At worst, these sattellite images will cause an outrage on Twitter until the mob finds something else to be angry about. People are too dependent on their product to do something that would actually hurt these businesses.
Or where they separated refugee parents from their children and put them in concentration camps where they had to sleep on concrete floors and beg for basic supplies, then 'lost' these children.
I'm not saying that condemnation isn't deserved in either direction, I'm agreeing that it is deserved in both directions simultaneously. For country A to tell country B they shouldn't do anything, they should absolutely expect country B to say what about X that you country A are doing.
Where do you get that I'm suggesting otherwise?
Part of the issue is that it's a problem that only exists in context. If I'm playing golf with my neighbor and he brings up my dog barking first, it's different than if he brings it up as a counterargument to my complaint about his loud parties. e.g. if someone on hacker news is bringing up criticisms of the US (e.g. Guantanamo Bay) in an unrelated topic, there's nothing wrong with that.
Whenever there is discussion of Guantanamo online, Xinjiang is almost never brought up. Here's a few (I promise not cherry picked, they're the first 3 results on google search for "hacker news Guantanamo" with more than a handful of replies) hacker news threads on Guantanamo to show this point: [0], [1], [2]. Not one mention of Chinese war crimes. There are debates over how bad they are, sure, but no whataboutism saying "Guantanamo is bad, but what about X issue in Y country?"
In contrast, there's not a single large thread about the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang on hacker news (or any other major site) that isn't filled with comparisons to the United States of America and its current and historical problems (and thankfully people calling them out for whataboutism). It's a pattern, and it's a real problem, and I won't hesitate to call it out when I see it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500597
Is what has been said at the start of every slippery slope. "What I'm doing is okay because it's not nearly as bad as what someone else is doing."
It's a weak person's answer. Call it what it is, and it's just wrong regardless of "level" or reason.
But furthermore, I never claimed that "what we're doing is ok" (it's not, Guantanamo is still bad obviously), rather I claimed that whataboutism is about CONTEXT. Bringing up tangentially related US issues in a debate about greater Chinese war crimes is a bad faith argument specifically because its purpose is to muddle discussion, confuse scale (less than 40 Gauntanamo prisoners vs 1,000,000+ prisoners in Xinjiang). The time and place for an argument makes a difference -- if you're talking about how bad the Germans are for the Holocaust, and I interject by talking about an event where an English Jew was murdered in 1935 by an anti-semite, are you not allowed to criticize me for derailing the conversation? I could say "anti-semitism is wrong at any level" or "the English do bad things to, why won't you acknowledge that", and I would be totally out of line because of the context of the discussion of the holocaust, because comparing some Englishman getting murdered to millions dying in death camps is dishonest.
Also: the party owning the pipeline has a pretty strong incentive to stop those leaks, it costs them money.
Unfortunately, the mixture is useless and vented into the atmosphere. There ought to be a burden of responsibility to deal with that in a more ecological way on the pipeline operators, but these tend to be in bed with the nation states that are home to the pipes.
A pipeline carrying a single substance or single mixture of substances can still vent, usually that is to deal with pressure excursions and is a safety measure.
Did you know California does a "Methane survey"?
https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/8/4383/2015/
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/11/18/2129
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7b99/...
https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2020/EGU2020-9923...
Is this about MH-17 shot down over Ukraine? There's arrest warrants out for the people responsible at the moment; they know what happened and who was responsible.
Before the mob finds something else a small guy is gonna be made a scapegoat out of, like that one small-ish bank that got prosecuted over subprime lending. What message does that send to the real offenders?
This is already a thing using Airborne data: https://methane.jpl.nasa.gov/
And California is already trying to regulate some of the emitters: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/methane/ab1496-rese...
CarbonMapper is planning to launch 30 satellites in partnership with JPL and Planet for 30m resolution from space.
This is an interesting situation. Some companies in the space want to sell serices, with the oil and gas sector being a likely customer (thus huge conflict of interest flag).
That means that the data used by the company you mentioned will likely underestimate it.
So it's not commercially available yet. I don't know if EDF has plans to open or sell their data in the future.
Russia and Turkmenistan might not care, but what about the companies in Algeria and the United States? Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Russia will be on the first line of climate change, they have quite few incentives to make the right call.
Algeria for what I know is corrupt like hell and this undermines everything. Public policies if decided, won't have any impact.
In the US the federal gvt can have quite a huge impact if the chambers follow. But you need indeed to convince a lot of people with conflicting interests.
Russia has incentives, but the Russian government does not. Its fortunes are entirely tied to the petro-ruble.
And when it comes to choosing between what's good for Russia, and what's good for whomever is governing Russia, Russians will choose the latter eight times out of ten.
After 1991, a lot of illegitimate fortunes built up, controlling important parts of different industries but also weapons, including nuclear ones.
Even with the govt power and the brutal nature of the regime, they had hard times to make the oligarchs yield to his wishes.
History will certainly say that somewhat Putin was a necessity before the country’s dislocation threat.
As if you were saying that you’d gain Alaska if you get rid of the permafrost. Yeah sure but you’ll lose all the rest.
The biggest issue with global warming is that it’s a non linear phenomenon.
There’s threshold effects involved followed by exponentially worsening situation until we reach a new equilibrium.
They can’t maintain a regime that sacrifices the majority of the population. If they do so, they’ll be kings of… nothing.
Judging by excess deaths, Russia lost 1 million people to Corona[0]. The government's response is either nothing, or saber-rattling in Ukraine (depending whether you buy the view of their recent actions as a domestic distraction).
It's always been very difficult to overestimate the indifference of the Russian government to its own populace's well being, especially when they gain monetaraily and internationally from being indifferent.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
You should start the analysis from the population and its reality. Even Staline and Krutchev didn’t manage to get rid of high vodka consumption and alcoholism, where Putin managed while being less brutal. And he’s still popular among the population.
I mean there that usually we judge them by our own values, but you need to take into account their reality.
They built a great scientific elite over the last century but on the other hand, the rest of the population is not worth more than a third country’s one in terms of education, work and “lumières ethics”. And that gap is huge.
To clarify however, I didn't mean to say that Europe is clearly going to stop buying from these sources, just that _there are other means_. Too often with the climate crisis, options are there, but the nature of how we humans organized ourselves seem to stand in the way of taking them. Thinking of this as "well there's nothing we can do because it's in Turkmenistan" might sometimes be just a way to clear our conscious while not doing anything.
And nuclear energy, while having no carbon emissions, has the problem that nobody wants it in their backyard. Plus, huge upfront investments and costs.
Where? And how?
>>using alternatives, such as green gas
You mean synthetic gas? There is absolutely no capacity to produce anywhere near enough to satisfy even a single percent of European needs.
>>or heat pumps
Heat pumps are not a universal solution, they don't work in all climates, or they require digging trenches or wells to actually be efficient - again, not possible everywhere and for everyone.
And even if it was - with what money? Where I'm from in Poland I know lots of people who still heat their houses with coal, purely because gas is too expensive as it is. And you want to switch their source of heat to an even more expensive one? I'm sure they will be super happy to do that, sure.
You only need as much gas as is required to fill the gap that alternative gas providers and heat pumps can't provide to compensate the lost gas.
Another option is to improve the houses such they leak much less heat.
Money allocation could be managed through a variety of ways, such as EU funds
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/07/fireplac...
I mean electric boilers, heating panels, ranges and car chargers will easily increase peak loads by 15-25 kilowatts per house, that's 2-4x as much as they currently pull. Do that times hundreds of thousands of houses and you see the issue.
The right conclusion is that now they need to buff up the power grid extremely quickly TOO (it needs not take such a long time, some choices like solar or wind are quite quick to install).
Both the consumer endpoints and production endpoints have to change, of course.
As for the billions required for the transition, since when absolute figures make for good decisions? What is required is a comparison with alternatives. And one sure thing is that the cost of a failed transition, of a climate catastrophe, or indirect consequences like wars, are tremendously more expensive.
Politicians tend to make delusional promises which can never happen. Something like this is a long term thing it’s not… stop using gas now!
Governments are trying hard to artificially keep the prices low, but the reality is that the market really really wants people to give up on fossil fuels.
That's incredibly naive, if you excuse me saying so. 300 million people depend on Russian gas supplies, yes, most EU countries have emergency supplies for few weeks in case of a major disruption, but those are for emergencies - not for threats of "do X or else".
When this does launch, the images taken should be open to public consumption, preferably on a website. Once we put these companies on blast with the hard facts, things will begin to change. Very quickly.