I wrote the other day about some of the manifest benefits of natural gas in our economies. There are also, without question, many negatives. Let me count the ways here. I also, however, want to note that there are ways to capitalize on gas in our transition to fully decarbonized energy economies. I’ll do that in a third post. Continue reading
Yes – and it was about bloody time – the Senate finally held up at least a small part of its bargain with the American people: to protect the public health and the environment.
First, a little context: What you see on the left is the flaring of natural gas from oil rigs, in this case in Iraq. It is a problem all over the world though. Flaring is but one part of the problem of how “fugitive” natural gas greatly exacerbates the climate crisis. There is an awful lot of anthropogenically produced methane in the world that escapes into the atmosphere every year: about 7.13 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2013 according to the excellent Climate Access Indicators Tool (CAIT) of the World Resources Institute. That was about 15% of the total of all the greenhouse gases produced that year, including those from land use changes like deforestation. Continue reading