The Brief

A landfill is a place of perpetual motion, where mountains of garbage rise in days and crews race to contain the influx of ever more trash. Amid the commotion, an invisible gas often escapes unnoticed, warming the planet and harming our health: methane.

On Thursday, the climate-data sleuths at Carbon Mapper published a study in Science that shows U.S. landfills emit methane at levels at least 40% higher than previously reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. At more than half of the hundreds of garbage dumps surveyed — in the largest assessment yet of such emissions — most of the pollution flowed from leaks, creating concentrated plumes. The researchers found these super-emitting points can persist for months or even years, and account for almost 90 percent of all measured methane from the landfills. Tackling these hotspots could be a huge stride toward lowering emission rates, but blindspots in current monitoring protocols mean they often evade detection.

“It’s a very hard problem to get totally right without any leaks at any place,” said Daniel Cusworth, an atmospheric chemist and project scientist for Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit that provides data to inform greenhouse gas reduction efforts. Sometimes Cusworth conducts aerial surveys of landfills and is relieved to find nothing. “And then other times, you know, I’ll see a massive billowing plume that’s three kilometers long.”

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas created by, among other things, decaying trash, and it often seeps through the soil and plastic covers meant to contain it. Although federal regulations require large facilities to use gas capture systems, landfills remain the third biggest source of these emissions in the United States, accounting for over 14 percent of the national total. Because methane is 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, scientists say reducing the amount of it floating around up there is the quickest way to curb global warming. Doing so also benefits communities: A disproportionate number of U.S. landfills are near marginalized neighborhoods, where gas exposure impacts health or poses an explosion risk.

Leaks that exceed the Clean Air Act’s limit of 500 parts per million are common, as shown by the hotspots Carbon Mapper identified. These areas typically appear after unanticipated events, such as cracks in landfill covers, valve failure in the vast gas collection systems, and other maintenance or construction issues. “They really dominated the total emissions for the landfill,” Cusworth said. The survey found that average release from the most surveyed sites was at least 1.4 times, and sometimes as much as 2.7 times, larger than those reported to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.

Although federal guidelines require these facilities to track emissions and provide that data to the EPA, current reporting and monitoring methods just aren’t up to snuff, according to the study. Most operators report an estimate, using EPA guidelines, calculated from the amount of trash they take in, not from measured data. Regulators also require facilities to perform walking ground surveys four times a year, but experts like Cusworth say these efforts aren’t frequent or precise enough. Hotspots can easily escape notice because many areas are too dangerous or inaccessible to walk on, and monitoring sensors react only to high concentrations on the ground and wouldn’t catch dispersed plumes. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Cusworth, adding that it’s a popular cliche in the air monitoring business.

In the survey, the Carbon Mapper researchers flew over landfills with airplanes that captured infrared images, revealing the plumes. Similar remote sensing methods, such as drones and satellites, are among recent technological advances that could keep the pollutant in check, helping facilities find and address leaks quickly. Other innovations to methane capturing systems, such as self-calibrating caps on valves and sensors that can detect leaks, further reduce the risk of failures.

“In the waste sector, specifically, we know what technologies to implement – we’ve known for a number of years. They’re feasible, readily available, and a number of them are actually quite cost effective,” said Kait Siegel, waste sector manager on the methane pollution team at Clean Air Task Force. “We need to have regulations in place.” This upcoming August, the EPA is expected to update its landfill management policies as part of a required 8-year review cycle.

Tom Frankiewicz, a waste sector methane scientist at RMI, which collaborated with Carbon Mapper on the study, said addressing outsized methane sources, like landfills, is urgent due to the short lifespan and extreme potency of the gas, compared to the longer-lasting carbon dioxide. The world won’t see the climate benefits of reducing CO2 emissions for a century, he said. That time frame drops to a decade when curbing methane. “We have to be working on both, and leaning in on methane because it buys us time.” And in the race to mitigate climate change, every moment counts.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/us-landfills-emit-far-more-methane-than-previously-known/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

It's a sunny, warm Wednesday on deck so make sure you stay hydrated and apply that SPF.

Daytime highs at the beaches are going to stay in the low to mid 70s, and reach 85 to 95 degrees in the valleys. Similar conditions are expected for the Inland Empire.

For communities in the Santa Monica Mountains, temperatures will stay in the mid 80s.

And in Coachella Valley, temperatures will once again be in the triple digits, with highs of up to 108 degrees.

The Phillips 66 oil refinery in the South Bay is shutting down, and nearby communities want a say in what comes next. But some residents worry they’re already being left out.  

Carson officials had called for creating a task force that would include community members to provide recommendations during the redevelopment process, but the effort has stalled.

City officials say they’re in direct conversation with Phillips 66 and are hosting community town halls for residents.

The background

Phillips 66 announced its intention to close its L.A. refinery in 2024, citing an aging facility and increasingly strict state regulations. The refinery spans more than 650 acres and has two main complexes, one in the L.A. neighborhood of Wilmington and one in Carson. They’re connected via a 5-mile pipeline. The company processed its final barrel of crude oil late last year.

Soon after Phillips 66 announced its intent to close, the Carson City Council passed a yearlong moratorium on proposals to develop the site and amended the general plan to give the council authority to approve the final plans for redeveloping the portion of the property within city limits.

What Carson leaders said 

When the moratorium expired last year, and in anticipation of the company submitting a project proposal, Carson Mayor Lula Davis-Holmes directed staff to put together a task force — including residents, City Council members and other stakeholders — to help inform the cleanup and redevelopment of some 223 acres of the company’s land within Carson city limits.

“ I know that my residents are real concerned about what they would like to see on that site versus them being told after the fact,” Mayor Pro Tem Cedric L. Hicks Sr. said at a council meeting last September, when he also expressed support for establishing a task force.

Task force effort stalls

Nearly nine months later, a task force has not been created.

In a statement to LAist, Carson spokesperson Margie Revilla-Garcia said the task force hasn’t yet been established “as staff is still discussing its structure internally.”

“At this time, no timeline has been established for the creation of the task force,” Revilla-Garcia wrote in an email.

Councilwoman Arleen Rojas, whose district includes the refinery, said a task force is premature — cleanup should be the priority.

“We have the community that’s been giving us ideas on what they want there, but we really need to clean it up,” she said.

Rojas said the council established an ad hoc committee that regularly meets with Phillips 66 about the cleanup. Meanwhile, she said the city has hosted and will hold more town hall meetings to educate residents about the cleanup process, which is likely to take years.

In April, Phillips 66 submitted its initial plan to turn the site into warehouses and industrial buildings. (The company submitted a proposal for its Wilmington site in August 2025 to the city of L.A.)

What’s next

Some Carson residents worry that without a designated task force, their concerns could go unheard as Phillips 66 carries out a largely unprecedented cleanup and redevelopment effort.

Jonathan, a Carson resident who grew up with a window view of the nearby Valero oil refinery, said most of his neighbors know little about the Phillips 66 closure. (LAist is not publishing his surname because he fears for family members who are in the U.S. without documentation.) He learned about the creation of a task force via the environmental justice advocacy group Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN.

That group had pushed for a task force that would be included in cleanup conversations, not only redevelopment efforts.

He added that a task force could allow residents to have some say in rectifying longstanding health and pollution concerns from the area’s refineries.

“We get pollution stains on our walls inside because the air is just that dirty,” he said. “In some ways it's a lot like living next to a giant bomb that you don't really know the timer.”

He hopes a task force could help influence the current proposal, which is fully industrial.

“ Living in the shadow of a refinery makes you yearn for way more green spaces,” he said.

Recommendations on how to spend $3.7 million recovered from the Andrew Do corruption scheme will be left to his successor — and long-ago boss-turned-foe — Supervisor Janet Nguyen, under a plan advanced Tuesday by Orange County supervisors. The money is expected to be devoted to benefitting his former constituents, with exact spending plans to be proposed later.

The supervisors moved forward with a proposal by Nguyen to transfer the recovered dollars into her district’s discretionary funds, which she makes recommendations on how to spend. In doing so, they opted not to pursue a notion floated by Supervisor Don Wagner to spend the funds outside the district — an idea that faced intense pushback from dozens of public commenters at Tuesday’s meeting.

“ These funds were recovered in connection with the Andrew Do corruption matter,” Nguyen said. The money, she added, “should be returned back to the benefit of the 1st District community that were deprived of the intended services and public benefits.”

Nguyen said a variety of community needs could be addressed with the dollars, including helping people affected by multi-day mass evacuations over a recent explosion risk at a Garden Grove industrial facility.

As LAist reported when uncovering the corruption scheme, Do used the district discretionary process to allocate millions of dollars in the scheme without it ever appearing on public agendas. Under a state law passed in response to the Do scandal, spending of those funds in O.C. now must go to a public vote of the full board and be posted in an online spending log.

Supervisors have not yet decided how much of the recovered funds will go to communities such as Santa Ana that were in Do’s district during the first year-and-a-half of the four-year scheme, before the map changed due to redistricting. That question will be decided when the board votes on Nguyen’s spending recommendations.

Residents want the money to stay in the district

The supervisors’ move came after more than 50 residents of Do’s former district spoke to the board during public comments — all urging that the funds be spent in the district it was originally intended for. Wagner previously said he wanted a discussion on where to spend it because there are so many needs “across the county.”

“ This is shameful that you're even considering that this money not return to our district,” said Anne Calvo, a senior in Seal Beach’s Leisure World community.

“Please return the funds that are due to our district that were stolen from us,” said Calvo, who was appointed by Nguyen to the county’s Older Adults Advisory Commission.

“Please don't steal these funds twice,” said Huntington Beach resident Lori Sueki.

Vietnamese-language media covers a packed audience during public comments about the fate of $3.7 million recovered from the Andrew Do corruption scheme, during the OC Board of Supervisors’ public meeting on Tuesday, June 9, 2026.

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Jill Replogle/LAist

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Nguyen said it was the most number of speakers she could recall speaking on one topic at a supervisors’ meeting in the year and half since she re-joined the board.

In the days leading up to the discussion, Nguyen put out email blasts calling on constituents to send letters and speak up for devoting the funds to the district.

Several elected officials in local cities were among those calling on the board to spend the money in the district.

“ Other districts vying for the 1st District's funds, which are rightfully the 1st District's, is crazy,” said Butch Twining, an elected city councilman for Huntington Beach.

“Your respective districts have already received 100% of your funding,” Twining said.  ”The money is for our kids, our seniors, our veterans, to aid in providing help to our homeless and underserved communities, our public safety.”

The money diverted in the scheme was originally intended to feed vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities in his district, which included Little Saigon, Huntington Beach and — in the earlier part of the scheme — Santa Ana.

The diversion of the funds “hurt and created true victims of residents who were denied the services, the assistance, the opportunities, to recover quickly and to have their needs addressed,” said Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, who was mayor of Santa Ana during the pandemic.

“The money should go back to those that were harmed. But let's figure out who was harmed and make sure that we look at that,” he said, noting the changes to the district lines.

Fallout

Do is now serving a five-year sentence in federal prison after he admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for awarding millions in tax dollars meant to feed needy seniors and people with disabilities in his district.

As part of the plea deal, Do acknowledged taking more than $800,000 in bribes through his two daughters, including a down payment on the house his youngest daughter Rhiannon Do later forfeited to resolve the criminal case. The unaccounted-for dollars were first uncovered by LAist.

Federal officials recovered money from seized bank accounts and two properties connected to the bribes — including the Tustin house his daughter bought.

Millions more haven’t been recovered, at least yet

The amount of taxpayer money recovered so far is less than half of the $7.9 million Andrew Do admitted was diverted from specific meal contracts.

In a lawsuit seeking to recover funds, the county alleges the total amount lost was even larger: $13.25 million. The county’s suit — scheduled for trial in November 2027 — covers all of the money Do gave to two nonprofits, Viet America Society and Hand to Hand Relief Organization.

That leaves more than $4 million — and possibly much more — not yet recovered.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office noted they have an ongoing criminal case against Do’s alleged co-conspirator Peter Pham.

“Assuming we obtain a conviction in that matter, we would expect to seek restitution,” the spokesperson, Ciaran McEvoy, said.

Pham left the country on a flight to Taiwan in late 2024 and remains a fugitive, according to McEvoy. The case against him also includes charges against another alleged co-conspirator, Thanh Huong Nguyen, who led the Hand to Hand nonprofit.

The scandal has also been costly to taxpayers in other ways. In addition to what the county has spent on legal fees to pursue the lawsuit, $1.7 million has been spent on outside contracts — including a forensic audit — Supervisor Katrina Foley said on Tuesday.

Congratulations to those lucky — or deep-pocketed — enough to score a ticket to one of eight World Cup games in Los Angeles. (If not, it's not too late.)

That now means a visit to Los Angeles Stadium in Inglewood — or SoFi Stadium to the rest of us — along with tens of thousands of others, all jostling to get in, seated, fed, and out.

SoFi is home to both of the city's (American) football teams: The Rams and The Chargers. And the ginormous arena plays host regularly to music's biggest names.

So it's all well-trotted territory. But to make your journey a bit easier, here's our cheat sheet on SoFi.

Driving?

We have to ask: you sure you want to get in a car? Because there are many public transit options to help you avoid traffic and save you money.

My colleague and transportation reporter Kavish Harjai has put together an entire transit guide for said purpose.

Still driving?

Fine! When in Rome ... we get it. In addition to navigating game-day gridlock, you’dll arlso have to park that thing.

Parking at and near SoFi Stadium

You can purchase official parking for each game. And offsite parking too. Inglewood’s Park & Go offers remote parking and shuttle service every 15 minutes to the stadium.

Pro-tip 1: Most of the streets near SoFi are permitted for residents only. Your car will be towed.

Pro-tip 2: There will be folks selling parking spots in private lots and driveways. As they say, caveat emptor.

Pro-tip 3: It could take at least an hour to get out of SoFi after the game. Use the restroom before heading to your car and pack your patience.

Food and stuff

Pregame: As my colleague Gab Chabron says, Inglewood's food scene reflects its Black and Brown residents that make up nearly 90% of its population. So grab some mightily tasty wings at a strip mall, or go a little fancy at a supper club co-founded by actor Issa Rae. Gab has all the details and more recommendations on his guide.

Game time: Plenty of options too at SoFi, which you can find here.

Pro-tip 1: After some back-and-forth, FIFA now allows fans to bring in one, soft, plastic 20 oz factory sealed disposable water bottle to the match. No other outside food or drink is allowed.

Pro-tip 2: The stadium does not accept cash.

Pro-tip 3: SoFi has a strict bag policy. Read what is allowed here.

Pro-tip 4: Yes, you can bring a poster and a flag. But there are strict rules on what those signs say.