It's not at all, that's a terrible emotional analogy that's 100% ridiculous.
But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking?
Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?
Having worked around fracking rigs and gotten covered in fracking fluid during blowouts... and having read the MSDSs for fracking fluid... I'm not convinced the lower emissions were worth the cost in groundwater purity. And boy, do West Europeans care about their groundwater purity.
It's clear that you care about the environment so I'm just going to say that, based on my firsthand experience as a roughneck who did fracking jobs, that it's probably the most greenwashed industry in the world and even if your opinion of it is based on direct reading of official hard numbers, those numbers are gamed at every handoff between field and office. Probably at every handoff between office and press release as well, though I was never in that loop.
> Not even that but every country and it's industries that have been transitioning from coal to nat. gas are fudging the numbers to pretend it's better?
It's quite clear the numbers are fudged for methane production at every level from the field to the PR office - I honestly didn't know that was a controversial statement. You don't get data added to a report on what you don't measure, to begin with.
I'm mostly responding to you since I had similar arguments about 20 or so years ago when the transition to natural gas (and off of nuclear btw, not just coal!) was being discussed while being massively subsidized. I felt it was a foolish decision then, and still do now.
Why? Society will not act unless there is an emergency. They will then focus on a single solitary solution. If you decide natural gas is going to be built while we build out our nuclear (or other) capacity, you'll find out that 30 years later you will have a whole lot of natural gas generation and be left with no nuclear industry whatsoever and very little capability to quickly restart it. Seems that prediction is playing out.
So now we get to burn all the cheap natural gas before we finally get into a big enough of an emergency to perhaps find something somewhat sustainable long-term. We'll see what short-term solutions present themselves in the meantime, unfortunately I think those short term political solutions may lie in a mountaintop in eastern Kentucky.
So to answer your overall question - yes, I can fully believe transitioning from coal to natural gas while we effectively ignored all other energy investments (at scale) was a stupid move in a long-term environmental lense. In 100 years I think it will be obvious that if fracking had not been invented it would have been better overall for the environment. Time will tell!
That's not the whole story. The Netherlands refrains from developing its natural gas fields to their full extent and yet the damage caused by the resulting earthquakes is considerable and widespread - very much like a nuke, just over a much longer timespan:
But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking?
Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?