Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry
Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong. Very wrong.
By Bill McKibben | March 23, 2016 |
The Nation
Global warming is, in the end, not
about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It
actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere,
where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would
otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it
doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many
speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the
chemistry wrong. Really wrong.
There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide,
which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet methane, otherwise known as CH4.
In February, Harvard researchers published
an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters.
Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the
nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002
and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more
than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in
methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere.
To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2. Partly as a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across
the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that burn natural
gas, which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas
releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow.
But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial
surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas
infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record
quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much,
much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2.
But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the
EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the
New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t
really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and
your index fund actually stands at 11,000.
These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains
from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed
coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years.
The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling
ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the
planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris.
It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spre2ad.
The Obama administration, to its credit, seems to be waking up to
the problem. Over the winter, the EPA began to revise its methane
calculations, and in early March, the United States reached an agreement
with Canada to begin the arduous task of stanching some of the leaks
from all that new gas infrastructure. But none of this gets to the core
problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking. Carbon dioxide is
driving the great warming of the planet, but CO2 isn’t doing it alone. It’s time to take methane seriously.
To understand how we got here, it’s necessary to remember what a
savior fracked natural gas looked like to many people, environmentalists
included. As George W. Bush took hold of power in Washington, coal was
ascendant, here and around the globe. Cheap and plentiful, it was most
visibly underwriting the stunning growth of the economy in China, where,
by some estimates, a new coal-fired power plant was opening every week.
The coal boom didn’t just mean smoggy skies over Beijing; it meant the
planet’s invisible cloud of carbon dioxide was growing faster than ever,
and with it the certainty of dramatic global warming.
So lots of people thought it was great news when natural-gas
wildcatters began rapidly expanding fracking in the last decade.
Fracking involves exploding the sub-surface geology so that gas can leak
out through newly opened pores; its refinement brought online new shale
deposits across the continent—most notably the Marcellus Shale,
stretching from West Virginia up into Pennsylvania and New York. The
quantities of gas that geologists said might be available were so vast
that they were measured in trillions of cubic feet and in centuries of
supply.
The apparently happy fact was that when you burn natural gas, it
releases half as much carbon dioxide as coal. A power plant that burned
natural gas would therefore, or so the reasoning went, be half as bad
for global warming as a power plant that burned coal. Natural gas was
also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win
situation. You could appease the environmentalists with their incessant
yammering about climate change without having to run up the cost of
electricity. It would be painless environmentalism, the equivalent of
losing weight by cutting your hair.
