Nimby + disassociation.<p>"That landfill is causing a lot of pollution". No, you caused that pollution. The landfill just collected it all in one place.<p>This is similar to "China's manufacturing causes a lot of pollution". No, you, the consumer, cause that pollution.<p>Just my $0.02.
There are several satellites focusing on human-driven methane emitters and monitoring that will be active in the next few years, like Planet's Carbon Mapper (<a href="https://www.planet.com/pulse/carbon-mapper-launches-satellite-program-to-pinpoint-methane-and-co2-super-emitters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.planet.com/pulse/carbon-mapper-launches-satellit...</a>). It's great to have active monitoring if we want to impose limits and hold offenders accountable.
Seems odd the title even mentions landfills and the comments here are focused on them, since despite the largest hourly producer of methane mentioned being a landfill, they are largely glossed over! Based on the map, landfill emissions are basically a non issue outside of South Asia, so efforts to reduce those emissions can be rather targeted.<p>It’s worth noting that despite trapping nearly 30 times more heat, methane is only responsible for around 25% of global warming and only exists in the atmosphere for a decade vs 100s of years for CO2. Certainly reducing methane emissions will help, but CO2 will hang around long after the methane is gone (why the usual “suspect”, cattle, is a non issue).<p>With regards to landfills, the culprit is anaerobic decomposition. Diverting paper to recycling and most other organics to compost would go a long way.
I'm not sure "exposed" is the right verb here.<p>This issue has been known for quite some time.<p>The problem is that no one is doing anything about it...
The real comedy of all this navel gazing and head shaking is we <i>could</i> capture all this excess methane to use as affordable winter heating or turbine fuel but it would literally crater a very lucrative natural gas oligopoly in a fortnight. Artificial scarcity is a planned feature in western capitalism.