The United States received 138 UN alerts of methane plumes in the past year, responded to none of them, and fixed no leaks. [1] That sentence is in the Guardian's own Monday report. It is not the headline. The headline is Turkmenistan.

Turkmenistan, the country the Guardian revealed in 2023 as the world's worst methane mega-leaker, has now stopped eight leaks by repairing corroded pipes, faulty wells, and failing flares. [1] The UN Methane Alert and Response System sent it 192 plume alerts in the last year. The country had three of the six worst leaks Mars detected worldwide in the past six months, and nine of the top 50. [1] It answered about 20 percent of the alerts with on-the-ground information and potential repair plans. [1] The UN called the eight completed fixes an "incredible first step." [1] The United States, sent the second-highest number of alerts, is in the other column: no replies, no repairs, grouped with Iran, Russia, and China. [1]

Methane traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 20 years and accounts for roughly a quarter of current global heating. [1] A single "super-emitter" — tonnes per hour from one valve or pipeline — can heat the planet more than a million SUVs or an entire coal plant. [1] Stopping leaks is often cheap and fast. Methane also breaks down far sooner than CO2, which is why some scientists call the cuts a climate emergency brake. [1] The brake only works if someone answers the satellite.

Meghan Demeter, who runs Mars at the UN Environment Programme, told the Guardian the Turkmen cases prove the pipeline from satellite detection to a wrench on a well can work quickly. "This is a breakthrough in terms of having real documented mitigation action," she said. "But it is not yet a breakthrough in the overall magnitude of emissions. Eight cases is an incredible first step, but there's also a lot more sources in Turkmenistan that need to be addressed." [1]

The political sequence behind those eight repairs is unusually well documented. Guardian reporting in 2023 on "mind-boggling" emissions from Turkmenistan's two main fossil-fuel fields caused a furore in Ashgabat, according to sources there, and pushed the government toward the UN, the EU, and the Global Methane Pledge, which it joined in December 2023. [1] The first documented fix came in November 2024, a faulty well. The most recent, in March, was a corroded pipeline in Lebap province. [1] Turkmenistan's foreign ministry and the state companies Turkmenoil and Turkmengaz did not comment. [1]

Kazakhstan has also stopped eight leaks, from a smaller alert pile of 38. [1] Mars credits 43 sealed leaks worldwide so far, including an Algerian flare that had run for almost 40 years. [1] Mexico answered all 23 of its alerts after an offshore leak of 37 tonnes an hour — equivalent to more than seven million SUVs — and has not yet completed a fix. [1] Response and repair are different stages. The United States has completed neither.

The photograph the Guardian ran with the story is not of Turkmenistan. It is Texas flares, with a caption that repeats the 138 unanswered American alerts. [1] That is the piece the breakthrough framing buries, and the piece that belongs in the lead. A secretive petrostate that used to ignore its own wells is now on the phone with the UN. The country that built the satellites, and received the second-most warnings from them, is not.

-- DARA OSEI, London