Some see hydraulic fracturing, and the resulting natural gas glut, as a boon for the economy and the solution to our energy problems. But the truth is that, absent a realistic plan for solving climate change, the flood of natural gas is going to make everything even worse.
The hopes of natural gas supporters have always been based on this fuel's lower carbon dioxide output per unit of energy as compared with coal, which produces nearly twice as much carbon pollution. The idea is to begin de-carbonization by replacing coal plants with natural gas plants for electricity generation. But if you want to solve climate change, you're going to have to do more than just replace coal with natural gas because eventually economic expansion will drive up natural gas consumption so that you are still drowning in carbon.
Now science has demonstrated this, in detail. A large peer-reviewed scientific study, published in the October 23 issue of the journal Nature by Haewon McJeon , an economist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and 12 colleagues, looked at the effect of abundant natural gas such as can be produced by hydraulic fracturing, as compared with the effect of continued limited natural gas from conventional drilling. The study assumed continuation of current regulations and subsidies to encourage lower carbon emissions and greater use of renewables, but that the market is otherwise free to operate on conventional economic principles. Five international teams of experts studied five sets of computer model simulations based on realistic economic principles with each model incorporating different specific assumptions.
Despite their differences, all five groups came to the same conclusion: Absent a real plan for de-carbonization, abundant natural gas will do nothing to solve climate change and will probably make things even worse. To many of us, that's an unsurprising conclusion. But the details are worth noting.
The study shows increased natural gas use is self-defeating for two reasons. First, abundant gas makes energy cheaper, which encourages higher energy consumption and discourages investment in energy efficiency. Second, natural gas competes not only with coal but also with renewables and efficiency. So cheap natural gas undercuts the very measures that could solve the climate change problem. And natural gas might make things worse in yet a third way: Two of the five study groups found unconventional natural gas drilling causes large releases of methane, a far more potent global warmer than carbon dioxide. So hydraulic fracturing could be even worse than using coal.
The underlying problem is the unrealistically low price of fossil fuels. Every time we use fossil fuels, we are being subsidized by what economist Nicholas Stern, chair of the British Academy for the social sciences, has called "the greatest market failure the world has seen." Fossil fuels are not paying their environmental overhead. There was a time when our planet was relatively empty of human impacts, and we could treat Earth as a resource that was free for the taking. But today the planet is full of people, full of consumption, full of resource extraction, and full of pollution and all the bodily and environmental ailments that accompany it. Yet, especially as regards fossil fuels, we blithely blow the cheap-energy bubble ever larger, as though there were no tomorrow. Economists know that climate change will cost the world between 5 and 20 percent of annual global GDP if we continue pursuing business as usual, as compared with only 1 percent if we begin now to solve the problem, yet the fossil fuel industry dismisses such analysis with a shrug, failing even to address it.
If Americans really believe the free market principles that we say we believe, we'll stop subsidizing fossil fuels on the backs of the environment and at the cost of our children's and grandchildren's future. By far the cheapest and easiest way to do this is with a carbon emissions tax, levied at the source of carbon extraction. The cost is then passed on to all fossil-fuel consumers, with fuel guzzlers paying more than fuel sippers. This can actually be nearly free on average, if we have the political intelligence and will to do it right, by refunding the tax in equal per capita payments to all Americans. The so-called tax then really becomes a fee directed at guzzlers, while sippers (most of us) net a nice profit every year.
The natural gas study points up the futility of our relentless quest for fossil fuel, and the benefits of accepting environmental reality.
Commentary on 01/04/2015