Vox Sentences: California's gas leak is doing 7 million cars’ worth of climate damage

The California methane leak, explained; Ramadi retaken; and seriously, what kind of parents throw their son a going-away party before he goes on the run?

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

California's ongoing environmental disaster

David McNew/AFP/Getty Images

• The Southern California Gas Company has finally identified the source of a gas leak that's been spewing methane into the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch since October 23rd.

  [AP]

• As Alissa Walker explains for Gizmodo, the leak is arguably the biggest environmental disaster since the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in 2010. And it's likely to continue for months.

  [Gizmodo / Alissa Walker]

• The Environmental Defense Fund, which is running a real-time estimate of how much methane has leaked, assesses the climate impact of the leak over the next 20 years as "driving 7 million cars a day."

  [Environmental Defense Fund]

• The leak caught national attention last week, when the EDF posted an infrared video that shows a plume of methane escaping.

  [Popular Mechanics / Jay Bennett]

• Two area schools were closed indefinitely earlier in the month due to the leak (the students will be sent to other schools in the area until it's fixed).

  [KTLA / Kareen Wynter]

• Efforts to plug the leak were ongoing even before it was pinpointed. But they haven't been working, as Melissa Cronin explains for Vice.

  [Vice / Melissa Cronin]

• In early December, the gas company said it would take until March to permanently plug the leak. Even after today's progress, that timeline hasn't changed.

  [Reuters / Diana Crandall]

Affluenza comes out of remission

Handout/Getty Images

• Texas 18-year-old Ethan Couch was apprehended today in Mexico. He had fled there after violating the probation he'd been sentenced to for killing four-people in a drunk-driving accident.

  [CNN / Evan Perez]

• You might be familiar with Couch's case because of the unusual argument made by his lawyer: that Couch couldn't tell right from wrong because his rich family hadn't set any boundaries for him, a condition indelibly called "affluenza."

  [WFAA]

• The term was deservedly mocked. But the lawyer might have had a point. This feature from this spring, in Dallas' D Magazine, uses court documents to show how nightmarishly indulgent Couch's parents really were.

  [D Magazine / Michael J. Mooney]

• Indeed, before Couch escaped to Mexico this year, police believe that his mother actually threw him a going-away party. A warrant is still out for her arrest.

  [ABC News / Meghan Keneally]

• Because Couch was sentenced to probation as a juvenile, he'll only get 120 days in jail for violating it.

  [Los Angeles Times / Matt Pearce]

• The New York Times talks to the families of Couch's victims, and finds a justifiable anger at the double standard: relatives of nonwhite victims feeling that, if their child had killed 4 people, they would not be treated with such leniency.

  [New York Times / Julie Turkewitz and Katie Rogers]

What's next in the fight against ISIS?

Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

• American and Iraqi forces officially recaptured the city of Ramadi from ISIS over the weekend; the Iraqi prime minister planted a flag there today to commemorate the recapture.

  [Reuters / Ahmed Rasheed and Stephen Kalin]

• This New York Times editorial explains why Ramadi is a big deal in the ground war with ISIS — it was one of the strategic keys the US identified earlier this fall when it rebooted its ISIS strategy.

  [NYT]

• But it's worth remembering that the more territory ISIS loses, the more incentive it will have to shift its tactics to inspiring terrorist attacks abroad — in, say, Paris or San Bernardino.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• So while the strategy for defeating ISIS on the ground is pretty well set, the long-term strategy of how to diminish ISIS as an organization is going to require non-military solutions, like online persuasion.

  [Foreign Policy / James Stavridis]

• One key asset in that battlefield: the vast numbers of English-speaking Muslims who are eager to mock ISIS at every turn, and bombarded a call to join the organization this week with mocking responses like "I wanna wait until April and find out what happened to Jon Snow."

  [Quartz / Adam Epstein]

MISCELLANEOUS

This article will make you want to move to the Swiss Alps and take up watchmaking. [BBC]

• The Massachusetts Supreme Court's 2003 ruling for marriage equality set the stage for same-sex marriage to be legalized nationally. And if not for a bit of crucial politicking in the state legislature, it never would've happened.

  [ThinkProgress / Josh Israel]

• In 1972, Hillary Clinton went undercover to a private school in Alabama to show it was keeping out black students.

  [NYT / Amy Chozick]

• Richard Posner — America's weirdest and most interesting appellate judge — once decided a case about "whether workers at a poultry-processing plant should be paid for the time it took them to remove and put on protective gear at the start and end of their 30-minute lunch break" by having his law clerks put on and take off the gear and timing them.

  [Harvard Magazine / Lincoln Caplan]

• The Third Reich did a tremendous amount to Nazify Christmas celebrations — and the German public mostly went along with it.

  [New Republic / Joe Perry]

VERBATIM

"NASA is already planning for the day when parts of the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s Cape Canaveral, will be underwater." [New Yorker / Elizabeth Kolbert]

• "Having your life changed by music is incredibly privileged. People whose lives are changed by not dying — that’s a bigger thing."

  [Seattle Times / Elizabeth Van Nostrand]

• "Over the last 15 years, those of us who live in rich countries have been astonishingly safe from terrorists."

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

• "Posner had realized that Nussbaum, like many other moral philosophers, essentially thinks that 'people should be made happy, and that is what is important in life,' she remembers. 'He, like Nietzsche, thought that life was all about struggle and suffering, in which not the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but heroic and creative achievement are the most important things.'"

  [Lingua Franca / James Ryerson]

• "Our moral intuitions and indeed our laws today are that you shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of their race, because of their gender, their sexual preference or other issues. But for odd reasons, it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against someone because they were born somewhere else. You can, in fact, put up walls and machine guns and prevent someone from moving simply for the reason that they were born somewhere else."

  [Alex Tabarook to Freakonomics / Stephen Dubner]

WATCH THIS

How Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen [YouTube / Carlos Waters, Phil Edwards]

Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images