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US Carbon Emissions Hit 20-Year Low
Freddybear writes "A recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Agency says that U.S. carbon emissions are the lowest they have been in 20 years, and attributes the decline to the increasing use of cheap natural gas obtained from fracking wells. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for 'cautious optimism' about potential ways to deal with climate change. He said it demonstrates that 'ultimately people follow their wallets' on global warming. 'There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources,' said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado."
Read the article. It talks about that quite a bit.
While conservation efforts, the lagging economy and greater use of renewable energy are factors in the CO2 decline, the drop-off is due mainly to low-priced natural gas, the agency said.
Why not just put the money where you want it to go in the first place by subsidizing clean energy programs?
Because that's not where you want it to go. Especially after passing through several layers of bureaucracy.
The solution is distributed solar. Solar pays back in under 5 years now with a lifetime of 20+. The only problem with solar is that the energy companies (almost all privatized now) see solar as a threat, so they continue to push the "it just doesn't work" press releases. Despite the fact they are all lies, people still believe, so long as it lines up with their personal philosophies.
Grid tied solar on homes would solve the power issue. Buy the dumped panels from China for the initial installation, and ramp up domestic production for replacement parts (as 20+ year life is good, but still means you need to replace about 5% per year forever). Distributed solar will take care of almost all our problems. We may end up with the (good) problem of more peak generation than demand, in which case we'd need to invest in some sufficient storage (China uses hydro storage, and it's quite effective - yes, I've been to Tien Shi and seen the production facility). Enough of that stable enough, and we could decrease baseline production.
Learn to love Alaska
You could go nuclear and avoid so much of it's proliferation and disposal drawbacks by going with liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTR's). But then again, if you wanted to create a big government pie-in-the-sky "make work" project, you could pursue fusion. Oh yeah, they're already doing that.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
The power generation plants use purpose built gas turbines designed specifically for electrical generation with methane fuel. they're large, heavy, and designed for longer duty than aircraft engines.
Methane leakage is a significant source of greenhouse gases.
It's quite questionable as to whether the switch to natural gas is a significant benefit in terms of global warming for a variety of reasons.
http://energyinnovation.org/2012/05/natural-gas-methane-leakage-and-climate-change/
Fracking itself is an excellent example, none of the stuff fracking can get to was considered viable to extract not that long ago.
Fracking is a bad example. We've been able to horizontally fracture oil wells for the past 50 years. It hasn't been much utilized because it is expensive. It was only when crude oil starting hitting $90 a barrel did it start to get popular.
Same with fracking natural gas - it's an economic rather than technical decision. Most of the major 'breakthroughs' in hydrocarbon resource extraction haven't occurred because of improved technology, but instead (largely) due to price increases.
Yep, there is a lot of oil and natural gas around. Maybe not so much relatively inexpensive stuff around. 'Cost effective' is an arguable point. If energy prices increase too much, the economies tend to fall off (as noted in TFA). We'd best hope that renewables get more reasonable fairly soon.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!