by Richard Muller, Professor of Physics, University of Califoria at Berkeley
Some oppose shale gas because it is a fossil fuel, a source of carbon dioxide. Some are concerned by accounts of the fresh water it needs, by flaming faucets, by leaked “fugitive methane”, by pollution of the ground with fracking fluid and by damaging earthquakes.
Although I believe that global warming is real, caused by humans, and a threat to our future, these concerns about shale gas are either largely false or can be addressed by appropriate regulation such as the controversial but ultimately positive developments in Illinois.
Shale gas can not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce a deadly pollution known as particulate matter. Particulate matter is the term for particles found in the air, including dust, dirt, soot, smoke, and liquid droplets. Particles less than 2.5 micrometers, referred to as PM 2.5, are believed to be the most dangerous of these particles as they can lodge deeply into the lungs. Greenhouse warming is widely acknowledged as a serious long-term threat, but PM2.5 is currently harming more people. PM 2.5 is currently killing over three million people each year, including roughly 75,000 in the U.S.
As both global warming and air pollution can be mitigated by the development and utilization of shale gas, shale gas technology should be advanced as rapidly as possible. Environmentalists should recognize the shale gas revolution as beneficial to society – and lend their full support to helping it advance.
Should environmentalists support fracking? Can shale gas limit air pollution? Please share your views.
For more information on this topic, please see my report “Why Every Serious Environmentalist Should Favour Fracking”
Source: http://www.ourenergypolicy.org/can-shale-gas-limit-air-pollution-2/ h/t to Steven Mosher
I told moshe yesterday that there are some people whose writings I will no longer refuse to read.
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There is now seriou study that can point the nonsense the PM2.5 kills 75,000 americans a year. If PM2.5 such a killer the Chinese would be dropping like flies sprayed with insecticide. The study he probably referring to was one Biggs disconstructed, it was done for somc California board so they could justify the imposition of their draconian rules. The commission wanted cover, cover they got, t was certainly was not science!
As someone who has severe lung damage (emphysema), I welcome and support any advance that has the potential to reduce all sizes of particulates. Shale gas (whether fracture drilling is involved or not) strikes me as being a win-win, both for pollution control and energy independence. I seriously question the motives of those against it.
Johnr
Particulate matter from NG is of a different nature than coal:
http://www.epa.gov/ttnchie1/ap42/ch01/final/c01s04.pdf
Particulate Matter –
Because natural gas is a gaseous fuel, filterable PM emissions are typically low. Particulate matter from natural gas combustion has been estimated to be less than 1 micrometer in size and has filterable and condensable fractions. Particulate matter in natural gas combustion are usually larger molecular weight hydrocarbons that are not fully combusted. Increased PM emissions may result from poor air/fuel mixing or maintenance problems.
But it’s not zero.
In the UK (and the rest of Europe) we have elections this Thursday. On reading a Green party pamphlet I was suprised to see that they are campaigning against the proposed HS2 rail link. As the major parties are all in favour of the link because they think it strengthens their green credentials, it makes you wonder why.
Still doesn’t make him a ‘skeptic.’ Nor does one make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
..and I thought we were confused
I wonder why he failed to mention the lower carbon emissions from NG? Practically all of the lower
carbon emissions in the U.S. these days is from the massive switch from coal to natural gas,
in addition to lower gasoline usage.
Since the US is now ahead in reduction of CO2 emissions because of growing use of gas, for one to be against this fossil fuel is to really have another agenda entirely than the environment.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/natural-gas-efficiency-fuel-u.s.-carbon-emissions-decline-16639
Skeptics have certainly been suspicious that the environment has nothing to do with the issue among ideo_log_ues who have been the “pipers of Hamlin” in this parade (Maurice Strong – new-world-order inventor, creator of the UN environmental agency as a tool, Soros,….) who cynically attracted (initially well-meaning) scientists into an anti-American (and anti-human) enterprise to kill capit_alism to let the “elite” lead us forward. Scientists who believed there was a crisis are now trapped by personal economic survival and have become less objective in the face of the hiatus in warming.
This is their one chance, at least those who are not supporting an alternative agenda. My respect for Best has gone up a fair amount – it makes him a concerned person (whether misguided or not). It will go up more when he realizes that real skeptics accept the planet has warmed 0.7C per century. How much is due to man, how much to natural variability, and is it good or bad are the talking points. I’m not encouraged by the growing hysteria and ugly behavior toward skeptics created by a 17yr hiatus in warming that has to be interpreted as natural variation having a much bigger role than thought by CAGW proponents. Praying for a jump and acceleration of global warming after the hiatus certainly isn’t science. This hiatus is falsification of the theory, period.
Maybe it will straighten out again and resume on average the 0.7C per century. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Maybe a bit warmer should be hoped for. Don’t forget, we are in an interglacial (more than half way through), a temporary warm period that makes up only 10% of an otherwise icy climate that has been extant for 2.58 million years in this cycle (Quaternary period). Other similar cycles go back half the earth’s 4.5By history at least. In between these Ice Ages, the planet has warmed such that there were no ice caps (Mesozoic – era of the dinosaurs). I believe a lot of climate scientists over a few decades have learned what geologists have known for more than a century. Instead of embracing this surprising knowledge, they’ve played Whack a Mole with it and taken up revisionism of history. I know Hansen didn’t have a clue about the LIA, MWP, etc until he got into climate science from astronomy.
There is little, if any, scientific basis for claims of deaths from particulate matter, including PM2.5. Despite Ms. Jackson’s claims before the Senate that PM2.5 was essentially a killer with no safe dose not only can they not show any diagnoses of deaths by PM2.5, it appears after years of stonewalling on “secrete” science on PM2.5, they can’t even produce the data to support their claims. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/epa-concedes-we-can-t-produce-all-data-justifying-clean-air-rules
In fact, these claims were debunked with real data
http://junkscience.com/2013/12/26/epa-air-pollution-scare-debunked-by-best-data-set-ever-assembled-on-particulate-matter-deaths/
He has stated clearly that he believes that humans cause warming AT LAST!! He ain’t no skeptic and never was. I respect the man for his non-acceptance of the hockey stick and I think he is well intentioned, but misguided by peers (as usual in the consensus scenes) LOL
On page 4 of the referenced powerpoint presentation by Bob O’Keefe at the HEI Annual Conference in San Francisco 2013, there is the following statement:
There are several different ways of engaging in falsehoods. One can lie outright (i.e. the claim is completely false), one can lie by omission or one can lie by distortion. The latter is the most insidious and I have seen it often in Climate Science where carefully hedged wording in underlying scientific papers is turned into categorical statements in the press.
In this case, Mr. Mueller you categorically state that:
while the reference you cite* has substantially different language.
I respectfully request that you correct your post as there is a meaningful difference between “is currently killing” and “contributes to 3.2 million premature deaths.”
*http://www.healtheffects.org/Slides/AnnConf2013/OKeefe-Sun.pdf
Take a look at the link on the 3 million number. PPP with a picture of The Lancet, November 2010 where the graph came from. That issue/article is not available for review online?
Details, details….
Regulate shale gas fracking with common sense and then go for it. Competetiveness, independence from imports and less pollution are worth it.
My opinion.
Oh, I dunno …
Surely it makes more sense to cut trees in the USA, truck them using diesel to a chipping plant (with a huge energy requirement) then load them onto rail cars pulled by diesel powered locomotives and transport them across the country to ports to be loaded on ships powered by bunker fuel to ship halfway around the world to offload at European ports and ship by rail to power stations modified to burn woodchips with one third the energy density of coal …
…that’s gotta be better … right ?
… /sarc off
May 17th climate article in The Lancet.
http://download.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140673614608138.pdf
“Third National
Climate Assessment, released on May 6, 2014, by the
US Global Change Research Program—a product of the
efforts of more than 300 experts to document the effects
of human-induced climate change. Rising sea levels, heat
waves, ice melt, and ocean acidification are just a few of
the grim harbingers of a planet in flux. Capturing these
indices and others, the assessment integrates a range
of observations that give a stark warning of the trends
over the next decades, but also bluntly points out that
climate change is already here.”
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH….
He sure did leapfrog Mann with his own highly parametrized black box hockey stick, after lying about being skeptical instead of an intense anti-carbon activist, even quitting the Sierra Club way back in the 1980s for their opposition to low-emissions nuclear power, for that stated reason.
After Steven Mosher helps tweak the parameters, they exclaim to the world, oh look, they our “objective” and totally independent method *matches* the new up-adjusted plots from Climategate University and of the smear site SkepticalScience.com partners Cowtan & Way’s Frankenstein data mashup that uses satellite data to up-adjust ground data in a way falsified by that actual satellite temperature data itself, both being mere support crew for the recent 2012 up-adjustment of the standard HadCRUT plot in which Phil Jones includes a Saudi Arabian university as his affiliation.
The fact remains that two independent satellite plots falsify such up-adjustments that deny recent lack of warming. One would think that these activists would separate their politics from their science and instead *use* satellite data to *calibrate* the thermometer record as well as fully understand the urban heat island effect. That they do *not* do this indicates that we are dealing with junk science due to utter activist bias and reliance of the bulk of their funding on avoiding even slight moderation of alarm.
Coal is just fire. If this is outlawed, do not be deceived into thinking that nuclear, or NG, or thorium, or any other process is going to be less regulated and government controlled/distorted.
And once you accept that coal is dangerous, than you have yielded that any combustion of any kind is harmful and a strictly regulated activity. Don’t do me any favors.
John Ratcliffe, I suffer from asthma and I am very allergic to just about everything, cold is one of them. Just holding a cold object is painful and will give me hives. I do not blame my bad genetics on some diesel truck going down the road, or my lung problems on some mythic 2.5m particle pollution, especially since modern times this exposure has drop, we no longer in this country do we heat and cook with wood, if the human race was that sensitive to 2.5M pollution we would have went extinct when our ancestors started to use fire. The best example I have for that is my grandparents whom did heat and cook with wood most of their lives, with the exception of one all live to their eights or mid nineties, none had lung problems. The one whom did at 74 was my grandmother and it was stomach cancer that killed her, unfortunately i inherited so of her same problems I am looking at a 1 in 20 chance of esophageal cancer. Again can’t blame it on environment just the genetic lottery. My father died at 65 due to lung cancer, I suppose I could blame air pollution, but we lived in rural america where the air was clear most of the time, but it more likely the two pack a day Camel cigarette habit. My wife had the same cancer she never smoked, you probably would blame second hand smoke but again, I consider those studies so much junk. My wife’s cancer again is bad genetics both of her parent had cancer her father cancer lead to his death. The funniest thing I have found out about the early and most definitive study about cigarette smoking was the less than 10 cigarettes a day smokers on average outlived the controls. That in itself should blow the 2.5M pollution and secondhand smoke worries right out of the water if 2.5 M pollution was a problem that would not have happen, it would seem that they human body is quit capable of coping with low level of small particles being brought directly into the lungs, unless you suffer from bad genetics. Unfortunately those kind of fact that do not fit a certain political agenda are suppressed, and laws are being passed to outlaw wood stoves and diesel cars in this country based on junk science. For some reason the left hates poor rural people. A large number of poor rural people heat with wood and a small diesel car would save them money driving the distances they have to since they elected to live in rual America.
There is no need to regulate fracking because there is no problem with fracking. Without fracking there is no shale gas production. Period. The industry has a very long experience with oil and gas production using hydrolic fracturing and the gov. needs to get out of the way and let the experts produce as much cheap energy as possible.
How novel.
Put real pollution particulate matter ahead of the boogeyman CO2.
This could be a sign of the advancement of climate science. Or not.
He’s probably funded by the Koch Brothers.
Page 91 of your reference* to the proposed fracking rules in Illinois.
A couple of hundred years some very flawed individuals rebelled against what was in many ways a totalitarian government and tried to establish a more progressive form of government that addressed some of the abuses they had experienced. Among them was the concept that someone or an entity is innocent until proven guilty. Having had the experience of trying to prove my innocence repeatedly against a false presumption of guilt, I have a very strong opinion about the importance of this principle. I, for one, would not do business in a state where I would be presumed guilty unless proven innocent. If I was already doing business in that state, I would have to consider the wisdom of continuing to do business there. It seems to me that this provision should be clearly unconstitutional, but challenging that in court is unbelievably expensive and would take many years. In the meantime, one would have to make some sort of business decision. I would question how this proposed regulation is “positive” and how this is supportive of natural gas extraction. The presumption of guilt as a regulation is astounding to me.
*http://www.dnr.illinois.gov/adrules/documents/62-245-Proposed.pdf
Why not heavy boots and down outwear in the winter and going naked in the summer? No particulates, no flaming faucets, no water contamination. Stop moving goods on anything other than sailboats. Forage for food. Tell stories for entertainment. Breathe less. There, problem solved; no global warming.
So, [you] can have your cake and eat it too.