Exclusive: Fixing a leak can be simple and equivalent to closing a coal power station, making lack of action maddening, say analysts
The world’s worst mega-leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane in 2025 have been revealed by an analysis of satellite data.
The super-polluting plumes from oil and gas facilities have a colossal heating impact on the climate but often result from poor maintenance and can be simple to fix. The assessment found dozens of mega-leaks, each having the same global heating impact as a coal-fired power station.
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
But don’t forget to pay extra the airlines for green fuel and save the planet…
But make sure you turn lights off, consumer, because it’s all your fault.
Omg you’re not unplugging all your devices when you dont use them ? You’re killing us !
What’s your carbon footprint
I get what you’re saying and the “individual carbon footprint” is often used to blame shift to regular people just living their lives, but we do still have a carbon footprint. It may be a tiny, rodent-sized footprint compared to the Kaiju-sized ones of big industries, but our actions and choices do have an effect (especially collectively).
I just don’t like dismissing the individual carbon footprint as total propaganda because it’s not wrong (though I acknowledge it is abused). Dismissing it like that just puts out a defeatist “nothing I do matters” message when our individual choices do matter and add up.
Can you live a totally carbon-neutral life in the modern age? No, probably not. But we also shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and do nothing.
You’re taking about fixing the leaky sink while the house is on fire.
No one is saying that we don’t have a carbon footprint. All life does.
But we, as a society, need to first focus on the things that are most destructive. In this case, fossil fuel infrastructure and the institutions keeping it in place.
It’s not an “or” situation. It is and always has been an “and”.
My gripe is with people refusing to do anything on a personal level because “what does it matter when X industry pollutes more in 5 minutes than I do in a year?”.
Lookup where the expression Carbon Footprint came from, what ad campaign birthed the term and what were the motivations of the companies involved in doing so. It’s not a matter of “and”, it’s a matter of propaganda or actual reality.
I’ll have you know, my energy utility just emailed me today that I’m ranked in the top 20% of energy and water savers in my city and I use less than half of the average household. /s
That’s good news, if more people in your area were like you, they could probably open another AI data center and only jack your rates up a little bit. :)
No one likes a pessimistic clown. Stop talking like a fool and do something about it.
Please stop turning this into an either / or.
Where did I do that?
I admit my thoughts on this go far beyond just your comment. This is a widespread narrative about how corporations pollute, therefore consumer footprint is bullshit or an outright conspiracy.
People keep standing up and pointing at commercial polluting and saying “well? Which is it? Should I turn off the lights at home or should corporations stop polluting?” It’s not either / or. It’s both. You should absolutely turn the lights off when not in use.
Here’s how this should go:
- consumers do what they can to conserve
- corporations pollute
- consumers get mad at the corporations and pressure them to stop
Instead, with your now highest-voted comment, here is what’s happening:
- consumers do what they can to conserve
- corporations pollute
- consumers get mad that they ever bothered to conserve
Do you see how this is the wrong outcome?
The thing I never buy about this is that people make out as if someone is going around with a bell crying SHAME SHAME at them every time they don’t recycle. IMO this is a phantasm: we all know what’s the right thing to do - maybe we feel guilty if we don’t do it, but there is no oil company representative going around wracking us all with guilt.
There are 8 billion consumers, with projections of 12 in our lifetimes. It absolutely matters what consumers do. If you want to reduce this to you personally agains the actions of some corporation, that’s simply bad faith. Collectively, consumer action is extremely important, especially in purchase decisions, which put direct pressure back on the companies polluting the worst, and at the ballot box, where we put pressure on our governments to regulate them.
Please stop moaning about the injustice of “personal footprint” every time you see evidence of a corporation misbehaving. It’s not either they have to act or we do. It’s both!
Plus, our individual impact affects their impact. It’s all connected.
If we all suddenly plan more efficient routes and carpool, and now we’re only driving half as much, well, those big companies start selling us half as much gas.
My aim was at the incessant drumbeat pointing to individuals to “do better” when there’s basically silence about corporate interests. People are conditioned to feel personally responsible, and either feel like there’s nothing more for them to do outside of their own behaviors, and/or bear the guilt personally which should be borne by the aforementioned corporations.
While it is of course proper for individuals to tailor their own behaviors for the greater good, make no mistake: when you see or hear produced messaging pointing to how individuals should modify their behavior with respect to climate, it is propaganda.
Taking over a coal power plant by force and shutting it down will do much more to combat climate change than separating paper from plastic in recycling.
You didn’t need to write a word of that. I know exactly what you are doing and why you think you’re doing it.
it is propaganda
Do you really think there is nothing for individuals to do, here? 8 billion people. Do they tend to just do the right thing unprompted? Is it corporate malfeasance anytime someone puts up a sign about what can / cannot be recycled in this bin?
the incessant drumbeat pointing to individuals to “do better”
Aha. Here is where I call on you to produce the phantasm. This is the supposed person walking behind you crying SHAME that I referred to. DO BETTER.
Can you show this relentless drumbeat to me? If this is really an ever present voice in your ear, you must be able to produce examples of someone saying “consumers, it’s all your fault.” Show me where anyone is actively pointing at consumers, guilting them, engaging in this propaganda. If this drumbeat is so relentless it must be all over the web. Give me half a dozen links telling you to turn off the lights because you are destroying the planet.
As a somewhat market economy believer , I even believe collective individual actions can help trigger corporate changes. Think of the huge chunk of climate change caused by fossil fuel industry. It’s maddening, and dwarfs anything people can affect.
But you can choose battery electric or human mobility, you can chose an electrified house, you can even chose to pay for all renewable electricity generation. We’re on the cusp of shrinking that fossil fuel industry. If only enough people would chose to go in that direction, the industry would have to follow and that would make a real difference
I blame government more than corps. Corps just act according to the market they’re in, morality isn’t relevant. But government’s role should be shaping the market to serve society, and they are abject failures. Government’s role should be to serve the people, not get captured by corps and a handful of ultra-wealthy. At this point the failure is malicious
Yes collective action matters. I also think it’s hard to wholly separate corporate activity from consumers. It’s not like factories are just over there polluting for their own reasons. At the end of the day, most of what is produced goes to consumers. Now, there are times when individuals don’t have good options to choose. Want to avoid plastics? Good luck eating. We do need to lean on corporations and governments to solve some problems. So let’s do that! It’s not mutually exclusive with individual and collective action.
Well these d-bags aren’t operating these oil or gas wells for funzies
Negative externalities like these must be re-imposed on polluting companies through democratic governance. Regulatory capture and subversion are carried out by individuals and must be treated as crimes against humanity.
Best I can do is crypto assassination markets.
I saw last week the Gas Leaks Project published some more data on this subject. The largest leak they found was something like 50-60 times higher than the EPA definition of a ‘super emitter’. Incredible really.
When compared to coal, methane is obviously much more efficient at energy generation. But this is true when we measure only the material burned, not when we look at the supply chain. With methane being 80-90 times more damaging to the atmosphere than the byproducts of burning coal, the end result is very tight once these leaks are accounted for.
So tight that, given the reporting requirements for methane leaks are ‘we trust you to use the honour system’, it’s more likely than not methane is doing more damage per resulting kilowatt than coal ever has. The equivalent ‘leaking’ for the coal supply chain is a lump of it falling off a train car and becoming a rock, to the benefit of only one guy. Rocks don’t tend to destroy the air, only naughty children’s Christmas mornings.
Of course this isn’t to suggest we build more coal infrastructure, just to point out that with these methane leaks being so prevalent, it’s not remotely as useful an energy source as has been believed. Remember a decade ago when ‘bridge fuel’ was mentioned in every conversation about clean energy? Honestly it’s shocking that these companies have deemed it cheaper to not even look for leaks than to keep the product they sell from floating away.
Here's an interesting quote from former Exxon mechanical engineer, Dar-Lon Chang:
"When they were marketing natural gas as clean energy, they didn’t really know what they were talking about because they were fixated on the idea that natural gas, when burned, produces half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal.
The industry was not monitoring methane leakage, so they did not have data about how much was leaking, and there wasn’t much appetite for management to measure methane leakage because if they found out there was a problem they would have to do something about it."
Source (I lost the timestamp, but it’s in part three, apologies)
Rocks don’t tend to destroy the air, only naughty children’s Christmas mornings.
It’s none too good for their lungs, either. Black Lung and all of that excitement.
Big Christmas has long perpetuated the jolly nature of the big guy. He’s rather diabolical though, having invented black lung in his workshop to cull the naughties. This is now the truth I choose to believe.
Very one sided story. Doesn’t mention gas industry profits at all.
Yes, we are destroying the environment. But, did you see how high our stock prices are!?
It’s a miracle we didn’t get extinct yet
It’s started, it’s just unevenly distributed among the poorer populations
There are people that can fix that any day at this point.
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
It’s maddening but expected.
When corporate decisions are based solely on pleasing investors, fixing a leak isn’t a priority. It might be a long-term investment that eventually pays for itself, but it comes with a front-loaded cost that diminishes the profits of the current quarter.
The only way to get them to care about the problem is if it’s actively unprofitable or comes with personal liability for the leadership, and the only way that will happen is with regulations.
In other words: “why about the survivability of the species when we can instead care about making our investor’s loins tingle?”
When corporate decisions are based solely on pleasing investors, fixing a leak isn’t a priority. It might be a long-term investment that eventually pays for itself, but it comes with a front-loaded cost that diminishes the profits of the current quarter.
The shitty thing is the vast majority of the leaks weren’t from investor owned corporations. The vast majority were from state owned and operated entities, mainly turkmenistan. The top 25 list were filled entirely by turkmenistan, Venezuela, Iran, and one corpo from texas.
Link to analysis - https://law.ucla.edu/news/spotlight-top-25-methane-plumes-2025-oil-gas
I was expecting it to be cow farts.
i’m kind of curious if there’s a scalable way to bag/bottle and transport cow farts. you just need a little flap to let out the solids.
This is why we need waste to energy, you solve three problems at the same time. First is landfill methane emissions, second is land waste usage, third is energy production.
I know YT shorts are bunk, but for anyone who partakes and wants to curate their stream, may I present climate town on this issue:
How does this compare to the methane from beef? (seriously, I’d like to know)
The problem will solve itself once fewer fossil fuels are consumed overall, there’s less fuels to transport around and therefore fewer leaks … also the companies are losing money on the leaks so they already have an incentive to fix shit today.
If they had any incentive, they would test regularly for leaks. They don’t and never have.
It’s in the article:
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
Gas that does not leak is gas that can be sold.
Certainly. I too commented on that. They’re letting profits literally float away. However what those researchers feel is maddening, to the capitalists is justifiable.
Why spend a dollar to retain a kilogram of methane from escaping, when that same dollar could be used to extract ten kilograms of methane? Repairing the infrastructure would be a lower return on investment, and that’s all that matters to them. They serve the bottom line.
If it were more profitable to repair and maintain the infrastructure, the infrastructure would be repaired and maintained. Alas it isn’t, and so the leaks continue.
yeah that makes sense actually
Except greenhouse effect will keep warming the earth for decades after we consume less fossil fuels. It’s like shitting on the rug and saying the problem will solve itself when you stop shitting in the rug.
Yeah. It’ll solve itself when the habitability of the planet declines enough to prevent the continuation of a high-tech global economy.
Bro, just let me have my sex bots first
One could argue the quest for sex bots is a root cause
We have consumed roughly half of the planet’s fossil fuels that are known and not too difficult to access.
If we continue and consume the other half it won’t matter one shit by then if the problem of leaks have ‘fixed themselves’ because most of humanity will be dead, those that remain will live in a world with so much CO2 in the atmosphere that they’re in permanent cognitive impairment.
