Choose your poison. This is the same reason sewage treatment plants and land-fills have these flares setup. The methane IS that much (exponentially)worse than the CO2 and other by-products of burning it, and not just for the smell and health effects. There are plants(leafy kind, not factories) and other ways for mitigating the CO2.
For methane, your best options are to burn it(full-stop) or leave it in the ground(maybe put it back… 🙄 ). The rest of the the sentence in the screenshot is just … incoherent and self-contradictory at best.
My first reaction to the headline was, “Hey, these assholes consider mitigation too expensive(where clean coal fails, according to their own bean-counters, nevermind the obvious realities against it), BUT THEY CAN BOTHER WITH THESE SHENANIGANS?”; However, burning/breaking down methane and other complex/harmful chemicals would be a first step in any in-place mitigation scheme.
The BEST first mitigation step is of course to just close these things down entire, so I’m done quibbling with the headline,
spoiler
but it sucks that all sides are stuck with the same fear-mongering-and-throwing-out-hyperbole/half-truth-and-occassional-hopefully-unintentional-straight-up-lies when trying to convince the public that the fascists trying to move the overton window their way use.
Seems like there’s some conflicting information in the article with the World Bank guy at the end contradicting the Texas regulator from earlier concerning the impact of enclosed flares.
Hang on. I misplaced my surprised face…oh, here it is.
Huh, who would have guessed?