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A leak in a gas pipeline.

Illegal landfills.

Power plants that smoke more than allowed.

Satellites from the Californian company Planet will soon detect all of this.

It would be a small revolution in the fight against climate change.

So far, photos from space have mostly shown environmental pollution on earth as blurred clouds over cities and industrial regions.

But with the new scouts you could see a lot more details: they will - to put it simply - snap each factory chimney individually.

"We don't have much time to stop global warming," says Will Marshall, co-founder and head of Planet, to WELT.

"That is why it is important to measure pollutant emissions quickly and precisely, everywhere on earth." This is the only way to identify where action is needed.

"The previous satellites cannot do that," explains the British entrepreneur, "we need new technologies."

Planet is the world's largest operator of earth observation satellites.

Marshall's fleet takes photos of the whole globe once a day.

The cameras document everything.

Forest fires, refugee flows and ship movements, for example.

Farmers use the pictures to judge the ripeness of their grain.

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Secret services are looking for rocket launch pads in North Korea.

Some companies count the trucks in front of their competitors' factories to gauge how business is going there.

Researchers now want to use Marshall's missiles to win the fight against climate change.

The on-board cameras designed by NASA engineers achieve a resolution of 30 meters per pixel.

This is a previously unattainable value for measuring environmental pollution from orbit.

Marshall's fleet includes around 20 satellites that look like fridges with wings, and is supposed to discover so-called super emitters - especially dirty industrial companies.

These include oil rigs, sewage treatment plants, farms and dairies.

Such systems contribute disproportionately to the pollution of the atmosphere.

According to the American environmental organization IATP, the 20 largest meat and milk producers in the world generate more greenhouse gases than all of Germany.

Planet's satellites are said to locate 80 percent of these super emitters.

One of the big polluters: The Permian Basin in Texas will probably also be watched by the satellite

Source: Getty Images

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In two years, Planet plans to put the first climate observers into orbit.

They are intended to help managers to identify and modernize pollutants in the corporate world.

They can also support the search for malfunctioning equipment - such as a leak in a pipeline.

Authorities, in turn, want to use the satellite photos to expose environmental offenders and bring them to justice.

For the project, Planet works with the American non-profit organization Carbon Mapper, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US state of California.

The measurement results are to be published on the Internet.

The main aim is to analyze and reduce global emissions of methane - this gas is even more harmful than carbon dioxide, according to researchers.

California is considered to be particularly progressive when it comes to environmental protection.

For example, state law stipulates that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced well below 1990 levels by 2030.

California even wants to be climate neutral by 2045.

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America as a whole is still a developing country in terms of climate protection.

Oil is the country's most important source of energy with a share of 37 percent, ahead of natural gas with 32 percent, according to data from the US government.

Third place is shared by coal and renewable energies, both come in at eleven percent.

It is followed by nuclear power with eight percent.

For comparison: In Germany, renewable energies make up 35 percent.

Former US President Donald Trump had promoted the oil, gas and coal industries, he thought little of green electricity.

Joe Biden is now going a different way.

The Democrat wants to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the expansion of green energies and build huge wind farms off the coast of his country.

For the commodity companies, however, he wants to remove the tax breaks that were in place under Trump.

For this week, Biden has invited to a virtual climate summit, there should be a video link with around 40 heads of state and government, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, China's President Xi Jinping and Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

And just a few days ago, the United Nations declared that 2020 would be one of the hottest years since temperature records began. In addition, the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere has increased - despite the economic standstill due to the corona pandemic. So it seems high time that Will Marshall's satellites began operating in space.