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The Shale Boom Won't Stop Climate Change; It Could Make It Worse
Lasrick writes Energy expert H-Holger Rogner walks through the realities of the shale-gas boom, the 'game-changer' that has brought about a drop in energy prices and greatly reduced carbon emissions. But despite the positive impact on carbon emissions, Rogner points out that the cheap gas brought about by fracking shale may already be affecting investments into renewable energy, nuclear energy, and energy efficiency by offering more attractive investment opportunities: 'At today's prices of $4 to $5 per million British thermal units, gas-fired electricity holds a definite competitive advantage over new nuclear construction and unsubsidized renewables.' But natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide. 'A much higher share of natural gas in the energy mix would eventually raise emissions again, especially if gas not only displaces coal but also non-fossil energy sources. Moreover, methane, the chief component of natural gas, is itself a heat-trapping greenhouse gas with 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent, that could negate any climate benefits of switching from coal and oil to gas.'
You mean the solution to pollution is no longer dilution?
It sure seems to be working for the oil industry. They are diluting the per barrel price of oil in order to stem the transitional tide of investment in alternatives. Shale oil and gas at lower prices will perpetuate GHG emissions and restore growth in general consumption warding off deflation and generating another boom cycle as long as food production keeps up with population growth.
Wall Street's bakers were given a pass on their global fraud, and the threat of reregulation has been nulled out in Washington Debit-Creditland, while Peru is generating nothing but hot air.
Hang on to your shorts, the weather makers are preparing to burn women, children and men, indiscriminately.
The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to stop burning carbon as soon as possible.
Agreed. TFS has got to be one of the most "duh"-provoking things I've seen posted here (and that's saying something). What kind of idiot thought we'd reduce climate change (which most scientists agree has something to do with carbon released from fossil fuel production) by switching to another fossil fuel that still emits carbon when burned? Unless we stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, we'll still be dumping carbon into the atmosphere. We need an article to tell us this? What we need are other reasonable ways to harness and use energy and/or radically cut energy consumption until we only need renewables; until we have that, gas isn't solving our problem of using coal and oil: it's merely postponing our usage of that coal and oil.
The funny thing about Sandy, is that the Capitol Weather Gang correctly predicted it about a week in advance, based on a very similar storm in 1878. We didn't quite as many SUVs nor coal plants back then.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
What really killed nuclear power wasn't "The China Syndrome" or Greenpeace - it was that the price of fossil fuels didn't continue to increase as expected. That's unfortunate, as while I like inexpensive energy I also believe that we should make ALL of our electricity with nukes (or hydro) and save fossil fuels for applications where nothing else will do (e.g. aircraft). And here's a litmus test: if you're serious about global warming, you've pretty much got to be pro-nuke. No other technology - not solar, not wind, not whatever green scheme you dream up - can produce electricity on a large scale. Wanna save the planet? Push for nukes and plug-in electric cars.
Yep that's why these guys aren't making any money at $50/bbl either right? Because it costs them so much money to pull it out of the ground. Interestingly enough, heavy crude pulling here in Canada from the oil sands is profitable down to $20/bbl, it's hovering at about $40/bbl right now. Light and medium is profitable down to $30/bbl in some cases, and newer techniques are driving the extraction cost even lower. And in the case of coal, it can be expensive...or cheap. Depending on the method that you're using to pull it out of the ground, here in Canada we mostly do strip mining for it. It's the easiest way, and companies by law have to restore the environment and have fund setup for it.
Om, nomnomnom...
The Salon article is wrong although the fault may be that of the interviewee. Bob Reiss asked Hansen what the view from his office would look like if his worst-case scenario from the paper he'd published not long before the interview were to come to pass.
That would have been the Scenario A from the 1988 "Global Climate Change as Forecast by GISS 3D Model" - http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs...
That scenario as described in the paper, assumes a CO2 doubling by 2030 but states that Scenario B's assumption of said doubling by 2060 is more likely.
Reiss details the conversation in a couple of his books but only named 2001's The Coming Storm when he corrected what he'd told to Salon, who never updated the online article.
Either way, there's still quite some time before Hansen's prediction can be definitively shown to have been wrong
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The problem is not carbon, nor climate, nor coal, nor natural gas, nor fracking
The problem is human
I have read the (almost the) same discussions since the late 1980's, first on fidonet, then The Well, then AOL, then the newsgroups, then net forums all over --- same old arguments repeated ad nauseum, while everybody and their old grandma keep depending on fossil fuel to survive
From driving cars (even if you do not have a car, you still take buses/trains, don't you?) to electricity to cooking to heating up the house during winter, we are burning fossil fuel
Heck, even the act of posting this message on /. fossil fuels have been burned to generate electricity to power my computer and all the servers that keep the Net alive
On one side there are people who pooh pooh the idea that the world is going down the drain because of our unsatiated appetite for more fossil fuel
On the other side people running scared like headless chicken bawking, but still, these people oppose Nuclear. Germany is a case in point
The country of Germany gobbled up so much electricity and yet they have closed down all their nuclear power plant. They do so because of political correctness doctrine that nuclear is bad, but by closing down their nuke plants, they burn fossil fuel, more of it
I do not see any light at the end of the tunnel, I simply don't
We humans are turning this planet into a hellhole, and the only thing we can do is talk, and then, talk some more
The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware of that, and unlike you I know the science behind it. The problem is the next sentence of my post that you conveniently left out of your quote -- which is, if we don't actually reduce energy demand, we'll eventually run out of natural gas and have to burn the coal/oil anyway. So we just end up in the same place, just a few decades later.
Also note my primary objection is to the beginning of TFS which implies we could STOP climate change by this substitution, which is in fact idiocy if anyone thought it true.