Emission control

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If we want to quickly combat climate change, we need to deal with “the other” greenhouse gas: methane. Methane leaks are heating up the planet and harming people who live where gas drilling takes place.

Reporter Elizabeth Shogren introduces us to a NASA scientist who’s devoting his career to hunting down big methane leaks. Riley Duren and his team have figured out how to spot methane pollution from airplane flyovers, and in an experiment, his data was used to make polluters plug their leaks. Scientists have answers to the methane problem. The question is whether governments will step up to fund a comprehensive methane monitoring system.

Next, Shogren zooms in on Arlington, Texas, a community that bet heavily on drilling for methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. There are wells all over Arlington, next to homes and shopping centers, even day cares and schools. Arlington’s children have unwittingly been part of an experiment to see what happens when gas wells and people mix.

We end the show with a story from Reveal’s Brett Simpson about a serious source of methane that is often overlooked. Cows and other livestock produce 14% of the world’s methane emissions, in many places belching more of the gas than oil and gas wells. We meet a scientist who’s figured out how to reduce methane emissions from cows by 80%.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Alan. I hope 2022 has been a good year for you. But to be honest, it's been a tough one for us.
0:08.0	This year, Reveal was struck by a financial crisis that jeopardized our very existence.
0:14.0	But we've rallied, and all the while that was happening, our staff forged ahead to produce ambitious investigations
0:22.0	that exposed corruption and abuses that the powerful interests did not want revealed.
0:27.0	Because that's what we do. If we're going to keep telling these kind of stories though, we're going to need support from you.
0:34.0	To support fearless investigative nonprofit journalism, please donate by December 31st.
0:41.0	Just visit revealnews.org slash 2023. Again, to donate to the show and to support our work into the future.
0:48.0	Please visit revealnews.org slash 2023. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
1:05.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal.
1:09.0	I'm Michael Montgomery, one of the producers on the show. I'm sitting in for Alex and who's working on a big project you'll be hearing more about.
1:17.0	We're going to start this week's show with something a little different, a science lesson.
1:23.0	About the gas methane. When you turn on your gas stove, you're burning methane, the main ingredient and natural gas.
1:31.0	It comes from hundreds of thousands of wells around the country, but a lot of it.
1:36.0	Millions of tons of methane never reaches your stove or furnace because it leaks into the air.
1:41.0	That could be from a worn out valve, an aging pipeline or storage tank.
1:47.0	Some companies just vet methane into the air because it's mixed in with the stuff they're really after crude oil.
1:56.0	Once methane's released, the wind carries it whichever way it's blowing and eventually it spreads through the atmosphere.
2:03.0	Methane's a greenhouse gas. That means it traps heat almost like a blanket, causing the earth's temperature to rise, climate change.
2:14.0	And there's more and more of these gases piling on all the time.
2:20.0	Up until now, most of the plants to curb greenhouse gases have centered on carbon dioxide.
2:26.0	But scientists say if we really want to stop the earth from heating up and fast, we need to deal with methane.
2:33.0	That's because methane traps way more heat over the short term.
	...

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