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."

Comments

Re:natural gas doesn't make CO2?

[Trepidity]

It produces around 30-40% less CO2 than coal for the same power output. Coal is particularly bad, both in terms of CO2 production, and other kinds of pollution (though with currently mandated scrubbers it's not as bad a contributor to things like acid rain as it once was).

Re:natural gas doesn't make CO2?

[TurtleBay]

A big part of this is the advantage of modern natural gas power plants is the combined-cycle nature of their operation vs. the single cycle of coal plants. In a coal plant, burning coal heats water which turns to steam which drives a turbine that is connected to the generator. In a combined cycle gas plant, instead of just burning the gas for heat, they use the gas to power a turbine similar to one that you would find in a military jet engine. The turbine produces mechanical energy on its output shaft which drives a generator directly in addition to the hot output gas is also used to power a heat exchangers which boil water and makes more electricity in using the traditional method.

Kind of proves the opposite.

[SuperKendall]

I keep hearing from conservatives that we can't do anything about climate change or reducing CO2.

That is what you heard.

That's not what they said.

Conservatives have long claimed there is no need to spend extra money to reduce CO2. They said there would be no benefit in ham-stringing first world countries in many ways to reduce a gas that may not even be causing a problem.

And as it turns out, they were correct. If we had adopted Kyoto the U.S. would have a far worse economy than we have today, with many additional regulations imposed on businesses - when it turns out those additional regulations were never even needed.

Over time alternative energy WILL naturally overcome traditional sources just in cost benefit alone, there is no need to hurt the productivity of countries to make that happen.