Freedom Gas bag Flies as Freedom Fries.

Freedom Gasbag.

As the DOE's head, the first certifiably mentally retarded cabinet member in US history, calls the export of Natural Gas to competitive economies "Freedom Gas", The Freedom Gasbag that hired him is hoisted in London in the form of a blimp. Axios meanwhile helps the administration out with a puff piece entitled, Natural gas is helping combat climate change. However, Freedom Fries yet another country, as India is becoming the poster child for Climate Derangement, posting temperatures in excess of 50degreesC (I'm sure it's too much to hope for, but maybe the extremes in drought and flooding, wildfires and torrential downpours, will wake the American public up to the fact that Extreme is not something to be mindlessly in pursuit of ... yeah ... that's likely). Citing as a positive the fact that,

"Natural gas was the fastest-growing energy source last year", which apparently is an an unalloyed good, since, according to the received wisdom, "it emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal."

If Freedom Fries, Democracy Bakes.

But coal demand in the world's actually growing economies, the ones that actually produce things, isn't abating, nor is it expected to for another 5 years or more (and if they predict 5 years, ten to one 10 to 20 years is closer to the truth). In fact, India, despite the havoc wreaked by climate derangement, saw the largest annual demand growth, reaching 3.9%, "but a large-scale boost to the nation’s renewable energy sector should help slow it down in future" (would you please stop laughing?), according to the report.

The operative word being "should".

There are problems.

Coal does not explode. Whether San Bruno in California, or Massachusetts whose natural gas distribution system had more than 34,000 leaks reported (which means far more of them existed) in 2017, including almost 7,500 "Class 1" leaks),  and resulted in enormous natural gas explosions and fires in three Massachusetts communities last September that have cost Columbia Gas more than $1 billion. That Billion dollars, along with similar amounts in California and Ohio, must be earned, so more gas burned. And that 's just the industry. The towns, the consumers, all have to rebuild, all energy-intensive activities that eat up the CO2 savings of burning natural gas instead of coal:
multi-billions of dollars that have to be generated by other concerns to make up for the loss in property and productivity, neither of which is included in the "half the CO2 as coal" estimations .

... or West Virginia, where TransCanada Corp. CEO Russ Girling pledged "years of safe, reliable and efficient operation" last year when his company launched the Leach Xpress natural gas pipeline.


Five months later, it blew up, snapped by a landslide.

And that's just the dramatic, impossible-to-hide feature of the explosion in the use of Natural Gas. The far more insidious and extensive factor in natural gas' danger to our lives comes from the industry's growing amount of leakage. 

And slashing the nation’s methane leak rate will require a collaborative effort between industry and government. But utilities have little incentive to plug leaking natural gas, a fact which, when coupled with the fact that a methane leak rate of greater than 3 percent,  results in no immediate climate benefits from retiring coal-fired power plants in favor of natural gas power plants. Plus, all the flaring of methane isn't considered as leaks, so the CO2 they are pumping directly into the atmosphere has to be added on top of the leakage of methane. But it isn't.

But this is Trump's Amerika, so just the opposite is occurring. Industry and government, together with the press, as evidenced by the Axios article referenced above, collude instead to downplay the existence, number of, and severity of leaks. And with the current leader of the DOE nothing but the typical Texan, a State notorious for its collusion with the fossil fuel industry, lack of enforcement for regulations they have nothing but contempt for, is coupled with a president that is a complete fossil fool, new regulations will NOT be written and the ones currently on the books will simply be ignored, anyone pointing out that fact simply labelled a whistle-blower and fired.

Then, over and above all these occurring problem, is the newest one: LNG. Liquefying natural gas is a high energy consumption process and the US has already "Paid it forward", building LNG terminals at great cost, both fiscal and environmental, to enable the continued process of fracking to rage across the continent. But the energy required, and the resultant CO2 thereby exhausted into the atmosphere, to not only build the terminals and specialized shipping containers, aren't a part of the "emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal" calculation either. And those are just the sunken costs. The day-to-day CO2 costs of first liquefying, then shipping (burning the dirtiest fuel burned in any application in the world: thick, sulfur-laden bunker fuel: a cheap, dirty, viscous, residual oil containing many harmful chemicals. It is a tar too thick to be burned by any vehicle other than an enormous ship) and then de-liquefying the Natural gas at its endpoints, also aren't taken into Natural Gas' CO2 calculations.

So you can sell the advantages of Natural Gas all you wish, but when the largest producer of Fossil Fuels in the country that is the Numero Uno of Flaring puts a Cowboy Capitalistic-yahoo in charge, the reality is that now that we're losing the aerosol effects of burning coal in the US,  the immediate effects of replacing that combustion with the much more dangerous, dirty, and double whammy that Natural Gas delivers, releasing rapidly increasing amounts of methane AND carbon dioxide, the accelerating rate at which climate change is galloping over previous estimates of its speed and severity will continue as long as we insist that stepping on the gas gives us a free ride .