Energy boom alarms Russian Greens

“Do you know what is the brightest place on Earth in satellite images?” asks Aleksey Yablokov, leader of the new Green Russia party.

“Not Los Angeles, not Tokyo. It’s western Siberia.”

The vast expanses of this sparsely populated region are lit by the flares of associated gas burned at oil wells.
“I once flew there by night – the view was unforgettable. But these flares killed not millions, but billions of migrating birds”, says Mr Yablokov, one of Russia’s leading biologists and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Former US Vice-President Al Gore called Siberian oil flares one of the main causes of global warming, in his book Earth In The Balance.

BBC