The officially recognized definition of a Tankie is one who is a strong supporter of communism. Which, I think we all agree is considered a "left" wing ideal.

It's also strongly authoritarian, but it's solidly in the authoritarian left. So people calling others "Tankies" are, in theory, more right-wing than the people they're insulting. It's a left-punching insult.

Usually these people are strong supporters of China and the old Soviet Union and are staunch critics of 'imperialist' nations such as Britain and the USA.

I now think of Tankies as being Alt-Left, just as modern conservatives are Alt-Right. Both are extremists, both are okay to use violent upheaval of society to get their way, both routinely ignore actual facts in favor or alternative ones (bOtH sIdEs SaMe), both are nearly incapable of having any kind of normal conversation without dragging politics into it (just look at any "meme" or "comics" community, especially just after Luigi), both have next to if not fully zero consideration for the other part in any conversation, both use nearly identical methods like "control the conversation" and "gish gallop" and "the card says moops" (from Innuendo Studios' The Alt Right Playbook series, but I notice that the tactics at least apply equally well to the Alt-Left) and so on.

Once you see it... you can't really unsee those similarities. But they aren't quite exactly the same, bc while they both shill for Russia, they use different talking points. So... there's that, for whatever that might be worth (very little imho).

extreme left on the economical spectrum

You cannot be this while praising China or Russia

It's written in the first two paragraphs of the article:

The 2022 explosion and leak of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea resulted in the release of 485,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere, according to a new study of the disaster.

The methane released from the pipeline was the largest human-caused methane emissions event in history. But the magnitude of the release is twice as bad as previously thought, according to a new study conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme and published in Nature. Prior studies estimated the methane released from the disaster at between 75,000 and 230,000 tonnes.

You're just thinking twice as bad means twice as much, that's just sloppy writing.

Edit that should be "at least twice as much" too.

Proof of the value of looking beyond the most base layer of news.

The base layer of news is what shows up in fly-in chyrons an pop-up ads. Great to get under the fold, but its worth acknowledging how much of modern media is now just the front page of the New York Post.