Study Finds Methane Leaks Negate Benefits of Natural Gas-Powered Vehicles

Lasrick writes "Coral Davenport at the NY Times reports on a study to be published on Friday: '...a surprising new report...concludes that switching buses and trucks from traditional diesel fuel to natural gas could actually harm the planet's climate.' The report apparently documents that the leaks of methane that occur when drilling for natural gas more than make up for the climate change benefits of using natural gas as a transportation fuel. The report will be published Friday in the journal Science."

Comments

Re:Are we doomed?

[GameboyRMH]

There are 3 different fields of problems that could doom our civilization: Energy, Economic, Population Growth.

The energy problems are actually the smallest. I don't want to take a "don't worry, the future will solve it" attitude because that's incredibly irresponsible, but I think we're on a path to solving global warming by accident. Solar cells are getting cheaper and more efficient, electric cars are looking better every day, fossil fuels are getting more expensive and it's getting harder to socialize the losses involved in their use. We're already in for some nasty effects of global warming, nothing we can do about that without a time machine, but in the long term I think this is a problem that will take care of itself if we stay on the right path. That's the path the denialist crowd is trying to steer us off of. I think we've already passed peak per-capita energy use, for any time period in which we'll have to worry about how much energy people are using. We were wasting it badly in the past decades and are still wasting it pretty hard today. People in the future will be amazed at how much energy we consumed through waste.

Economic and population growth are much bigger problems. We have to do something very different economically. All we can do by making alterations to capitalism is buy ourselves some time with it. I have no idea how anyone could see it as "elegant" or "self-regulating." It's a dumb chaotic half-baked "system" full of nasty positive feedback loops and minefielded with unnecessary catastrophic failure conditions. It appeared to work "OK" for a couple of centuries (largely because our standards were so low) as long as we kept furiously fiddling with the dials, but automation and wealth concentration are utterly breaking it. And if you look at the big picture, it's always been horrendously inefficient and has done a poor job of serving humanity. I think the best solution would be to use mincome to make a smooth transition to a society where automated production provides resources to everyone.

That ties into the population problem. The good news is that educated people do a decent job of limiting how many kids they have. The bad news is that the path to making everyone highly educated will cause a population explosion. So one way out is to try to make everyone highly educated before the population level starts causing major problems, but it's scary - it's like your DeLorean is headed for a wall at 80mph, you don't think you can stop in time, so you hit the gas to try to reach 88mph and get to where the wall doesn't exist instead. Scary and potentially fatal, but maybe the best way out.