Natural Gas is a Net Bad for the Environment

The gratuitous reference to "clean coal" was not the only false energy hope President Obama included in his convention speech: natural gas as a way to reduce carbon emissions is just as mythological.

 

Kevin Drum analyzes the latest data on the energy and economics of fracking, and concludes that in most ways, natural gas is a net environmental good.

But not in the way President Obama is pushing it.

McCabe tells me that the most important factor in the IEA model is crowding out: cheap shale gas will reduce coal usage (good) but will also reduce development of new nuclear, wind, and solar power (bad). So this is your bad climate news for the day—to go along with shrinking Arctic ice, extreme weather, killer droughts, more wildfires, and monsoons increasingly inundating low-lying areas. Natural gas fracking may be good for North Dakota, but the evidence suggests that, in the end, it won't do much of anything to rein in climate change.

In other words, the truth is what what environmentalists have been telling us for a century: carbon-based fossil fuels are bad. Period.