Tech | January 25, 2012 | 6 comments

Natural gas is a bridge to nowhere-absent a price on global warming pollution

source: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/24/407765/natural-gas-is-a-bridge-to-nowhere-price-for...

Image
JanforGore
President of American Gas Association, 1981: “In fact, gas energy — currently America’s largest domestically produced fuel — could prove to be the keystone to solving the nation’s energy crisis by serving as the ‘bridge fuel’ to the next century’s renewable energy technologies.”

VP of AGA, 1988, “refers to natural gas as a bridge fuel — the least harmful alternative while the world looks for other, longer-lasting solutions to the ‘greenhouse’ effect,” the Washington Post reported.

Chair of AGA, 2008: “Natural gas will be the bridge fuel to the future…. The electric industry is expected to turn to natural gas as a bridge until clean coal and nuclear generation are available.”

It’s the longest bridge in history! Heck, the Golden Gate Bridge only took 4 years to build!

The President will be touting natural gas in his State of the Union address tonight, according to sources. Nothing wrong with touting gas — if you also tout a rising carbon price, which the president once did but no longer does.

Way back in June 2009, I pointed out the value of gas in the context of a climate bill with a rising CO2 price — see “Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet.” But the key point of that post was that you could put gas in existing, underutilized plants to replace existing coal power cheaply to meet the key 2020 target Obama.

Building lots of new gas plants doesn’t make much sense since we need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades if we’re to have any chance to avoid catastrophic global warming. We don’t want new gas plants to displace new renewables, like solar and wind, which are going to be the some of the biggest, sustainable job creating industries of the century.

Late last year, some of the leading (center-right) economists in the country — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — concluded in a top economic journal that the total damages from natural gas generation exceed its value-added at a low-ball carbon price of $27 per ton! At a price of $65 a ton of carbon, the total damages from natural gas are more than double its value-added!

For the record, stabilizing at 550 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which would likely still be catastrophic for humanity, would require a price of $330 a metric ton of carbon in 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted back in 2008.

The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was in fact, first demonstrated by the IEA in its big June 2011 report on gas — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. That study — which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 — made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels.

Then came a remarkable new study by Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) that concluded:

In summary, our results show that the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades.


More at the link
  1. groups:
    News and Politics,   Tech,   Green,   Earth and Science,   4 more
  2. tags:
    Environment,  Climate Change,  Global Warming,  Water,  6 more
  3.     
    |

6 comments // Natural gas is a bridge to nowhere-absent a price on global warming pollution

  • coolplanet
    • 0
      coolplanet  

    • They tell us "It's the economy, stupid!"
      I say "It's stupidity, stupid!"
      Here we have the world's leading climate scientists warning that if we develop tar sands, shale oil and gas fracking it is "Game over for the climate."
      What we get from our politicians, even our president, is more "drill baby drill."
      Something has to change, and SOON, or we will be spending trillions to deal with the fossil fuel-driven weather catastrophies that are getting far worse every year.

    • 4 months ago
  • JanforGore
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • JanforGore:

      Jan, this goes much farther than you know. Switching from volatile gasoline to highly-volatile methane/natural gas/propane whatever engines ONLY BUNS UP MORE OXYGEN.

      It is not just "stupid" it is a vicious assault against WORLDWIDE HUMAN HEALTH for which Americans should be whipped unconscious on a wrestling mat til they die.

      Let me explain a "revelation" that came to me last week. If oxygen content in the atmosphere wasn't being lowered by so much extra CO2 (carbon dioxide displacement in the human bloodstream) our Immune Systems would be quite capable of fighting off bacteria, viruses, disease organisms such as parasites, AND CANCER.

      Switching to more volatile (oxygen burning) fuels is taking mankind further down the road away from health, added of course into the GMO maneuver.

      We are being exterminate Jan. Exterminated.

      I'm going to repeat that word some more. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Exterminated. Until it sinks in to the hardest hardhead there is on this Current website.

      Exterminated with rat poison + exterminated by a low blood oxygen content til we fall down and die in the streets of America, the streets of Sao Paulo Brazil. The streets of Paris France. This is a worldwide extermination maneuver as much a maneuver as George Patton rolling out a countryside full of WWII Sherman tanks.

      I perceive this to be their last and greatest move but, that's because I am the eternal optimist. My optimism must give way to their final next assault which will likely be the unleashing of deadly toxins upon us and all our future & present babies.

      The reason they can do this is because they have set up "seed repositories" which very likely truly are "SEED REPOSITORIES", by which I mean the "seeds" of all the animal kingdom => their eggs from their female species and sperm from their males, including the best sperm & eggs they could find for a representative sample of Mankind.

      They're preparing to restart the engine Jan, and you should cry. I'm sorry Jan, but I see the worst evil now than I have ever seen. No voters ballot can turn this slaughter blade away from humanity's neck.

    • 4 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • Gravity_Man:

      And that's only half of the coin Jan. All these bacteria, viruses and other airborne disease organisms, many of them are "ANAEROBIC, which means they cannot live in the presence of oxygen.

      Okay, so with 350-400 PPM of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere displacing the oxygen that kills those organisms, plus a 3rd horror level that the extra CO2 is making them STRONGER, which of course snowballs them into becoming the feared "SUPER GERMS" RESISTANT TO ALL OUR ANTIBIOTICS.

      Jan, we have set up the ideal situation for a tiny germ to be added into the air that will quickly assume a worldwide killer plague concentration, aided to do so by the low O2 of the world's air layer. Such a germ could be dropped into the air, or a mud puddle whatever, and in 2 days to perhaps a week have eliminated 90% of the world's population SNAP FINGER FAST.

      Now let me tell you "THE REST OF THE STORY" that most people don't know. Most of these biological agents are killed by direct sunlight, So let's say they released it during a week where the weather forecast was for Cloudy days. OK, so they would hit with the speed of lightning, travel around the planet taking out billions and their children and animals of course, and then the sun would come out and kill off the germ they had released only days before.

      INSTANT PRISTINE PLANET. INSTANT PRISTINE GERM-FREE PLANET.

    • 4 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • JanforGore
    • +1
      JanforGore  

    • The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was in fact, first demonstrated by the IEA in its big June 2011 report on gas — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. That study — which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 — made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels."
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      We need to START getting off ALL fossil fuels. What will you tell your grandchildren was the reason why we didn't?

    • 4 months ago
more from Tech:
from the community

top videos