#shale gas

In the post below, I wrote about the recent and instantly controversial study from Cornell that calls into question the greenhouse gas advantage that natural gas was assumed to have over coal and oil.  This BBC article, for instance, points out what may seem like the obvious:  As one very involved British geologist says “By […]

You may be entirely aware by now that the controversy over shale gas resources and their extraction by hydraulic fracturing heated up last week with the publication of an important paper in Climatic Change, a well-respected scientific journal.  (Here is a great little video on what exactly the heck hydraulic fracturing is – aka hydrofracking […]

I’ve said this any number of times:  Environmental protection is much more about public health than it is about the natural environment.  Every time you hear somebody tear down the EPA or some other environmental protection agency, just remember that sometimes they may be the only thing standing between you and lung disease, cancer and […]

(Here’s a great graphic from DOE’s Energy Information Administration that shows how we deploy energy in the US.  Gas is a big factor.) I caught this comprehensive but succinct item at the NYT recently:  Time to Tap the Bounty of U.S. Natural Gas.  It lays out the fact of the astonishing ballooning of new, proven […]

Following up on my post of the other day, there’s a poll just out from the Financial Times and Harris:  in the US and the five largest EU countries, “Big majorities of the public … favor the building of more wind farms in their countries, varying from 90% in Spain and 87% in the U.S. […]

I don’t write about fossil fuels much here because I consider them, well, to be fossils.  The fossil fuel industries are rather large dinosaurs lumbering to their long, drawn-out deaths as the earth continues to get hotter.  It’s a scene from “Fantasia.”  Unfortunately, so is my vision.  Coal, oil and gas are going to be […]

With abject apologies to the Bard, this is just a note on the potentially enormous question of how much do we want to get at the vast amounts of shale gas available, worldwide, and what price is there to be paid.  I’ve written about the implications for greenhouse gas reductions in exploiting the enormous reserves […]

Most of us stumble through life never knowing how oil or gas or mining works. That’s fine — right up till we’re facing drilling or mining in our own backyard, or we want to take a stand on it. There’s a lot of fear about the process, which is completely justified — a lot can […]