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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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
This is not only not the worst disaster in US history, it's not ever in the top 25.
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"
Seriously, this is not anywhere near close to one of the worst disasters in the country's history. Anyone who would make such a claim is either a complete idiot or just looking to be a sensationalist. We've had dozens of hurricanes or earthquakes that have been far worse and if you want to count man-made disasters both the September 11 attacks the the BP Gulf Oil spill are just two within recent memory that are far, far worse in terms of damages and something like the underground coal mine fire (that's still going) in Pennsylvania has probably dumped (or will dump) several orders of magnitudes more greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the atmosphere than this incident.
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".
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".
... 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"
We won't know for a while. We'll have to wait for the final death count that can be attributed to climate change and then do some regression analysis. That's assuming of course that humanity survives.
"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.
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.