With shale, as with many other things, we rushed ahead before we'd fully figured out the science and economics. But now that the analysis has had time to mature, several things are easily apparent:
1. Given what we know about methane leakage, it makes absolutely no sense to convert vehicle fleets to natural gas: that's because, as you go from the well to the car, there are even more places for leaks than when you send the gas to a power plant. An EDF study found that converting even big diesel trucks to natural gas would result "in nearly 300 years of climate damage before any benefits were achieved." Since we already use gas for lots of things like home heating and cooking, there should be a huge priority on plugging the leaks in the ancient pipes that deliver it to our cities, and in converting home gas furnaces to more modern technology like heat pumps.2. It also makes no sense to export natural gas around the world. This is a live issue: protesters rallied this month at Cove Point in Maryland, site of one of many new proposed terminals for exporting liquefied natural gas from U.S. shale. if they all get built, our exports will grow 14-fold by 2020. Such plans, because they will make big money, have powerful backers: when Heather Zichal left her post as the Obama administration's climate czar, she accepted a $180,000-a-year position on the board of the country's biggest gas exporter.
But the math makes no sense at all: when you chill and rewarm natural gas for shipping, leaks multiply. A study this spring from the Department of Energy -- even using leak rates we now know to be too conservative -- found that shipping natural gas to China and burning it instead of coal would mean no improvement for the climate.
3. The Obama administration plan to help other countries develop shale gas likely makes no sense either. If the best one can hope for in this country, after intensive efforts at regulation and enforcement, is a barely marginal improvement over coal, then even that gain is unlikely in countries where environmental enforcement is non-existent. You can make a case in places like China and India, where the public health effects of coal smoke are so terrible, that gas is better even if it's not helping the climate -- but these are also precisely the places poised to make huge advances in renewables.
4. Most contentiously, environmentalists in the U.S. should all be doing what they can to slow the spread of fracking. As the science has mounted, this has been the trend: The nation's biggest environmental group, the Sierra Club, went from accepting major contributions from the nation's biggest gas developer to turning down that money and vocally opposing increased fracking. EDF is the main group that hasn't come out in favor of moratoriums in places like New York, instead working with industry to come up with new regulations and saying it's up to local communities to decide whether they want to frack.
To be sure, Krupp, EDF's leader, talks about gas as "an exit ramp" not a bridge, and in a debate this spring said it was imperative to avoid "lock-in" to the fuel. Still, EDF's work with industry angers many anti-fracking activists, who feel that it will help expand the practice: When Krupp and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg called for new fracking regulations in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year, gas producers (who realize that such rules will help reduce opposition to the practice) cheered it. Efforts to regulate existing wells would be more useful if EDF were to also come out against an expansion of fracking: We will, after all, continue to produce natural gas in this country (if nothing else, massive quantities are required to produce fertilizer) and there is no need to leak more methane than we have.
The importance of this debate has grown the more we've learned about methane -- and one of the things we've learned is how fast it acts. Unlike CO2, which can last in the atmosphere for a century or more, methane disappears relatively quickly. Which means that its power at trapping heat is concentrated in a very short burst.
Twenty years ago, when scientists first started calculating how much to worry about methane, they said that molecule for molecule, it trapped 25 times as much solar radiation as co2. But now, over a more appropriate 20-year time frame, that ratio is reckoned to be about 86 times as much. At that rate, more than a third of the greenhouse gas that America produces is methane (not all of it from gas wells -- a fair amount comes from cattle). And that means that while the Obama administration boasts about cutting carbon, it's poised to leave behind a huge burst of methane as its greatest climate legacy.
It turns out, in other words, that there's no easy bridge to a working climate future -- no way to avoid angering powerful interests, no way to put off actually building the clean energy we desperately need. It's time to stop searching for a bridge and simply take the leap.
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