
America's falling carbon-dioxide emissions: Some fracking good news - ph0rque
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/05/americas-falling-carbon-dioxide-emissions
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po
I totally understand the fears behind fracking as well as nuclear power (I'm
living in Japan and my family lives in upstate NY) but often the progressive
approach to energy policy has been to jump from the pan into the fire.
Absolutely the worst offender is the coal industry (and the so-called 'clean
coal' movement is just not feasible) and it has to go to zero. If gas and
nuclear have to grow to fill the vacuum, then so be it.

The anti-nuclear movement here in Japan is flawed in a similar way. It
certainly would be nice not to have nuclear plants but they're replacing them
with coal imports. They should be talking about regulating and replacing the
nuclear operators, and put replacing the nuclear power itself on the long-term
track.

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nextstep
It's sad that the trade off is between dirty coal and natural gas. Energy
policy (and the corrupt subsidies) are so short-sighted. In 5-10 years, Europe
will have moved a small but significant chunk of their powergrids to renewable
energy sources. The best the US can hope for is a decrease in coal power as it
is replaced by fracked natural gas. Hardly any forecasts expect an increase in
the adoption rates for renewables.

However, Europe and whomever invests in renewable technologies will likely
benefit most in the long term.

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pyre
The US is a large place. Having just driven cross-country, I can say that
there are a _lot_ of wind farms along the I-84 + I-80 route. The issue though
is that those wind farms probably still only represent a small portion of the
total power usage of the country.

~~~
po
Well, in the linked article you can see a graph showing the contribution from
renewables. You can see it's even growing a bit. It's just nowhere near ready
to replace coal just yet.

We absolutely should be pushing them and they represent our long-term solution
but the 5-10 year plan should be shutting down coal. That means you need an
alternative ready to go now.

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pyre
The real question (which I haven't researched) is if (specifically) wind power
is sustainable without government 'alternative energy' subsidies.

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jacobolus
It’s annoying that their graphic shows percent share of various electricity
sources, rather than total quantity, and then makes statements like “The
importance of coal in America’s energy mix has indeed tumbled since 1997”. The
unstated implication of the words + graphic is that we’re using less coal than
we used to be. But if you look at their data source, first it doesn’t include
1997 at all, but more importantly, in 2008 we generated more electricity from
coal than in 1998, and the average electricity generation from coal in the
last 5 years is higher than the amount generated in either of the first couple
years. But mostly, what does it mean for “the importance in the energy mix” to
“tumble”? If we stopped using coal power, the price of energy would spike up
dramatically; coal is pretty much essential to our current “energy mix”.

The story I see in the data is that our energy use grows on average about 1%
per year, with a bit of a dip in 2009, presumably due to the recession. The
amount of electricity from natural gas has almost doubled and continues to
rise, the amount from hydroelectric dams has been slowly creeping downward,
and the amount from other renewable sources has been increasing steadily but
is still a small fraction of our total “energy mix”.

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bluedanieru
Of course our energy use is growing. Our energy use will always increase, I
hope. This article is about greenhouse gas emissions, and the chart is there
to provide some explanation, i.e. where we're getting our energy _from_.

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ch0wn
It's not unthinkable that the total energy consumption will shrink. Take
Germany for an example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany>

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DennisP
Great for CO2 emissions, not so great for climate change. Several recent
studies have found that methane emissions from natural gas extraction and
operations make natural gas as bad for the climate as coal, at least over the
next few decades. Methane drops out of the atmosphere much faster than CO2,
but is also a much stronger greenhouse gas.

~~~
jackfoxy
Can you site these studies, please. And do any of these studies take into
account the offsetting massive loss of wetlands world-wide (which now no
longer release methane into the atmosphere) over the last couple centuries
from destruction of swamps. (e.g. when Saddam Hussein drained the
Tigris–Euphrates marshlands
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris%E2%80%93Euphrates_river_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris%E2%80%93Euphrates_river_system))

~~~
DennisP
Sure. Here's a recent one, for example (pdf hosted at motherjones but it's
from the journal Climatic Change).
[http://www.motherjones.com/files/04-11shale_gas_footprint_fu...](http://www.motherjones.com/files/04-11shale_gas_footprint_fulltextpdf.pdf)

And here's a short article in Time that mentions several studies:
[http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2111562,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2111562,00.html)

The industry has disputed the data of some studies but also strongly resists
efforts to shore up the data by better measuring methane leakage.

The direct greenhouse effects of methane vs. CO2 are not seriously in dispute,
being a matter of basic physics. So I don't see how the level of methane
emissions 200 years ago is relevant to the question of whether coal or gas is
causing a greater greenhouse effect right now, per unit energy.

I'll mention though that while we may have less swampland, we've also got new
methane releases from melting permafrost and clathrates.

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easp
Also, the loss of wetlands is a huge environmental negative in other ways. The
oceans are in serious trouble, and that trouble often starts at the margins
between land and water.

Also, cheap natural gas is helping fuel recovery of tar sands, which brings
its own raft of problems.

