Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In the face of the embarrassing failure of European renewables to reduce CO2 emissions, greens appear to be ramping up attacks on the alleged climate impacts of natural gas.
America’s liquefied natural gas boom may be on a collision course with climate change
By Matt Egan, CNN Business
Updated 2301 GMT (0701 HKT) July 1, 2019New York (CNN Business)
America’s liquefied natural gas boom has a climate change problem, according to a report released on Monday.
The US energy industry is scrambling to build dozens of expensive export terminals that can be used to ship cheap natural gas to China and other fast-growing economies that want to move away from coal.
While those investments make sense today, they will likely be derailed in the longer run by a combination of plunging renewable energy costs and rising climate change concerns, according to the Global Energy Monitor, a network of researchers tracking fossil fuel projects.
Those dual forces will make many LNG projects “unprofitable in the long term,” putting much of the $1.3 trillion of investments in the sector at risk, the report said.
The problem is that the LNG boom will create harmful methane emissions — a greenhouse gas that is roughly 30 times more harmful than carbon dioxide emissions. Both coal and natural gas produce CO2 emissions, though natural gas creates far less than coal.
…
Rather than fossil fuels like gas, Nace argued that the long-term growth opportunity will be solar, wind and other alternatives.
“This century will be owned economically by whoever manages to dominate renewables,” he said.
Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/01/business/lng-boom-environment-climate-change/index.html
I think it is kind of sweet of greens to put so much effort into warning fossil fuel investors they’re about to lose all their money.
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“Rather than fossil fuels like gas, Nace argued that the long-term growth opportunity will be solar, wind and other alternatives. “
Like maybe nuclear power? The failure of the Green idiots to acknowledge nuclear power as the only viable long-term solution gives away the game they are playing.
From the story: “Ted Nace, founder and director of the Global Energy Monitor, said in an interview.”
“Tellingly, billionaire Michael Bloomberg has expanded his own fight against climate change to include natural gas. Last month, Bloomberg launched Beyond Carbon, a $500 million investment aimed at not only accelerating coal plant retirements but “working to prevent new construction of gas plants.””
So what is this “Global Energy Monitor” organization? Is it an independent source of quality information or just another (of many) climate propaganda shops masquerading as independent, reliable research?
Here is their “About” statement:
And here are their listed financial supporters:
Carlin Family Fund
ClimateWorks Foundation
Energy Foundation
European Climate Foundation
KR Foundation
Mertz Gilmore Foundation
Natural Resources Defense Council
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Rockefeller Family Fund
Sierra Club Foundation
Wallace Global Fund.
Basically they have 3 of Biggest Names in the GreenSlime Syndicate as financial backers.
And “social justice” is one of their two innovative projects. Between that and who is paying their salaries, that should inform anyone with a brain what they are “about”. And it “about” has zero to do with honest messaging on energy.
Make no mistake, Mr Nace and his Climate Porn Production outfit are just a Climate propaganda outlet for the GreenSlime. Nace and his team are doing little song and dance jigs for GreenSlime pay-outs in exchange for idiotic “reports” that then fake news CNN dutifully reports on orders too. They think just because they can write garbage and have CNN report it means it has any validity.
Joel O’Bryan
What can we do about the suicidal zealots who apparently believe in the meme that “It is necessary to destroy a village to save it.” Clearly, they are not amenable to rational discussion or even understanding facts. It is akin to the inmates being in charge when the Media and half the electorate accepts the unsupportable claims.
Funding for the Global Energy Monitor, which seems to have provided the impetus for some of the Canadian media outlets this morning to report that Natural Gas is the “New Coal”, is as follows…
FUNDING
In addition to private donations, Global Energy Monitor has received support from the following funders:
Carlin Family Fund
ClimateWorks Foundation
Energy Foundation
European Climate Foundation
KR Foundation
Mertz Gilmore Foundation
Natural Resources Defense Council
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Rockefeller Family Fund
Sierra Club Foundation
Wallace Global Fund
https://globalenergymonitor.org/about/funding/
Just follow the money….
Any expert who avoids mentioning molten salt nuclear reactors isn’t qualified to give any public opinions.
“This century will be owned economically by whoever manages to dominate renewables,” he said.
Hilarious. Proving, once again, that the Koolade-quaffing, misguided Greenbeany Climate Numpties live in a dream world full of myths, fantasies, magic, and wishful-thinking.
whoever owns renewable energy production will make a $billions… cause the CO2 tax is coming, no matter what you think you are willing to do to avoid it, you cannot keeping destroying other people’s properties and believing you can get away with it for free. Already now renewable energy is massively profitable business, in fact TEXAS is the biggest wind power producer in North America, they have so much wind generated power, they have to export it, because they have too much for local consumption.
SO much for these communists down in Texas .. huh ?
That said, … imagine that, BP as in British Petroleum is investing $Bs in wind power mill to be installed in the North Sea, where they took down their failing oil rigs and replaced, them with Wind Power mills …
they must be totally stupid, isn’t it?
Wind farms don’t exist to harvest wind energy.
Wind farms exist to harvest tax credits and subsidies.
If those tax credits/subsidies were withdrawn, every wind turbine would be shutdown the next day.
Almost all the cost of solar, wind, and even nuclear is up front. So cutting off any subsidies has no effect on existing fuel cost is zero for wind so the only ongoing costs are maintenance and land rent. Not a fan of subsidies for things that should pay for themselves.
““harmful methane emissions — a greenhouse gas that is roughly 30 times more harmful than carbon dioxide emissions”
Except methane reacts with oxygen. Methane cannot exist for long periods in an atmosphere comprising 21% oxygen. The atmospheric residence time of methane is reckoned to be less than 10 years, so emissions of methane have no prospect of ever adding up to much. Methane is a tiny part of the atmosphere and that’s the way it’s going to stay.
Claims of high “global warming potential” add up to the thick end of naught. Methane is the big lie.
Methane decays into the very same amount of CO2 as if other types of fossil fuels were burned for the same amount of energy , it simply has a short time peak of radiative forcing that will increase temperature faster initially, but then asymptotically reach the same level of long term CO2 concentration, hence global warming.
So, if methane is used only as fuel, yeah, it simply has a spike of warming impact, because of the higher GHG effect, but no difference on the longer terms (whose length depends on the amount methane released by unit of time). It can take even a 100 years to reach the same level of CO2, if the methane was to be released rapidly in large amount.
The issue with methane is that there are 500Gt of it stored in the frozen tundra that is melting … that would not be useful energetically but would still be released. It will probably take 100 year to get it all released …
Now go (SNIPPED)
(Some of your language needs some cleaning up, which is why I snipped the offending part, you have another comment, one far worse in the mod bin, which will have to be moderated) SUNMOD
Looks like we have a new troll reading from the scriptures in his Clientology bible. Always hilarious to see these cultists repeating the same long refuted nonsense.
Leo,
Your Tundra melting claims are silly since around 95% of the Tundra of the last 15,000 years have long melted away. It used to be in Southern Nebraska and into Northern California. It was all over most of Europe at its peak.
Currently its southern boundary around 60degrees N, but 18,000 years ago it was down to around 40 degrees N in America and Europe, that is a lot of land!
You like many warmists fail to think it through, since most of the Permafrost have long melted away with only a small amount left.
Despite the massive reduction of Permafrost from the planet, no catastrophic events transpired.
“Leo Kenji” is another fake name, fake email, fake IP address. He’s been binned. Probably our good friend in Oregon again dealing with his personal demons.
He also doesn’t understand that methane (the vast majority of “natural gas”) produces the least amount of CO2 of any hydrocarbon fuel – methane, when burned, produces water (H2O) and CO2 at a 2:1 ratio, other hydrocarbon fuels converge to a 1:1 ratio as the fuel molecules get longer.
““harmful methane emissions — a greenhouse gas that is roughly 30 times more harmful than carbon dioxide emissions”
Typically with propaganda this is a half truth. You need to understand where this 20 or 30 times came from. What Hansen did was compare a 1 ppm increase in CO2 to methane ie for CO2 375 to 376 or a 0.3% increase to a 1ppm increase in methane from 1.6 to 2.6 ppm or a 63% increase. The result was that the increase in the forcing for methane is 20 times that for CO2. And what is the increased forcing; next to zero so 20 times zero is a pretty small number. However methane at the same concentration as CO2 is actually less powerful than CO2 as the emissivity/absorbance is lower for methane at the same concentration. Essentially the effect of methane on forcings is negligible.
It’s the same tosh the communists have pumped for 100 years, just recycled.
The dinosaur communists asserted that socialism was a transitional state on the path to true communism.
Today’s eco-communists assert that natural gas is only a transitional state on the path to true eco-communism.
Green on the outside. Still red on the inside….
so then, to not be communist, you need to die starving because the physics of green house gases will kill most of he crops …
wow, smart thinking … where did you get your brain?
to think that CO2 is a gas, not a political party, all you had to do was to simply use non carbon based energy sources and you’d have been on your way to a better place, but no .. cause preferred to follow Trump’s lead, (SNIPPED) sounds familiar .. oh Yeah, the former head of the KGB, the intelligence services of the USSR, they were NOT communists, right?
Gee, you are dumb ad confused ..
(Do not continue to write up sexually explicit language!) SUNMOD
“Leo Kenji” is another fake name, fake email, fake IP address. He’s been binned. Probably our good friend in Oregon again dealing with his personal demons.
Although the greens are a bunch of morons, they are right about people loosing money in the LNG boom. Just like the internet boom of 2000, there will be a few winners (Amazon, Google, and a couple more) , but the rest will be wiped out. I stay away from those investments as you have a much greater chance of loosing your shirt than getting rich.