The other problem with the Natural Gas argument is right there in the premise. If burning natural gas is twice as carbon efficient as burning coal (X emissions → X/2 emissions), you can never do better than halving your emissions by switching everything to natural gas. So even though it’s good that gas has led to lower emissions so far, we must necessarily work on these other technologies if we ever want to do better than X/2.
Another issue is that, if your ultimate goal is to keep total CO2 content in the atmosphere before a certain level, natural gas gives you timeline but it is not, on its own, a solution. It is still an exhaustible resource that puts carbon permanently into the atmosphere.
That said, timelines count for a lot. If natgas gives us time to accumulate truly renewable green energy infrastructure, without reducing the urgency around installing renewables so much that the benefits cancel out, then it’s to the good.
Right but i think part of the argument being made above is that we shouldn’t bother will all this pie-in-the-sky stuff because the gas transition has caused almost all the actual emission reduction. It’s boneheaded as a statement on climate policy, but in a way i think is constructive to explore and apply more broadly.
If you have achieved big gains doing some thing X, but you are very confident that ultimately X has fundamental limitations such that it can’t possibly solve your ultimate problem....then it’s not good to put all your resources into X. (cf RLHF, i guess)
The other problem with the Natural Gas argument is right there in the premise. If burning natural gas is twice as carbon efficient as burning coal (X emissions → X/2 emissions), you can never do better than halving your emissions by switching everything to natural gas. So even though it’s good that gas has led to lower emissions so far, we must necessarily work on these other technologies if we ever want to do better than X/2.
Another issue is that, if your ultimate goal is to keep total CO2 content in the atmosphere before a certain level, natural gas gives you timeline but it is not, on its own, a solution. It is still an exhaustible resource that puts carbon permanently into the atmosphere.
That said, timelines count for a lot. If natgas gives us time to accumulate truly renewable green energy infrastructure, without reducing the urgency around installing renewables so much that the benefits cancel out, then it’s to the good.
Right but i think part of the argument being made above is that we shouldn’t bother will all this pie-in-the-sky stuff because the gas transition has caused almost all the actual emission reduction. It’s boneheaded as a statement on climate policy, but in a way i think is constructive to explore and apply more broadly.
If you have achieved big gains doing some thing X, but you are very confident that ultimately X has fundamental limitations such that it can’t possibly solve your ultimate problem....then it’s not good to put all your resources into X. (cf RLHF, i guess)