America's falling carbon-dioxide emissions: Some fracking good news | Hacker News Reader

America's falling carbon-dioxide emissions: Some fracking good news

economist.com

29 pointsph0rque16 comments

I totally understand the fears behind fracking as well as nuclear power (I'm living in Japan and my family lives in upstate NY) but often the progressive approach to energy policy has been to jump from the pan into the fire. Absolutely the worst offender is the coal industry (and the so-called 'clean coal' movement is just not feasible) and it has to go to zero. If gas and nuclear have to grow to fill the vacuum, then so be it.

The anti-nuclear movement here in Japan is flawed in a similar way. It certainly would be nice not to have nuclear plants but they're replacing them with coal imports. They should be talking about regulating and replacing the nuclear operators, and put replacing the nuclear power itself on the long-term track.

It's sad that the trade off is between dirty coal and natural gas. Energy policy (and the corrupt subsidies) are so short-sighted. In 5-10 years, Europe will have moved a small but significant chunk of their powergrids to renewable energy sources. The best the US can hope for is a decrease in coal power as it is replaced by fracked natural gas. Hardly any forecasts expect an increase in the adoption rates for renewables.

However, Europe and whomever invests in renewable technologies will likely benefit most in the long term.

The US is a large place. Having just driven cross-country, I can say that there are a lot of wind farms along the I-84 + I-80 route. The issue though is that those wind farms probably still only represent a small portion of the total power usage of the country.

Well, in the linked article you can see a graph showing the contribution from renewables. You can see it's even growing a bit. It's just nowhere near ready to replace coal just yet.

We absolutely should be pushing them and they represent our long-term solution but the 5-10 year plan should be shutting down coal. That means you need an alternative ready to go now.

The real question (which I haven't researched) is if (specifically) wind power is sustainable without government 'alternative energy' subsidies.

I live in Japan too and the whole thing is frustrating as hell. What happened here last year ought to be an example of how safe nuclear power is, but instead it's nothing but ATOMS fear-mongering and total willful ignorance of the dangers of coal power.

What's weird to me is how long it took for public opinion to turn as it has. For the first few months it dropped of course but there wasn't any overreaction even as people were checking Geiger counters online every day. But as things got under control public opinion continued to slide. I blame the institutional fuck-ups, and can sympathize with that.

But Tokyo air quality is going to go to shit again, which is something this city has historically had problems with. And electricity prices continue to rise.

Japan has to own a lot of that failure though - nuclear power is something you can only get behind if you have a tremendous amount of trust in the people running it. The potential catastrophic failure modes are, well, sobering.

With the Fukushima disaster, we've seen an awful lot of finger-pointing, buck-passing, carpet-brushing-under-ing, and an utter lack of transparency (some of it IMO bordering on criminal). If you cannot trust your government and/or power utility to be transparent about their handling of nuclear power, both in a day-to-day and disaster context, of course you can't sell it to the public.

In the long term, they may try to harness wind power. Japanese article about floating windmills on the ocean near Fukushima: http://www.nikkei.com/news/article/g=96958A9C93819499E3E2E2E...

It’s annoying that their graphic shows percent share of various electricity sources, rather than total quantity, and then makes statements like “The importance of coal in America’s energy mix has indeed tumbled since 1997”. The unstated implication of the words + graphic is that we’re using less coal than we used to be. But if you look at their data source, first it doesn’t include 1997 at all, but more importantly, in 2008 we generated more electricity from coal than in 1998, and the average electricity generation from coal in the last 5 years is higher than the amount generated in either of the first couple years. But mostly, what does it mean for “the importance in the energy mix” to “tumble”? If we stopped using coal power, the price of energy would spike up dramatically; coal is pretty much essential to our current “energy mix”.

The story I see in the data is that our energy use grows on average about 1% per year, with a bit of a dip in 2009, presumably due to the recession. The amount of electricity from natural gas has almost doubled and continues to rise, the amount from hydroelectric dams has been slowly creeping downward, and the amount from other renewable sources has been increasing steadily but is still a small fraction of our total “energy mix”.

Of course our energy use is growing. Our energy use will always increase, I hope. This article is about greenhouse gas emissions, and the chart is there to provide some explanation, i.e. where we're getting our energy from.

It's not unthinkable that the total energy consumption will shrink. Take Germany for an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

That's pretty questionable, really. Suppose ten percent of car commuters were offered telecommuting 80% of the time. House size ( which is an input in to air conditioning energy use ) is dropping.

Great for CO2 emissions, not so great for climate change. Several recent studies have found that methane emissions from natural gas extraction and operations make natural gas as bad for the climate as coal, at least over the next few decades. Methane drops out of the atmosphere much faster than CO2, but is also a much stronger greenhouse gas.

Can you site these studies, please. And do any of these studies take into account the offsetting massive loss of wetlands world-wide (which now no longer release methane into the atmosphere) over the last couple centuries from destruction of swamps. (e.g. when Saddam Hussein drained the Tigris–Euphrates marshlands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris%E2%80%93Euphrates_river_...)

Sure. Here's a recent one, for example (pdf hosted at motherjones but it's from the journal Climatic Change). http://www.motherjones.com/files/04-11shale_gas_footprint_fu...

And here's a short article in Time that mentions several studies: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2111562,00.ht...

The industry has disputed the data of some studies but also strongly resists efforts to shore up the data by better measuring methane leakage.

The direct greenhouse effects of methane vs. CO2 are not seriously in dispute, being a matter of basic physics. So I don't see how the level of methane emissions 200 years ago is relevant to the question of whether coal or gas is causing a greater greenhouse effect right now, per unit energy.

I'll mention though that while we may have less swampland, we've also got new methane releases from melting permafrost and clathrates.

Also, the loss of wetlands is a huge environmental negative in other ways. The oceans are in serious trouble, and that trouble often starts at the margins between land and water.

Also, cheap natural gas is helping fuel recovery of tar sands, which brings its own raft of problems.

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