I’ve had a busy end of the summer with a great vacation out West, plus getting squared away back home, getting ready for my NYU teaching assignment and performing various tasks relative to the forthcoming book. I’ve been meaning to write about natural gas, having saved some interesting items to highlight and discuss from earlier in the summer. I’ll do that soon, particularly as I have an engagement in a couple of weeks to speak about fracking and natural gas on a panel sponsored by the UN Association.
In the meantime, I want to simply revisit a post I did at my FPA blog back in March: To Frack or Not to Frack? The main points of the argument are simply:
- we know how to engineer fracking to make it virtually environmentally risk free,
- yes, of course, it is critical to apply strong, vigilant regulatory oversight – which is entirely within our means to do,
- there are significant environmental advantages to using natural gas e.g. diminished use of coal in power production, the ability to drive our still-nascent cogeneration capacities much further, and the significant potential to radically reduce oil use in transportation, and
- we need to keep our sights firmly set on the now-visible horizon of a fully decarbonized, 100% renewable energy future.
There are also enormous energy security advantages to be had, not only for the US but for the Europeans who, believe me, have no wish to rely on Russian natural gas imports.
That’s it in a nutshell. But read my older post with a full fleshing out of these points.
