Coal, oil, gasoline, propane, natural gas, biodiesel, wood fired stoves, candles, its all the same; molecules made up of a bunch of carbon bonded together. Add heat and oxygen and the bonds break in order to bond with oxygen, creating co2 or carbon monoxide and releasing heat. Its always gonna emit a shit ton of greenhouse gases, the entirety of the fuel is being turned into one.
The carbon in the ground took atmospheric carbon too. Ancient plants and animals eating those plants. All of it is a matter of carbon being sequestered in a solid state or burned into a gaseous state.
Sure but the issue is that sequestered carbon from millions of years ago is being released. In the short term carbon from trees is comparatively neutral. There could be an issue if you start using firewood in a non sustainable way, however at the current scale it doesn’t seem to be the issue.
Is burning trees part of it? This is like eating a bunch of pizza to lose weight, because you can exercise it off. The pizza is only hurting your ability to lose weight, and burning trees is only hurting our ability to reduce greenhouse gases. You can grow trees without burning any.
No point. Its the diversified old-growth forests we need to protect. Planting more trees without achieving that is pointless. There is not enough wood-burning for heat and/or fuel happening to make a difference vs what we do grow though, as the vast majority of what we do grow goes into construction.
You want to stop indigenous peoples burning wood for heat and cooking? How about we stop paying them to burn down rainforests for farms and ranches first. If we can accomplish that, cracking down on campfires becomes a pointless endeavor.
The carbon footprint of the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa is nothing close to yours or mine. The idea that that article recommends eliminating wood-burning entirely is … not born-out in its text.
What do you think the biomass in “Efficient Biomass Cooking” is? Its wood. The carbon footprint of the transportation of any other fuel to these people alone would more than offset any criteria by which wood-burning falls short, until we can electrify the entire world, and/or get everyone using solar ovens for cooking.
The one positive point is that methane-burning power plants can be spun up in under an hour whereas coal plants usually need a week to power up. If the vast majority of power comes from solar/wind/batteries and gas is only used as (secondary) backup, this may make sense.
Fossil marketing pretty successfully tries to eradicate the caveats and nuances from the discussion of course.
Mostly because the US has huge coal deposits but fairly limited coal exports. A lot of the discussion about LNG is whether it makes sense to use it to displace same-country coal extraction & use vs ship in LNG from far away.
Great, thanks! Why doesn’t the chart show costs of transportation of coal via ship as well? Do you have a link for the study mentioned in the graph by chance?
For those that don’t know natural gas is a think tank tested way to brand methane. Natural gas is methane. They are the same thing. When you hear natural gas think “methane” because that is what natural gas is. For some reason “natural” makes you think it’s a perfectly fine and good thing, but that’s just good ol’ propaganda that you believed because you didn’t know any better.
Petroleum is also “natural”. It forms naturally, in nature, all by itself, and it combusts if you light it on fire. It’s so natural we can’t make it ourselves that’s why we drill wells several miles down and then inject compressed fluids at insane pressure to fracture the rock formations that natural petroleum is trapped in.
The problem is that methane is significantly worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and if you burn methane, it breaks down into CO2. So when you hear “Clean burning natural gas” you are being spoon fed bullshit. It’s not clean burning, it’s lighting methane on fire to produce the same greenhouse gas they want you to think they’re cutting down on.
While I don’t doubt that it helps with branding in the modern day, the name natural gas entered the public vocabulary centuries ago to differentiate it from synthetic gas/coal gas/town gas, not as a think tank branding exercise.
Created as a byproduct of the coking process, the aforementioned syngas was used primarily for its bright white light, and indeed in the US much of the network was built out after the invention of the lightbulb but before they got bright enough to be competitive.
Natural gas by contrast is produced by drilling into naturally occurring deposits of methane and other flammable gases as compared to being a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced by coal gasification. As electric lights got better and fewer factories needed to turn coal into coke, most cities decommissioned their syngas systems. A few decades later cites rebuilt gas distribution systems using natural gas to provide for a far more efficient form of heating, and people needed to easily tell the difference since syngas lighting and appliances arn’t practically useful with natural gas and so used the common name for it in much the same way most people don’t go to a restaurant and ask for a glass of high concentration dihydrogen monoxide, they just ask for water.
If you think that “Clean Burning Natural Gas” hadn’t deliberately been kept in the advertising vernacular intentionally to avoid negative connotations, I have a bridge to sell you.
I mean, clean burning is an perfectly accurate description of natural gas flames, that’s why it’s so terrible for lighting but good for heating, there’s extremely little soot and ash that need to be cleaned out of a flue of off the walls above a lamp.
I don’t doubt that gas companies really like or have indeed have helped feed the common misconception that “clean burning” has anything at all to do with climate effects, but that wasn’t my point, which was that natural gas is the common name for the mix, and it has been since long before companies had to form think tanks to pretend to care about climate impacts.
Cool so your point was to give a history lesson on the origins of the original naming convention behind the mining and burning of methane, and disparage my point that it still being called natural gas in intentionally misleading, while also not actually disagreeing with it or bringing any sort of evidence to the contrary?
So you just wanted to…look pompous? Gaslight? Distract from the fact that burning methane is just as bad if not worse than drilling for and burning crude oil based fossil fuels for the environment? Point out that it’s all fine because it was originally used for lighting?
Okay then. Thanks for your contribution to society I guess. Go tell the bees in your safe space how you did your good deed for the day by defending the fossil fuel industry!
You said something incorrect, were pretty gently corrected, and then rather than simply move on and learn, you decided to crawl all the way up your own ass into a deeply entrenched position. You are not the one being useful or coming off worth listening to here.
My point is that your staring comment on which the majority of your argument rests, “Natural gas is a think tank tested way to brand methane.” is clearly false. I figured this was an honest mistake, as its something someone who is not well informed on the topic might think, but it’s something which a lot of people do know, and so I politely added more information you or others could use for a jumping off point if you didn’t know that syngas even existed.
Calling something by the name it has always been known by is not “intentionally misleading”, but basic communication.
There are enough enough true criticisms of useing natural gas for power and heat, such as the parent’s post that gas leaks are more damaging to the environment than the coal it replaced, without making wild claims about the name itself being a hundred year old PR spin.
When most climate activists are dismissed as having no idea what their taking about, making claims like yours that people know wrong because they live down the hill from the old synthetic gasworks is how you convince people that the parent claims are just as poorly researched and easily dismissed as some wild comment.
It is kind of important to be accurate is your criticism least it be used to diminish far more well researched and damming criticism.
Howarth found that LNG’s total emissions are between 24 and 274 percent more than coal’s, depending on how the LNG is transported.
Horrific.
We’re making the same mistake now as we did after the Iraq War. During/after that war, there was a massive push to decrease US reliance on Middle Eastern oil. That was great, but unfortunately, most of the effort centered on domestic oil production, including fracking, which is even nastier than conventional oil production. We should have been building out and transitioning to renewables instead.
Now we have the same basic problem: Europe has realized it can’t rely on Russia for its fossil fuels and is now greatly increasing consumption of LNG, which is even nastier (for climate emissions) than conventional fossil fuels, even apparently coal, which I didn’t know was possible. That’s insane!
Let’s learn from this and build as much wind, solar, and other renewables as quickly as possible.
EU 2023 LNG imports have been below 2022 imports. That is still a massive increase compared to 2021, but that was to be expected. Maybe even more important the natural gas price is falling extremely quickly. It halved over the last year. LNG is more expensive then other transport methods of natural gas, so it is the first to be cut.
Edit so coal has been deemed the absolute worst energy bearer for combustion but suddenly there’s a report that the somewhat better natural gas is dirtier?
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