Just a few major pipelines stand between hundreds of millions of people in the European Union and total energy collapse. This vast and—for now, at least—stubbornly indispensable infrastructure carries a dark secret into the heart of what’s supposed to be the first continent to reach the post-fossil fuel era. Engineers from Russia’s state-run energy giant, Gazprom PJSC, are charged with maintaining the tenuous supply of natural gas. Their work, at times, involves releasing immense clouds of superwarming methane on the crossing from the Siberian tundra to Europe. Take an incident on June 4 that started off as routine maintenance. As the company later described it, engineers found a defect serious enough to shut down the pipeline, which involved releasing gas inside the tube. It’s a standard practice in Russia and elsewhere that many operators see as the simplest and cheapest way to prevent explosions. Gazprom didn’t break any laws. […]