environmentalists accuse the rest of us of being "anti-science" but really most of them cannot even do basic maths and if they studied science in school at all it sure as heck didn't involve either physics or calculus. I wish that people who majored in social science would just admit that they like the environment and leave it at that. Instead they end up pushing crazy theories like how batteries are suddenly going to become this marvelous drop in replacement for fossil fuels, or that climate change is the end of the world as we know it or that mankind has some kind of destiny in space. I like science fiction too, but I don't get it confused with science facts. Why do we even give these alarmists the time of day? It's a good question.
He is fighting against the lies and misinformation coming out of the deniers and the fact that the conservative 'team' doesn't care anymore as long as their side wins. But, if they do, you will see more pollution and spills.
Or maybe just choke to death on some methane gas.
Not if they saved more than $300M by storing this stuff in questionable ways.
Worse than, say, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, in which over 6000 died? Worse than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in which over 3000 died? Worse than the 2001 NY Trade Center in which 3000 died? Or the dozen other disasters in which 1000 or more died? How many people died because of this?
In the case of Sweden, you are off by an order of magnitude.
In America forever.
Gee, it shows a clear trend upwards, what a surprise.
... link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close.
The Guardian addresses several of your errors interpreting this graph in this article. Perhaps the biggest error is the implication that the models predict specific temperature rises over time. In reality, the projections all included error bounds which, if included, would have show a very different picture.
I will note that those error bounds were pretty broad back in 1990. And that newer models are narrowing those bounds.
Last, a quotation from the article: "The 1990–2012 data have been shown to be consistent with the [1990 IPCC report] projections, and not consistent with zero trend from 1990"
I care about the environment. I just think hysterical headlines like this one tend to do more harm than good by damaging credibility.
A serious issue, and one that needs investigation? Yes, absolutely. One of the worst disasters - even environmental disasters - in US history? Please. Not even close. Notice how this topic was completely derailed by reactions to the ridiculous hyperbole? In this case, yes, I absolutely am blaming the messenger.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Just because there are glaciers in the world remaining does not mean that many glaciers in the world have already been lost.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/01/local/la-me-glaciers-20131002
I hate printers.
Gah, "not already been lost". Too many negatives in one sentence.
I hate printers.
"One of the worst disasters in US history"? Cows and other livestock release 238 million metric tons of methane per year [source]. The estimated 97,100 metric tons from this leak amounts to a whopping 0.04% of that amount.
Now that I think of it, consider all those coal seam gas and shale gas projects where the well is drilled sometimes many months before the infrastructure to collect the gas (which often comes up full of water). There's a lot of stuff flaring off or even just getting vented.
cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average
So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Only as dishonest as you make them seem.
That's what I was thinking. Pulls some numbers out of his ass then claims "dishonesty".
OTOH, maybe Poe. If so, kudos to GP.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Yup, the blame rests as it so often does when /. has a click-bait & provably false title with Timmay. At least this one doesn't have the grammar and spelling errors his submissions so often do.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Because this is a local company with excellent political connections, whereas VW is a foreign company that barely has any lobbying presence in the U.S.
This is slashdot, it's ok to change your mind based on new evidence
Roy Spencer is indeed a "climate scientist" and a specialist in creating misleading graphs and statements about that particular set of sattelite data (UAH lower troposhpere temps). He is well known as a religiously motivated climate denier and is quite likely the author of the red-herring you just posted. I have used scare quotes on the phrase "climate scientist" because IMO someone who signs the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming just doesn't have the skill set that Science requires.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is slashdot, it's ok to change your mind based on new evidence
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Isn't tit funny
Yes, tits are funny, especially on a bloke.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is that Volkswagen, Hummers or Fords?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Even so, that's 600 gallons for each of those 500,000 cars. New cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average when including older ones. That's 12,000 miles per car. US DOT says the average miles driven per year is 13476, so they're overstating the equivalence. 300,000,000 * 20 = 6,000,000,000 miles, /13476 = 445236 cars. So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Ahem. 13476 miles / 600 gallons = 22.46 mpg, which closely agrees with your original mpg number, especially when significant figures are considered.
You introduced the significant error that you claim they dishonestly rounded up: "around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg".
22.5 / 20 * 445,236 = 500,890.5, or simply 500,000 when using significant figures.
Unlike an oil spill this is a relatively clean disaster too. There's no cleanup you can do once you've sealed off the leak so rather cheap, so not much those savings need to offset.
So it's a 1.5% increase in methane emissions from leaks this year. This amount have been decreased by 15% in the last decade so we basically lost a few months of progress. sucks but not even close to a disaster.
I thought it was this one:
http://politicalhumor.about.co...
There are about 250,000,000 people in the USA. Your friend dying is no tragedy.
When you die,that will be nothing to 99.9999999% of the planet. Not a tragedy.
If you're railroaded by the government, same deal: who cares.
If you're shafted by a criminal organisation, so what?
So lets get rid of all these laws, since they never protect more than one person out of 7 billion, except class action lawsuits, which generally aren't criminal cases.
Why is "death toll" the right number to use for disaster metrics??? If that were the case, smoking and cars are the biggest disasters. Are you claiming that we should ban those and criminalise driving and smoking to stop it before fixing ONE INCOMPETENT COMPANY'S FAILURE???
There is nothing funny about man boobs.
graph
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements.
Oh, cute, an unsourced graph that stops in 2012 and uses dodgy frequently "adjusted" UAH satellite data.
Why not try it with actual temperature data and include recent measurements? Oh, because it doesn't tell the same story.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/compare_1997-2015.jpg
Just because there are glaciers in the world remaining does not mean that many glaciers in the world have already been lost.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/01/local/la-me-glaciers-20131002
True.
10,000 years ago New York was under a glacier.
What's your point?
It certainly doesn't do their/your credibility any good when they exaggerate stories like this. "LA Methane Leak Is One of the Worst Disasters In US History"....really? It's a plain lie. It's not even in the top 25. And your antinuclear hysteria is blocking badly needed change to save your precious global warming or climate change or whatever the new word is these days because all the old words were discredited.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Vented (vs burned) methane gas was probably 1000 times this amount every day for the overseas oil industry alone, during the 1960s and 70s. Coal and natural sources even more.
Cows emit about 120 kg/year of methane. There are between 1.5 and 2 billion cattle, along with the nearly countless african antelope, wildebeasts, and other ruminants. Ignoring the uncountable african contribution, 2 billion cattle @ 120 kg/year is 250 million tons of methane/year just from cattle farts. So a 97K is more of a rounding error in emissions.
Putting things in perspective.
That a few thousand years' worth of change has happened in a few decades and we ought to be asking why.
Just because there are glaciers in the world remaining does not mean that many glaciers in the world have already been lost.
Sure, but when you tell politicians that you predict that a particular glacier is very likely to melt, and then it doesn't do what you said... this failed prediction is a data point that goes into the column keeping track of the veracity of your predictions, and within this column the distribution of errors better turn out to be normally distributed
If all the science is rigorously peer reviewed then of course the prediction errors will be normally distributed, but peer reviewed science isnt what backed the prediction that the IPCC told policy makers (based on an editorial from the world wildlife foundation, really?), and guess what... the error falls towards alarmism. Are we likely to see more alarmism play a role in the prediction errors coming out of the IPCC?
"His name was James Damore."
This is Southern California we're talking about. Anyone driving in heavy traffic is going to have considerably worse fuel economy numbers than someone driving open roads. When I was still driving 30,000 miles a year (about 31 miles each way daily just getting to and from work), I averaged somewhat less than 18 mpg. With the same car and a trip cut to 18 miles each way, I averaged better than 20 mpg. It wasn't just the distance, it was the fact that traffic between San Pedro and Santa Monica was nastier than the traffic between Studio City and Santa Monica, and that I had only one reasonable route from San Pedro. I had five from Studio City. In any case, there is good reason to believe that L.A. area drivers have poorer fuel economy on average than their cars are capable of. This actually makes the "number of cars" estimate even further inflated.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I showed my math, where the numbers came from and exactly how the results were derived. It's all there, so if anyone disagrees with any of it, they're free to work it out themselves.
Contrast that to the article, which simply claims a completely unsupported figure as fact. That's dishonest.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
FUD. Just the standard in spreading climate hysteria. It might scientifically proven but the green loonies are still the biggest PR group. Which is great for the climate change deniers because it makes their job so easy.
I'm a skeptic. Of everybody in the climate change debate. As soon as either side's models come to pass, wake me up and I'll gladly listen.
Although considering the cost of natural gas the loss is in the tens/hundreds of thousands instead of millions it is still a loss.
Then my gas attack after eating five cans of beans must rank in the top 1000.
Yep, I'd say Deepwater Horizon qualifies as at least a little worse than that.
A few home owners were severely inconvenienced for the duration, but that was about it.
Where's the loss of life?
Where's the permanently disabled/disfigured/diseased
Where's the injuries?
Where's the property damage?
On behalf of everyone impacted by any real disaster in the U.S. I'd like to say; FUCK YOU Inhabitat and any other tree hugging piece of shit that gives this "worst disaster" assertion any credence at all. FUCK YOU!
"the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars."
What kind of cars?
What engine sizes?
Running at what RPM?
Running for how long?
With modern or old emissions equipment?
What kind of fuel?
Seriously, FUCK OFF with this alarmist meaningless bullshit comparisons.
Only the most environmentally-conscious state of the 50 or so we have. How ironic...
Transportation is a small contributor to methane emissions. A better perspective is total anthropogenic methane emissions in the US... for 2014, this was about 28.3 million metric tons (MMT). So this leak was about 0.3% of that. For another comparison, manure management contributes about 2.4 MMT annually, and agriculture overall accounts for 10MMT.
(http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/ghgemissions/US-GHG-Inventory-2016-Main-Text.pdf, Table 2-12, Sum of CH4 emissions in CO2 eq. divided by 25.)
I mean, this wasn't great, but let's keep things in perspective. If this was a catastrophe, then we have much bigger problems.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
And they wonder why a majority of people in the US disbelieve global warming. The only potential disaster from this is tear stained prius seats. You can argue over whether global warming is real or not but even if you take the worst case scenario, this is such a small amount of C02 compared to global emissions and the effect on temperature will be too low to measure.
" the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars."
An interesting unit of measurement for an equivalent to tons of methane. Is that emissions per year, month, weeks or day? I'm guessing year but that's a guess because I can't be bothered to work it out.
Never forget.
Also, slavery. And the Civil War.
And that wardrobe malfunction.
I could go on.
There is nothing funny about man boobs.
Potentially disturbing if encountered out of context though...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force of government.
We dont talk about existing disasters that we cant fix...
i'm astonished that allegedly not-brain-dead alleged humans can imagine giving a shit about the environment. if we ignore the environment, hopefully, it will go away...
Again, one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States happens in California - the state with the highest number of environmentalists, liberals arts degrees, and bankruptcies per capita.
If something smells bad, it - *SNIFFS*- is probably in the state of California.
Probably a few hundred thousand people there, between investors and employees. I guess taking the bus or a train or walking 2 days for each would be a serious punishment, eh?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html
And this release is 97,100?
Lets see...
97,100 / 700,000,000=.00013487
So .0134% or our normal emissions is ONE OF THE WORST DISASTERS IN US HISTORY.
We're all gonna die!!!!!
I'd like to know how many Libraries of Congress of methane were released.
MikeChino writes:
Timothy very rarely if ever writes submissions, users write submissions, Timothy approves submissions from the firehose and sometimes adds commentary.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Seriously, we need to have new nuclear reactors that can replace not only old reactors, but coal and even some of the nat gas.
It is sad that the GOP refuse to do their jobs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You're dividing 112 days of methane leak by one year's-worth of automobile consumption. So now we're at 0.7%.
That still seems smallish, and when talking about greenhouse emissions it's a global problem. One has to take into account global greenhouse gas production, but also global carbon sinks. I wonder what percentage of unabsorbed greenhouse gasses this contributed to over that period of time?
Maybe another way of digesting the impact is in terms of money. That, we can relate to. So maybe here's the question: given current technology for atmospheric carbon reclamation (and they say methane traps 100 times more heat than CO2), how much would it cost to reclaim 9.71 Gg of CO2? I see one reference quoting reclamation at $200 per tonne CO2, which for this leak equals $2 trillion. How does this compare to past disaster cleanup costs? It's a lot of money.
If they are so concerned about losing money then perhaps they should have spent a bit more to prevent the well from rupturing in the first place rather than sit around for 3 months claiming it would take many more months to plug the leak.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
you link to article about glacier that is still there. anyway that glacier and some of those others in that article may well have formed or bulkied up in the "little ice age (not a true ice age admittedly) from 16-19 centuries. Get me alarmed about glaciers NOT in the n. hemisphere just because of that LLA thing.
"You're dividing 112 days of methane leak by one year's-worth of automobile consumption. So now we're at 0.7%."
Non-sequitur. The leak was a one-time event, so why not compare the lifetime total for the leak to the lifetime total gasoline consumption, which would make it essentially 0%?
The figure was given to make the scale more comprehensible. Comparing to 112 days worth of auto consumption isn't that.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Give that to us in usable units of measure. Like X million cow farts.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So you are saying all of the wasted gas that wasn't sold and not servicing the stockholders is a good thing?
After the cost/benefit ratio has been done, the answer is 'yes'. The market is saturated.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If they are so concerned about losing money then perhaps they should have spent a bit more to prevent the well from rupturing in the first place rather than sit around for 3 months claiming it would take many more months to plug the leak.
But that wouldn't have serviced the stockholders.
Rinse and repeat. It's the corporate version of "Hello World!"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So you are saying all of the wasted gas that wasn't sold and not servicing the stockholders is a good thing?
After the cost/benefit ratio has been done, the answer is 'yes'. The market is saturated.
Whoosh.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's a valid point. I'm really preferring my $2 trillion cleanup figure anyway. Not that anyone is going to actually clean this up, because no one can afford to be responsible. And I suspect that $200/tonne CO2 reclamation is not a very accurate figure, even hypothetically.
Still, I'd like to suggest that we aren't addressing global warming until we enact a reclamation tax for all significant greenhouse emissions including gasoline prices and electricity from coal plants.
Timmay has been proven to skip over informative submissions in the firehose until a clickbait written submission comes along and also rewrites titles and summaries that are insufficiently provocative.
I'm far from the only one commenting on how he effects /.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I wish you had logged in so that this post would have been more visible, because it is quite insightful (no mod points today, sorry). There are some significant differences (VW's was on purpose, but they also weren't double, so less 'extra' pollution than this), but the context is quite valuable and the cynical reply before mine is likely spot on.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
There are about 250,000,000 people in the USA. Your friend dying is no tragedy.
Not true (yes, I just quoted Stalin :) )
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
graph
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close. If they practised science at this point you would trash your hypothesis and come up with a new one. Since they are anti-science and reality doesn't matter, only their agenda, they ignore this reality and tell you the models are what matters and reality is only an inconvenient truth to them.
Of course climate models model the surface temperature while you're comparing them to satellite temperatures that convert proxy readings for somewhere up in the troposphere to temperatures. Also, the satellite temperature graph stops in 2013. It would be interesting to see what an up to January 2016 graph would show.
I went to Wood For Trees and the current UAH plot up to January 2016 looks like this. Just eyeballing it I'd say the January 2016 temperature is above the "Climate Models Best Estimate" line in your graph. I expect February 2016 to be even a bit warmer.
nonsense, not when the idiots at the IPCC are making absurd claims like their "Himalaya glaciers will be gone by 2034" debacle. chicken little alarmists are not a credible source
Or idiots like you who pay no attention to the correction made for what was essentially a typographical error and continue to try and use it.
I eat whole-wheat squares. Not much methane, we are talking "solid fuel", here.
Yeah, yeah, eating whole-wheat cereal and multi-grain bread makes me some kind of health nut. It is just when I switch to white bread when it is on sale, oh, man, a part of me stages a "sit-down strike."
The 5 Bcf of methane released by this is equal to the amount of methane released by US coal mining operations every 6 days. Worldwide, this amount of methane is probably the daily release of coal mining operations. The benefits of methane over burning coal are still substantial enough that even with problems like this, which never should have happened if more diligent well surveys had been done by So Cal Gas, are still substantially better than the alternative of burning coal to make electricity, which California still does.
registered passenger vehicles in the USA would be a far, far greater disaster, along the same lines of reasoning...
I sure miss the pre september 11th slashdot. It did not suck rotten moose cocks.
Try this link, instead. http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/st...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Same graph, same answer, same clear trend upwards. Even more so if you remove that little cheat at x=0.
(Note to self: sarcasm doesn't work when expressed as a URL.)
It's the ziggy-zaggy black line we need to watch, especially the way it diverges from the "Climate Models Best Estimate" line. Diverges by going down, as it happens.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
No, we only care about the center points the "ziggy-zaggy" moves around. That shows a clear trend up. Then there's the cheater that the graph starts out below 0. Correct the y offset until it properly starts at 0 and see what happens.
Good thing we have cars to offset the loss of methane by contrast.
Yes it is a calamity. There are certainly flocks of birds, caught in that gas, and killed, and there are seniors who, if they could relocate far enough away from the leak, were ok, but others who had whiffs of that gas were less fortunate. Ask the hospitals close to the leaking site.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
While not endorsing a race to the bottom, there has been a gas leak that is on fire in Russia since the 1970's, apparently a bit of a tourist attraction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Is going to smell America's big fart!