Fear of Fracking by Jeffrey Frankel - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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CAMBRIDGE – Against all expectations, US emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since peaking in 2007, have fallen by 12% as of 2012, back to 1995 levels. The primary reason, in a word, is “fracking.”
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Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.
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Natural gas emits only half as much CO2 as coal, and occupies a rapidly increasing share of electricity generation – up 37% since 2007, while coal’s share has plummeted by 25%.
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Meanwhile, the share of coal – the dirtiest fuel – has been rising, not falling, in the rest of the world’s energy mix.
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Moving beyond economics, America’s reduction in net energy imports – which have already fallen by one-half since 2007 – means that its foreign policy will be less constrained by events in the Middle East. In Europe, the new technology could similarly break Russia’s politically troublesome stranglehold on natural-gas supplies.
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Put differently, if the world continues to build coal-fired power plants at the current rate, those plants will still be around in 2050, regardless of what other technologies become viable in the meantime.
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Even a serious fracking mishap would be unlikely to cause as much damage as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in 2011, or coal-mining tragedies that play out dramatically in frequent explosions and collapses (and more insidiously in the form of lung disease, water pollution, and soil erosion).