Environmentalists Struggle with Natural Gas while Conservatives
Battle Clean Energy
Location: New York
Date: 2013-07-02
Environmentalists are facing a conundrum. Reducing
greenhouse gas levels is urgent, although the greenies are remiss to
accept natural gas as a viable vehicle, releasing 45 percent fewer
carbon emissions than coal. Despite the possibilities, its
imperfections remain a sore point among ecologists.
Eco-activists can be accused of taking the apocalyptic view while
partisan conservatives have inflated the failures associated
President Obama’s clean energy program. And while those critics
reject the notion that climate change is the result of human
endeavor, they do support the acceleration of this country’s most
abundant natural resource: unconventional shale gas, which has also
helped the United States reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 4
percent in recent years.
“Natural gas is an important transition to a carbon free economy
provided we don’t go too many decades,” says Tom Wigley, climate
scientists with University
Corporation for Atmospheric Research, who participated in a
conference sponsored by theBreakthrough
Institute. “After 30 or 40 years, it won’t matter what we do.”
Here in this country, coal’s share of the electricity market has
fallen from 50 percent in 2005 to 36 percent in 2012. Overseas, and
especially in developing nations, coal remains the dominant fuel.
According to the International
Energy Agency in Paris, coal use will exceed that of oil by
2017. Consider: In 2011, China added 55,000 megawatts of
coal-generated power.
At the same time, the estimates of recoverable
natural gas in the United States have grown from 200 trillion
cubic feet in 2005 to 350 trillion cubic feet in 2012. Meanwhile,
the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that technically
recoverable shale
gas resources outside this country are 7,300 trillion cubic
feet. That’s 10 percent higher than the study done in 2011.
“The world is awash in natural gas,” says Robert Bryce, a scholar at
the Manhattan
Institute and the author of Power Hungry. “The U.S. is leading
the world. We have the rigs and the pipes. We own the minerals
beneath our feet. Other nations are a decade or two behind.”
Green Politics
Bryce, who also addressed the Breakthrough Institute’s conference
outside of San Francisco last week, goes on to say that if natural
gas is used to fuel vehicles, it could reduce global carbon dioxide
levels by 20 percent. The issue here, though, is that the
infrastructure is limited. That is, the lack of pipelines means that
the gas must be flared as opposed to captured and transported. He
says that Russia is flaring excessive amounts of natural gas, or
enough to keep France fat and happy.
To be sure, the extraction of natural gas is not without fault.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been blamed for polluting
ground water supplies and for being too water-intensive -- a
resource that is scarce and which must be disposed. Meantime,
environmentalists are also worried about the incidental releases of
methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than
carbon dioxide.
Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra
Club, spoke at the Breakthrough conference and said that his
group formed an alliance with the natural gas industry because the
two had a common goal -- to prevent the building of 150 coal plants
over a decade. But he said that the industry is actively trying to
avert public scrutiny by failing to disclose the chemicals it uses
to frack, or to ply loose the shale gas from the rocks where it is
embedded deep underground.
Meantime, Pope disagrees with developers and says that the federal
government has a role in the oversight of hydraulic fracturing.
That’s because the process affects drinking water supplies and air
emissions, which fall under the domain of the Environmental
Protection Agency. He is, furthermore, concerned that the exporting
of natural gas in the form of LNG would increase ecological damage
and harm air quality while driving up prices for consumers.
“Natural gas can be part of a climate solution,” says Pope. “It is
not so risky that it should be demonized. But it is not so
intrinsically clean” that it should be solely relied upon to solve
the problem of global warming.
A central theme to emerge from the Breakthrough Institute’s annual
dialogue is the call to reform and renovate green politics -- to get
its advocates to embrace the advancement of new tools that can
reduce pollution levels tied to power plants. To that end, such
thinking would apply not just to drilling technologies but also to
the production of renewable fuels, which conservatives must likewise
accept.
Infighting creates delays that will defeat progress. Focusing on and
then sharing improvements in technology, by contrast, will polish
power production and leave future generations with cleaner air and
water.
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