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Comment by Daniel_Newby | Hacker News Reader

There is not even a molecule of irony. They were saying to drill because energy is prosperity and coal is dirty.

The irony is that policies promoted by people who don't care about CO2 emissions and dimiss climate change have led to a significant decrease in CO2 emissions as an unintended consequence.

The word "irony" is frequently misused and doesn't mean "unintended consequences" or "rain on your wedding day". Irony would mean that those who supported drilling were actively trying to increase CO2 emissions and failed. That was not the intention of the Oil Lobby.

If there's one thing I've learned from my years of internet use, it's never use the word "irony."

Drill in this context means to lift carbon baed fuels stored deep underground and bring it to the surface where it will be converted to energy and then go into the atmosphere.

Irony requires a reversal of expectations. The logical expected consequence of drilling is increased greenhouse gas emissions. What in fact happened was the reverse. This is textbook irony.

"Drill", in this context, also means "for oil". Specifically, "in Alaska". Even more specifically, "in ANWR".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_National_Wildlife_Refuge

Because ANWR would supply petroleum (a fuel mostly used for transportation and scarcely ever used for generating electricity), it has virtually nothing to do with the market for coal (which is used almost entirely for generating electricity), or disruptions to that market caused by a growing reliance on natural gas (which is also frequently used for heating, but remains uncommon in the transportation market).

And because transportation networks and electrical grids have so little overlap in terms of power supplies, policy choices made about Alaskan petroleum have little direct connection with policy choices related to fracking for natural gas. So no, there is no irony in any of this. The word is simply inapplicable.

Natural gas is a hydrogen based fuel.

Natural gas is made up of hydrocarbons, mostly methane, so it's both hydrogen-based and carbon-based.

It sounds more like randomness than anything else. If your goal is to increase U.S. energy production without any interest in cleanliness of the energy, sometimes this may result in the energy getting cleaner anyway, and sometimes it won't. In this case, the main controlling factor seems to be a mixture of what's in the ground, and logistics. We've found significant new exploitable natural-gas sources, but since exporting it is hard (U.S. LNG export capacity is very limited), it's mostly not traded on a world market, so there's now a domestic glut of gas that's so cheap it's even cheaper than coal to burn.

Energy is prosperity, but the problem with using non-renewable energy is your prosperity will run out.

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