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In The Long Term We Are All Dead
As many people have expected the process of fracking releases much more methane into the atmosphere than official figures credit. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how researchers used an aircraft to collect information about atmospheric methane concentrations and measured them.
The researchers found that methane emissions above fracking pads and wells in South West Pennsylvania were leaking into the atmosphere at about a thousand times higher than the rates than officially estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Overall, methane emissions from fracking are more than 50% higher than the EPA’s official figures.
Clearly the gains in using natural gas compared with coal may be offset where that natural gas is produced from fracking by leaking of natural gas into the atmosphere. Methane is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
I have no doubt that methane emissions from fracking could be substantially reduced but the costs of doing so in the short term would make fracking more expensive than it is under the present rules, and that would make the cost of natural gas higher than at present.
As usual, business tends to be concerned about the short term, rather than the long term. It operates on the basis that in the long term we are all dead, and that is true, and if we carrying on preferring short term benefits over long term survival in the long term we will not only be dead but we will also be without descendants and in the short term will shall all be dead.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: cost of fracking, EPS, fracking, in the long term we are all dead, methane, PNAS 
Source: http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/in-the-long-term-we-are-all-dead/
