Eight Leaks Plugged. One Hundred Thirty-Eight Ignored.

My neighbor on the south road called last Tuesday to ask why the coop raised his propane surcharge again this winter. I told him it wasn’t just propane. I told him about methane — invisible, eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide over its lifetime, responsible for roughly a quarter of the warming that’s already baked in — and I told him the United States had just been handed 138 satellite-confirmed locations of the stuff pouring into the atmosphere from broken wellheads and corroded pipelines, and had done nothing. Not one repair. Not one response. Zero.

He wanted to know what that had to do with his propane bill. Everything.

A UN system called the Methane Alert and Response System — Mars — now uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from more than a dozen satellites and identify super-emitter leaks. A super-emitter is a single valve or pipeline section venting tonnes of methane per hour. The worst one detected last year was in Mexico’s offshore oil fields — thirty-seven tonnes per hour, equivalent to the emissions of more than seven million SUVs. These are not hard to find. The satellites see them from orbit. Mars sends the location to the responsible government or company. Then it waits for a response.

Turkmenistan — the world’s worst mega-leak source, a country most people in Adams County couldn’t find on a map — fixed eight of its flagged sites. Repaired corroded pipes, faulty wells, failing flares. The UN called it a breakthrough. I read the UN press release at the bench one evening after a long day on the shop floor, and I set it down next to the numbers. Mars sent 192 alerts to Turkmenistan in the last year. About one in five got a response. Eight got a repair. That is a four-percent fix rate on a twenty-percent response rate. One hundred and eighty-four super-emitting leaks are still venting in a country that joined the global methane pledge only after being publicly identified as the world’s worst, two years after the pledge launched. The press called it a breakthrough.

The number that should be in the headlines is not Turkmenistan’s. The United States received 138 Mars alerts — second-highest on the planet. The response was zero. Not one alert answered. Not one leak fixed. The country that has spent decades positioning itself as the global energy authority shrugged at 138 confirmed plume locations and moved on.

That inaction is not abstract for us here. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative is headquartered in Friendship. The co-op serves tens of thousands of member-owners across Adams and Columbia counties and beyond. The electricity we get through the wall is generated by Dairyland Power Cooperative, our generation-and-transmission provider, and Dairyland’s portfolio includes natural gas. Every tonne of methane that leaks from a wellhead or pipeline in the Permian Basin or the Marcellus Shale is fuel that someone paid to extract, transport, and condition, and that cost shows up on the rate side of the cooperative’s books. Methane leakage is not a climate abstraction. It is a fuel-waste problem, and the ratepayer eats the waste.

The last five years have made sure nobody has to fix it. The Biden administration engaged with Mars and managed one small repair — a pressure safety valve on a single well in New Mexico, in 2024. That engagement ended with the second Trump presidency. The president called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at the UN general assembly last year. The IRA disbursements have been frozen. The methane fee that was supposed to make leaking economically irrational is being restructured to make it optional. Meanwhile the EU — the entity that was supposed to be writing the rules — has proposed suspending its own methane penalties until 2030, reportedly caving to industry pressure. The system is functional. The politics of the system are not.

Look at what other countries are doing while Washington stands still. Mexico, with that thirty-seven-tonne-per-hour offshore monster, has answered every single one of its twenty-three alerts and is working toward a fix. Iraq repaired a corroded pipe at Baiji in May. Algeria shut down a faulty flare that had been venting methane for nearly forty years. Kazakhstan has patched eight of thirty-eight flagged sites. Brazil and Argentina have answered 100 percent of their alerts. These are not climate crusader nations. They are countries that received satellite data and did something with it. Iran, Russia, and China also received alerts. They did nothing. The UN secretary general wants an 80-percent response rate. Three countries have hit it. The rest are treating the notifications like junk mail.

So here is what this means for Adams County, and here is where the lever is. Adams-Columbia Electric is a member-owned cooperative. That means its governance runs through its members, not through shareholders in a distant city. The annual meeting is where members question rates, set policy direction, and ask the board what it is doing with their money. A county supervisor, a township chair, a farmer who writes a check for propane every winter — any of those people can walk into that meeting and ask what Dairyland’s methane reduction plan is, what percentage of its generation portfolio is gas-exposed, and what compliance costs are being passed through to Adams County ratepayers because the EPA is not enforcing. Those are not speculative questions. They are rate questions. They hit the heating bill. They hit the propane budget. They hit the township road fund when extreme weather — the kind that is coming faster and harder every year — washes out culverts and collapses gravel shoulders that the county does not have the equipment budget to repair on schedule. We have watched Lake Petenwell’s ice-out move by roughly a dozen days in the twelve years I have kept the notebook. The warming that shows up in the ice-out data is the same warming that the methane numbers describe. The difference is that the methane data also comes with a satellite photograph of exactly where it is happening, and a system that tells the responsible party exactly where the broken valve is, and a 43-leak track record proving that the fixes take days or weeks, not decades.

A corroded pipe in Turkmenistan got repaired because the satellite saw it and the UN told Ashgabat where it was. Thirteen hundred corroded pipes in the United States will not get repaired because no one in Washington wants to answer the phone. That is the choice, and it is being made deliberately, by governments that have been told exactly where the leaks are.

The opportunity for Adams County is not to applaud eight fixes in a country halfway around the world. The opportunity is to show up at the next Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative annual meeting and ask the board what they know about Dairyland’s methane exposure, what it is doing to our rates, and what they plan to do about it. That is how a rural county in central Wisconsin takes the satellite data and turns it into something that matters on the south road and the county line and the heating bill that comes in January. The satellites are doing their job. The question is whether we are.