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

It just moved

[Anonymous Coward]

About 1/3 of carbon emissions comes from manufacturing, and most manufacturing is now done in asia.

Re:not exactly a new insight

[Trepidity]

The market doesn't really care about lowering pollution, though, since pollution is an unpriced negative externality. Sometimes it'll favor more-polluting energy sources, and other times less-polluting energy sources, due to completely unrelated factors. So if you're waiting for the market to lower pollution without pollution actually being priced, you're just hoping for luck. Sometimes it does come along; the current cheapness of natural gas vis-a-vis oil is one of those instances. Other times it doesn't; the cheapness of coal is one of the other kinds of instances.

Re:OR

[evilcoop]

Except that the reason it is cheap is because of shale gas. Of which there is at least a 100 year supply. It is just not going to run out for decades, even with massive increases in usage.

Re:The Long Game

[ColdWetDog]

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.