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Comment by kpmcc | Hacker News Reader

What is climate friendly about natural gas?

It's cleaner than coal and oil. If you upgrade a coal plant to a gas plant, that's a step forward against climate change.

Yes, we'd be much better off with wind farms, solar plants, and nuclear reactors, but a step forward is a step forward.

Countries like Poland, running mostly on coal, would get cleaner air and contribute less to global warming if they were to upgrade their power plants to anything non-coal.

Replace them with nuclear generators and they'd also significantly reduce the amount of radiation people would be exposed to.

It's not that gas is that good, it's more that coal is that bad.

Clever use of the adjective “cleaner”. Try replacing it with “less dirty, but still pollutant and toxic” to see an alternative, correct version of what you have written.

You can put absolutist restrictions on things like that but every time you enter a cost-benefit calculus with such restrictions already in place you're going to end up with more cost and less benefit

I don't understand, "cleaner" and "less dirty" are perfectly synonymous to me. Are they not to you?

A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot.

[1] https://people.wou.edu/~courtna/GS361/Energy_From_Fossil_Fue...

So not climate friendly.

With that logic, humans aren't climate friendly and should be transitioned away from

Different shades of grey. We'll always cause pollution as part of being. I don't believe that the person above meant it as a final solution to keep burning fossil fuels

> With that logic, humans aren't climate friendly and should be transitioned away from

Well, that's mostly solved problem by EU and even SEA:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2024/

https://www.populationpyramid.net/south-eastern-asia/2024/

At that point human life isn't climate friendly... everyone wants to live like the average american with 2 cars and 4 ac units per households, when Asia and Africa come for their fair share, even if they only claim 25% of it, we're fucked, no amount of battery or solar panel will make this consumeristic and "growth forever" mentality sustainable, because by definition it is a boundless quest. Half of the world still live like medieval peasants with less than $7 a day, this is just the beginning

Is it less climate unfriendly than the alternatives. Every form of energy generation releases CO2. Gas also has the benefit that it doesn't need all sorts of extras to make it dispatachable when needed (which also require CO2).

I forgot to say hydro is also great where possible.

> Every form of energy generation releases CO2

…except nuclear, hydro, solar… They are stable once built.

“Natural gas” is a fossil fuel and adds CO2 that was locked away.

So manufacturing hydro and solar releases no CO2? How long until those panels need to be replaced and recycled?

Much better to have CO2 than methane in the atmosphere

Even better to have neither.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

Thus nuclear and solar. Not perfect. Considerably better.

Both nuclear and solar have conditions where they cannot generate energy. Nuclear is also slow to scale up/down. There is a need for something that has the properties of natural gas

I tried telling that to my brother but he won't quit releasing methane.

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