It's sad that a war can driving massive change but not the insight that we are destroying the stable climate as we know it.
Are we still going to meet those energy targets if the weather escalates and destroys more and more infrastructure and harvests?
reverse may also be true
It's like saying France could easily end the war in Ukraine today, they just choose not to nuke Moscow.
But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking?
Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?
Shale oil deposits are usually found in harsh landscapes where not many people live.
Fracking fluid is just 90% water, 9.5% is sand, 0.5% additives. Those additives are normal cleaning products like salts, antifreeze.
Yeah you don't want to drink them but in small quantities they are fine to be in the middle of nowhere.
You'd rather have more global emissions than some small amount of pool cleaner in a remote desolate landscape?
Would you rather we burn our trash vs putting it in a landfill too? Because that's the same line of thinking.
Not even that but every country and it's industries that have been transitioning from coal to nat. gas are fudging the numbers to pretend it's better?
And you know that because you were a roughneck "who did fracking jobs", therefore you can see through these numbers.
That's quite a story, but I'll go with the breakdown of energy production by source, and the tracked emissions of energy production trends.
It's quite clear the numbers are fudged for methane production at every level from the field to the PR office - I honestly didn't know that was a controversial statement. You don't get data added to a report on what you don't measure, to begin with.
I'm mostly responding to you since I had similar arguments about 20 or so years ago when the transition to natural gas (and off of nuclear btw, not just coal!) was being discussed while being massively subsidized. I felt it was a foolish decision then, and still do now.
Why? Society will not act unless there is an emergency. They will then focus on a single solitary solution. If you decide natural gas is going to be built while we build out our nuclear (or other) capacity, you'll find out that 30 years later you will have a whole lot of natural gas generation and be left with no nuclear industry whatsoever and very little capability to quickly restart it. Seems that prediction is playing out.
So now we get to burn all the cheap natural gas before we finally get into a big enough of an emergency to perhaps find something somewhat sustainable long-term. We'll see what short-term solutions present themselves in the meantime, unfortunately I think those short term political solutions may lie in a mountaintop in eastern Kentucky.
So to answer your overall question - yes, I can fully believe transitioning from coal to natural gas while we effectively ignored all other energy investments (at scale) was a stupid move in a long-term environmental lense. In 100 years I think it will be obvious that if fracking had not been invented it would have been better overall for the environment. Time will tell!
I also am a natural pessimist :)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61901033
Russia on the other hand is largely uninhabited and its gas deposits don't require fracking - they only started testing the technology this year.
Those measures take years to decades to materialise to a significant degree. Still, all those measures are currently being implemented, and rightfully so.
In comparison, developing a new fracking site from a mere technical point of view takes less than a year.
That's not to say we should do one or the other or prefer fracking over renewables. However, when the alternatives are to either continue to be at the mercy of a potentially hostile power or to use less environmentally friendly energy sources (such as coal or lignite) or to accept regular power outages as a consequence, simultaneously exploring all possible better avenues (including nuclear energy, which as mentioned is still readily available right now) is pretty much a no-brainer.
So Germany can just as well continue to dig up and burn lignite instead of starting fracking.
2. It's very small amounts and it can be captured (and is in some instances)
3. The US reduced emissions while growing energy output thanks to nat. gas displacing coal.
We don't have to take your word for it, we can see that nat. gas energy production is cleaner than coal, because we have actual data from our transition off of coal to nat. gas.
The methane talking point is just that. It's not an actual issue, and you can see it's not from overall numbers.
If you truly cared about emissions you'd want the current best solution that drives it down. That would mean displacing coal at all cost. The current best way to do that is nat. gas and fracking.
Nuclear isn't built up as a baseline, renewables aren't ready for peak loads, and outsourcing it to someone else only shuffles it around. So... natural gas it is...
Ditching a fossil fuel to another fossil fuel is just perpetuating the problem, it's not solving anything. It's like going from a meth addiction to a cocaine addition, sure cocaine isn't as bad, you'll still be absolutely fucked up in a decade though
First off, I'd say total emissions by electricity generation is a great single metric to look at.
Second, those studies you didn't even reference were most likely FUD. I've worked on companies who organized those through call centers to spread the misinformation about fracking.
But instead of coming up with useless analogies about cocaine and falling back on studies you didn't even reference, please respond to each of my points instead of talking past me.
Maybe start with the fact that there are no replacements ready for coal other than nat. gas.
I'm all for building up nuclear energy and even battery banks. But currently nothing is available other than nat. gas to take the load that coal has produced.
Soo... the best way to reduce emissions is to use nat. gas until a solution is built up and ready. (cough, nuclear, cough)
Renewables will most likely never be able to handle the peak load, you need a baseline source, that's either fossil fuels or nuclear energy thanks to their densities.
---- edit ----
@lm28469: You're still not addressing any of my points. Dropping a study and calling it a day is not a conversation. At least pick out a point to defend from it...
But here's the cool thing. We don't need to read through your biased studies!
We know nat. gas is cleaner than coal and we can see it from reduction of emissions as we transition off of coal to nat. gas.
If you want to displace nat. gas as well, support nuclear as the new baseline standard! Or come up with better battery tech!
Until then, it's not ready and we need energy so we don't die... so nat. gas it is. Or coal worst case.
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-links-fracki...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27012022/fracking-air-pol...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4016083/
Studies you don't like are fake right ?
> I've worked on companies who organized those through call centers to spread the misinformation about fracking.
Is that supposed to make you sound more truth-worthy ?
They're in top 30 by energy production in the world, around 50% of the energy produced being nuclear. And there untapped gas reserves as well. Coal has been disrupted since Russia invaded the east in 2014
If I'm not mistaken, nuclear capacity was to be expanded considerably in 2022 - 2023, to sell more energy to EU (specifically Poland)
Compare a map of Ukraine’s gas deposits [1] with one of Russian-occupied territory [2].
> oil and gas, both items that Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of
Ukraine has enough to rival, if not dethrone, Moscow [3]. It is accurate to say the Kremlin is burying Russians in large part to protect its energy profits.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-gas-potential-of-ind...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/War_Mapper/status/158542369079528...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_Ukraine#Prove...
Meanwhile climate change deniers are sitting on their couches pulling things out of their asses, cherry picking data from publications they didn't write, removing all context to support their argument. Posting content on Youtube, Twitter, TikTok and Substack is all these people do, either for subscribers or for conservative think tanks financed by the fossil fuel industry.
Complicated systems tend to show only subtle signs before they rapidly collapse. AI is a new approach that might actually help us asses the risks better.
Climate change is a mine field. Telling people that we are going to be okay, while not doing anything to manage the risk is a lie. Rapid, extreme changes are coming, and they are going to test our civilization's ability to survive. Many parts of the planet will be inhabitable. And that's in a few decades, not even centuries.
Unfortunately this is out reality, like it or not. We don't get another one, so it's important what we are doing something about it. But we don't because of people like you living comfortable lies, not willing to look up.
I don't think it's going to be a few decades. I think as you said the models are too conservatives. We are already seeing things that they didn't predict.
I don't think that's a "scientific consensus" on the end of the civilised world coming, that's what I'm talking about, that's what the narrative is.
There are countless examples of Ancient Greek cities/towns that are now several feet under the sea-level, and still, here we are, ~2500 years later and still doing our thing. The Cyrenaica and Northern Africa more generally was/were the bread-basket of the Roman Empire, they're not anymore, and yet, here we are, ~2000 years later, we've found other bread-baskets.
The civilized world now comprises of 8 billion people on a planet of depleting resources, energy crisis, pollution, and worst of all a man-made climate change that's many magnitudes faster than any before.
Good luck finding another bread-basket on an inhabitable planet with oceans having widespread oxygen-starved dead zones, a malfunctioning biological carbon pump, collapsing food web, extreme temperatures, intense droughts, diseases and conflicts.
We are seeing these happening already, and it's only going to get worst, much worst, as we reach the tipping points.
Academically, I would assume that for the majority of people, science was something you were taught to trust growing up, being told that scientists have your best interests in mind while they spend time finding out everything about the world and coming up with reasons/theories for the way the world works and interacts with itself. The world wouldn't be anything without science, they say.
Religion is based on a set of beliefs, followings, teachings, determined and taught/shared by "qualified" individuals like priests/pastors - followers were raised from a young age to follow, internalize, and spread their faith. The world wouldn't exist without God, they said.
When you go to church (catholic in this example), you're asked/silently obligated to donate to the church when the collection plate is passed around. You're giving money, and debatably power (in form of money) to the church to keep spreading their beliefs.
I think it would be foolish to assume that there weren't rich kings/countries hundred of years ago giving money to the church to influence certain activities/actions through religious decree/law. I would also be a fool to not believe the church would influence the governments to act in certain ways based on how much power the church had had to control/influence it's followers.
Today, we have numerous examples of corporations lobbying governmental and scientific institutions to push whatever is the cause de jour. There was corn syrup lobbying in the 2010's and who knows how far back, you had the food pyramid in the 90's that heavily promoted food groups that the USDA itself was subsidizing.
There's so many outside influences, blind faith/trust, etc. etc. that I feel comfortable in todays day and age saying that society in general "trusts" science like they would "trust" a religion to keep them safe and alive, and healthy - and therefore this "trust" can be exploited to invoke fear, uncertainty, and ultimately convince people that the harm they're going through or the actions they're being forced to take, is for their own good - with the other followers chastising or guilting the others or "non-believers" into believing what _they_ think is the truth.
Do you kind of see what I'm getting at? It might seem completely odd-ball to you, but it's how a lot of people interpret and understand what's going on. Science isn't this 100% true, be-all, end-all thing because it will _always_ corrupted by governments, corporate interests, NGO influence, etc. etc. etc.
Can you not see? The changes became so rapid in the last few years that you can just go outside and see for yourself, extreme temperatures, heat domes, cold waves, wildfires, droughts, intense storms, vanishing biodiversity. Once in a hundred years events one after another. I remember my childhood when we used to have four seasons, we barely have two now, a mild winter with occasional cold waves and a summer with extreme weather. No in-between. Biggest droughts we have ever seen. A lot of insects missing.
It's an absolutely giant, complex system that has enough opportunities in the works for humans - or groups of humans running corporations/NGOs/research groups - to exploit for personal profit/power/etc. meaning the end-goals are never truly achieved.
You have no recourse to your government for the decisions it makes - sure, you can vote - but your vote has such little power compared to the effort required to make meaningful decisions in society at large. Violence is out of the question legally, though the government sure likes to be violent towards its people when they want something from you.
I believe it's simply not possible for the government to simultaneously keep and grow its power and take complete care of its citizens. Governments are corporations with customers that are forced to buy products (road access, schooling, healthcare, as some examples) from them at the rate the government chooses at the service level they choose. You have no other options. Good luck with trying to change it when there's so many people all fighting amongst each other over inane things compared to this all-encompassing problem of the climate, like 'critical race theory', 'universal basic income', or 'building a wall'.
If we've already gone past the turning point as you have suggested with credible evidence, then why bother pushing so hard? We've already ruined the earth. Why not make things as comfortable as we can for the ones that are still around?
Bit of a defeatist attitude to take, but it seems like that's where it's going to inevitably if the climate scientists are right.
I don't know - I'd rather live in relative comfort because I owe nothing to the people of the future, and I wouldn't expect people in the past to owe me anything either...