Greenhouse gas emissions are hot news these days — especially in
the lead up to an election when candidates, at least those who claim to
believe in climate science, vow to do something about the biggest
environmental crisis facing our little blue planet:
climate change.
In early March of this year, while campaigning in New Hampshire,
Obama vowed to end $4 billion in Big Oil and Gas subsidies. “You can
either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the
American people,” Obama said to an applauding audience. “You can keep
subsidizing a fossil fuel that’s been getting taxpayer dollars for a
century, or you can place your bets on a clean-energy future.”
That sounds dandy, but ending subsidies to polluters is only half the
battle, and Obama’s idea of a “clean-energy future” is tenuous at best.
In an attempt to round up the green vote, which he successfully
accomplished, President Obama trumpeted his half-hearted attempt to put
the breaks on climate change by tapping energy sources here at home and
regulating the industry that’s doing most of the damage. Only days after
the president announced he was looking to fast-track the southern
portion of the
Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, his administration
released the first-ever federal standards to limit greenhouse gas
emissions from new power plants.
In what’s now become typical Obama fashion, the move was meant to
appease environmental critics while at the same time ensure the
fossil
fuel industry that the so-called
New Source Performance Standard would
not actually hurt its bottom lines.
Here’s why: the
EPA rule
would only impact new coal-fired power plants, but only those that
break ground in later next year. In all, 15 proposed coal plants in 10
states could be potentially impacted by the rule, even though most are
already hung up in court battles. As such, no coal-fired power plants in
the United States have broke ground over the past three years and
tenacious environmentalists have seen far more victories than defeats
when it comes to battling
King Coal.
The new greenhouse rule will require fossil fuel-fired electricity
generating units to restrict their emissions to 1,000 pounds of carbon
dioxide (CO2) per megawatt-hour of electricity produced; a strict
standard to be sure, but one that doesn’t come without caveats. All old
power plants, some well over 50 years in age, will be exempt entirely
from Obama’s greenhouse rule when it comes into effect, despite the fact
that these archaic facilities alone account for over 40 percent of
carbon emissions in the country. In a nutshell, the biggest coal
polluters are being let off the hook altogether.
Five years ago a staggering 151 new coal plants were slated for
construction, but with one of the greatest environmental achievements in
our history, grassroots activists across the country stopped their
development.
Obama is still riding on the coat-tails of these victories, but
what’s underlying the greenhouse gas rule is a bit more sinister. As
concerns about the impacts of fracking continue to grow, the power
plants that burn natural gas extracted through this process of pumping a
mix of water, chemicals and sand deep into the earth’s crust, won’t be
covered by the rule. Generally, natural gas plants produce less than 900
pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. Indeed the limit set by the EPA was
not arbitrary; it directly aids and abets the natural gas industry.
Obama knows quite well that natural gas is poised to be the fossil fuel
of the future and his administration and the EPA are not going to stand
in the way of the big boom.
This isn’t to say the effect of natural gas on climate change is
benign — far from it. While still producing a large amount of carbon
emissions (albeit less than coal),
natural gas also spews a whole bunch
of methane (natural gas is methane), which is far more potent than CO2
when it comes to the immediate warming of our planet. In fact, it is
estimated that methane gas has a global warming potential 25 times that
of CO2 (averaged over 100 years). So, in absolute terms, natural gas
does contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions, and with more
production in the works, this contribution is going to grow a lot more
in the years to come.
The EPA certainly understands methane is a big contributor to global
warming. In an analysis released last year the agency doubled its
earlier estimate for the amount of methane that leaks from natural gas
wells and pipelines. This leaking is so extensive that it is equal to
the annual emissions from over 35 million automobiles. In addition, the
EPA reported that the levels of methane release during the fracking of
shale gas were actually 9,000 times higher than previously thought.
Methane, unfortunately, is not covered by Obama’s proposed greenhouse
gas rule. Perhaps that’s because Obama supports the expansion of
natural gas exploration as well as the notion of “safe” fracking — an
oxymoron akin to “clean” coal.
“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one
hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to
safely develop this energy,” said President Obama in his last State of
the Union address. “The development of natural gas will create jobs and
power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we
don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy … it was
public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped
develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale
rock.”
The process Obama is touting is the
fracking of natural gas
and oil from underground geological formations, like the
Marcellus
Shale on the East Coast. The procedure has been documented in a draft
report by the EPA as
causing groundwater pollution in Wyoming, yet
fracking remains exempt from the Clean Water Act.
As coal becomes a relic of the past in the U.S., natural gas, with
fracking as its main source of extraction, is being set up as the fossil
fuel of the future, thanks in large part to Obama’s embrace and the
EPA’s blind eye. In 2008 the Obama campaign amassed $884,000 from the
oil and gas industry. In 2012 that number topped $2 million.
Often seen as a “bridge fuel” from coal toward renewables, natural
gas has not come under the same scrutiny as other fossil fuels. Instead
natural gas has been seen as a safer, cleaner burning fuel — an
improvement over dirty coal. Hence why the EPA continues to punt on
proposing regulations on the industry, as it did for a second at the
beginning of last April when it delayed the release of rules for the oil
and gas industry. If the EPA caves to the natural gas industry, as it
will likely continue to do, the majority of existing fracking wells will
be exempt from regulation.
Yet, even if fracking wells begin to receive the regulatory oversight
they so gravely deserve, the burning of natural gas is not about to
come under intensified scrutiny any time soon. On the contrary, as long
as the EPA’s attention remains on curbing coal’s carbon footprint, the
natural gas industry is sure to benefit and more methane is sure to seep
from the depths of Earth. A recent study by tech billionaire Nathan
Myhrvold and climate scientist Ken Caldeira argues that
shifting to
natural gas “cannot substantially reduce the climate risk in the next
100 years.”
Those fighting the frackers ought to expand their focus from
fracking’s immediate dangers, which are very real, to natural gas’
long-term impacts on climate change. Even if fracking were to one day be
outlawed, as long as natural gas continues to be burned the planet will
continue to heat up. In short, natural gas is not a bridge to renewable
energy;
it’s a bridge to an even more toxic planet.
