The fossil-fuel industry has been busy playing a deceitful game in response to climate change. The playbook is to argue that, although the fossil fuel industry has largely been responsible for the problem of climate change, it is now the key to the solution.
Although coal and oil may be dirty, gas is much cleaner and can be a bridge between the dirty fossil fuels and the fledgling renewable technologies. Clean gas, goes the argument, can have an “indefinite future” in the fight against climate change. Gas is supposedly “green”. Methane leakage means that gas is not clean or green. What the scientists found is that gas has no future if we are to try and limit global warming to 2 degrees. There has been a massive expansion in gas in the US and also in Europe. Much of this comes from shale and is extracted by fracking.
Scientists and environmentalist campaigners have warned that gas is not green at all, due to many reasons, but one of the main ones is the potential loss of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Research by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research argues that gas is not a bridge fuel to a clean energy future and that the methane emissions from gas have been severely underestimated. The report Natural Gas and Climate Change by Professor Kevin Anderson and Doctor John Broderick reveals the urgency with which Europe needs to phase-out all fossil fuels. The report concludes that “there is categorically no role for bringing additional fossil fuel reserves, including gas, into production,” if we are to meet the Paris 2°C.
Antoine Simon, a spokesman for FoE said: “It is intolerable to see the European commission and its members giving support to an increasing number of gas projects that will lock us in to decades of fossil fuel addiction."
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/11/07/scientists-argue-gas-isnt-green-call-urgent-phase-out-across-eu
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