Natural gas can’t be a “bridge fuel” unless we crack down on methane leaks

From an Article by Tim McDonnell, Mother Jones, September 18, 2014

Few figures in the climate change debate are as polarizing as former Vice President Al Gore. His fans and his enemies are equally rabid, and his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” is still probably the most-referenced document on climate change in history. In the last few years, Gore’s global warming work has mostly been channeled into a nonprofit he oversees called the Climate Reality Project, which organizes rallies and educational events.

This past week, that group held its annual “24 Hours of Reality” marathon of live-streamed videos and appearances by Gore and other celebrities to raise funds for climate action. The event took place in New York City, which geared up for a series of meetings and protests in advance of the biggest climate summit of the last five years, which took place at the United Nations.

Gore took a break from the broadcast to chat with Climate Desk’s “Inquiring Minds” podcast, offering his views on everything from President Obama’s climate polices and the role of the tea party in US politics to his hopes for a strong international climate treaty.

Gore said that Obama hasn’t yet gone far enough in his efforts against climate change, but that he nonetheless admires “what the president has done.” “In his first term I expressed some considerable concern about what I thought he was failing to do,” Gore said, adding that after the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, “there was not the kind of energy and activity that I felt was appropriate.” But Gore credited Obama for shifting course dramatically in his second term, and for going around the “logjam” in Congress by instructing the EPA to issue “historic regulations” on carbon emissions from power plants.

Gore did criticize some of Obama’s policies, including the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which Gore described as the “prevailing code for ‘let’s keep burning fossil fuels.’” “But it’s not fair to just take those things out of context without looking at the totality of his policies,” he added. “And the totality of what he’s doing now in his second term is really historic.”

Gore expressed skepticism about the fracking boom. He said he opposed the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel—something the Obama administration has supported—”until and unless they demonstrate the ability to stop the methane leaks at every stage of the process, particularly during fracking.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that some scientists argue can negate the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.)

And he added that the increasing cost-effectiveness of solar and wind power was already posing a “threat to the viability of natural gas as a source of energy in the marketplace.” You can hear Al Gore’s comments in full on this week’s episode of our “Inquiring Minds” podcast, and see the highlights of his comments in our exclusive video.
 

Going where?

Fossil Fuels and Troubled Waters!

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

ISSUES: We need fossil fuel for the foreseeable future. Natural gas is a bridge fuel. We can adapt to global warming. Natural gas burns cleaner than other fuels. No other energy source is apparent at the present time. All of these statements come from the fossil fuel industry, pumped out over and over through the sympathetic media. Consider the source.

Q1. We need fossil fuels for the foreseeable future? In part it depends on whether you look further than the next few years. Taking a long view, it isn’t hard to see what is going to happen to the surface of the earth if we continue with them. The carbon dioxide being dumped into the air is affecting our weather now. If you look at the places where extraction is going on you find the earth’s surface is being altered at an alarming rate in ways that negate its use for biological purposes.

Canada’s tar sands not only destroy the tar sands area, but also the areas where gas is removed to heat the sands to get the oil out of it, and the pipeline planned to carry it from the center of the continent to the sea, where it can be shipped across the sea to release the carbon dioxide. Think about it: four different sources of pollution from the one resource.

There was an announcement of sixteen different Marcellus wells permitted in Doddridge County WV on just one day recently. If you “fly” over the surface between US Route 19 in Harrison County and WV Route 28 in Doddridge using the Google Earth application, you will see a “pox” developing on the landscape. These are well locations with their pits and long straight lines of bare ground for the pipelines.

In a few months this “pox” so easily seen now will be intensified when the US Department of Agriculture flies this year’s aerial photography survey. This forms the ground picture for Google Earth and drilling for the year between summer 2012 and summer 2013 will appear. This “pox” on the surface will go on intensifying for a decade or more, if no change occurs. All the while carbon dioxide is pouring out into the atmosphere.

Then the structures will be abandoned, if the past is any guide to the future. Pollution on the ground will go on for a century, like the coal industry pollution, to be cleaned up later at public expense, if at all. Clean water, desirable living space, hunting and fishing, outdoor recreation, all be damned.

Q2. Natural gas is a bridge fuel?  No other source is ever mentioned. Occasionally some vague reference to “renewables,” but frequently in the next paragraph a claim that they aren’t competitive and never will be. No mention of truly advanced technology such as fusion power waiting to get out of the box. Nuclear fusion could be low-polluting. All investments go into fossil fuel, tried and true with almost no investment to really forward looking research.

Q3. We can adapt to global warming? Tell that to New Orleans, to New Jersey, to the Eskimo. Coastal areas will be most affected. And recall that in the Arctic region methane bubbles out of the long frozen ground each summer, methane which is 20 to 100 times as damaging in warming the earth as carbon dioxide. Watch the decline of Arctic ice here.

Interested in drought? Check here or here. In any case get your facts from where measurements are made, not from fossil fuel minions.

O4. No other energy source is apparent at the present time? Bosh! Several countries are much further along than the United States. Portugal now gets 40 percent of its electricity from renewable power. Germany got 20.7 percent of its electricity from renewable energy in 2011. The reasons are here.

Even Fox Network acknowledges Germany’s renewable success, although Rupert Murdoch disparages renewables while investing in natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean. For a laugh, look here.

One reason fossil fuels are so profitable and dominant in the market is subsidized. According to The International Monetary Fund, subsidies are a principal cause of global warming.

They say the annual $1.9 trillion (nine zeros), world wide subsidy, is a principal cause of advantage to fossil fuels, a boost to greenhouse emissions (both carbon dioxide and methane as well as some minor green house gases), and helps limit investment in renewable energy. It also encourages over consumption. IMF figures world removal of subsidies would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 4.5 billion long tons annually, and sulfur dioxide by 13 million long tons.

The U. S. grants $502 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel, China $279 billion and Russia 116 billion. For the sake of comparison, the United States Gross Domestic product was $15.8 trillion in 2012, so the U. S. energy subsidy to fossil fuels is a little over 3% of the GDP.

Q5. Will there be life after oil and gas and coal? It is too early to tell. The only for sure part is that, if there is, it will be very different from what we have seen so far on this earth. Technology will have to change from what we have now, and perhaps our social organization, too.