Re:Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
by dredmorbius on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @05:52AM
(#21522774)
Natural gas is at best a bridge technology.
Resources are ultimately more limited than oil, and have grown only through extremely expensive, and environmentally damaging (groundwater contamination, earthquakes) hydrofracking. Simply on a financial basis that appears unsustainable.
Natgas has and will help smooth the transition. It's not a stable goal, however. Lifeboat, not safe land.
Natural gas. The year-over-year growth in natural gas deployment is greater than the entire historic deployment of solar power. Let that sink in.
I'll be optimistic when the total fossil fuel footprint stops growing. Hell, I'll be optimistic when it stops growing exponentially. We aren't there. We aren't anywhere near there. We don't have the foggiest plan of how we will get there. Germany killed its coal power industry, and transitioned right into burning Russian natural gas.
And this is just in electrical generation. Electrical generation is only 20% of our overall energy usage. In order to transition the rest of our society to green energy, we'd have to triple our overall electricity production.
Solar and wind deployments aren't even able to keep up with increased demand in electricity growth. How you expect them to triple our overall electricity generation capacity anytime soon is beyond me.