Allegheny County
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is a place of many histories, and many kinds of pollution. The ultra methane emissions in the county, to the north-east of Pittsburgh, are from coal. The county lies within the Main Bituminous Field of Pennsylvania, in which coal has been mined since the 1790s. At the time of the Allegheny County "comprehensive land use plan," adopted in 2008, there were "seven underground mine fires burning in" the county, including one in Kennedy Township, near the methane flare that the TROPOMI spectrometer observed. There were also "dangerous highwalls, impoundments, embankments, slides, gob piles, hazardous or explosive gas build-ups, and hazardous equipment or facilities remaining."
Methane is a source of pollution, and it is juxtaposed, almost everywhere, to other sources of pollution and loss. In Allegheny County, there are four Superfund sites listed by the US Environmental Protection Agency: an oil processing facility operated from 1977 to 1992, a toxic waste disposal site used from 1850 to 1986, a municipal and industrial waste site used from the 1930s to the 1970s, and a resin disposal site in a strip mine valley, used from 1950 to 1964. There are histories of legal and political liability associated with all these sites, and histories of human dismay.
To reduce methane emissions, site by site, is also, in prospect, to improve the environments in which individuals and families live and work. The Allegheny land use plan of 2008, Allegheny Places, has not been updated. But it is still in operation, and it is a visionary (administrative) work. It is not concerned with climate change or even, except fleetingly, with methane. It is about "the concept of places," the possibility of loss, and the possibility, eventually, that "all residents [will] have equitable access to opportunities," including 'historic, cultural and natural resources." To mitigate the causes of climate change is to change the atmosphere, and also to change the land.