rzimmerman parent
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 (https://www.planet.com/pulse/carbon-mapper-launches-satellit...). It's great to have active monitoring if we want to impose limits and hold offenders accountable.
Considering that merely existing creates carbon, the choice of "offenders" is concerning. Creating or "emitting" carbon and methane aren't crimes and attempts to "hold offenders accountable" makes advocates of this position sound authoritarian. You can't outlaw living and force people to buy climate approved products. The narrative and wording surrounding the climate movement get worse every year.
By "offenders" I clearly mean parties exceeding a legal limit (or any treaty-negotiated limits). It's a way to enforce laws and agreements. Of course I'm not implying that creating or releasing any amount of methane inherently a crime. We're talking about leaking pipelines (either by accident or negligence), biomass landfills that might be required to reclaim or capture methane (but aren't), things like that. Or even just identifying human-driven sources we didn't realize existed.
The methane emitters in the satellite image are doing far, far more than merely existing.