It's like saying France could easily end the war in Ukraine today, they just choose not to nuke Moscow.

But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking?

Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?

Shale oil deposits are usually found in harsh landscapes where not many people live.

Fracking fluid is just 90% water, 9.5% is sand, 0.5% additives. Those additives are normal cleaning products like salts, antifreeze.

Yeah you don't want to drink them but in small quantities they are fine to be in the middle of nowhere.

You'd rather have more global emissions than some small amount of pool cleaner in a remote desolate landscape?

Would you rather we burn our trash vs putting it in a landfill too? Because that's the same line of thinking.

Not even that but every country and it's industries that have been transitioning from coal to nat. gas are fudging the numbers to pretend it's better?

And you know that because you were a roughneck "who did fracking jobs", therefore you can see through these numbers.

That's quite a story, but I'll go with the breakdown of energy production by source, and the tracked emissions of energy production trends.

It's quite clear the numbers are fudged for methane production at every level from the field to the PR office - I honestly didn't know that was a controversial statement. You don't get data added to a report on what you don't measure, to begin with.

I'm mostly responding to you since I had similar arguments about 20 or so years ago when the transition to natural gas (and off of nuclear btw, not just coal!) was being discussed while being massively subsidized. I felt it was a foolish decision then, and still do now.

Why? Society will not act unless there is an emergency. They will then focus on a single solitary solution. If you decide natural gas is going to be built while we build out our nuclear (or other) capacity, you'll find out that 30 years later you will have a whole lot of natural gas generation and be left with no nuclear industry whatsoever and very little capability to quickly restart it. Seems that prediction is playing out.

So now we get to burn all the cheap natural gas before we finally get into a big enough of an emergency to perhaps find something somewhat sustainable long-term. We'll see what short-term solutions present themselves in the meantime, unfortunately I think those short term political solutions may lie in a mountaintop in eastern Kentucky.

So to answer your overall question - yes, I can fully believe transitioning from coal to natural gas while we effectively ignored all other energy investments (at scale) was a stupid move in a long-term environmental lense. In 100 years I think it will be obvious that if fracking had not been invented it would have been better overall for the environment. Time will tell!

I also am a natural pessimist :)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61901033

Russia on the other hand is largely uninhabited and its gas deposits don't require fracking - they only started testing the technology this year.

Those measures take years to decades to materialise to a significant degree. Still, all those measures are currently being implemented, and rightfully so.

In comparison, developing a new fracking site from a mere technical point of view takes less than a year.

That's not to say we should do one or the other or prefer fracking over renewables. However, when the alternatives are to either continue to be at the mercy of a potentially hostile power or to use less environmentally friendly energy sources (such as coal or lignite) or to accept regular power outages as a consequence, simultaneously exploring all possible better avenues (including nuclear energy, which as mentioned is still readily available right now) is pretty much a no-brainer.

So Germany can just as well continue to dig up and burn lignite instead of starting fracking.

2. It's very small amounts and it can be captured (and is in some instances)

3. The US reduced emissions while growing energy output thanks to nat. gas displacing coal.

We don't have to take your word for it, we can see that nat. gas energy production is cleaner than coal, because we have actual data from our transition off of coal to nat. gas.

The methane talking point is just that. It's not an actual issue, and you can see it's not from overall numbers.

If you truly cared about emissions you'd want the current best solution that drives it down. That would mean displacing coal at all cost. The current best way to do that is nat. gas and fracking.

Nuclear isn't built up as a baseline, renewables aren't ready for peak loads, and outsourcing it to someone else only shuffles it around. So... natural gas it is...

Ditching a fossil fuel to another fossil fuel is just perpetuating the problem, it's not solving anything. It's like going from a meth addiction to a cocaine addition, sure cocaine isn't as bad, you'll still be absolutely fucked up in a decade though

But instead of coming up with useless analogies about cocaine and falling back on studies you didn't even reference, please respond to each of my points instead of talking past me.

Maybe start with the fact that there are no replacements ready for coal other than nat. gas.

I'm all for building up nuclear energy and even battery banks. But currently nothing is available other than nat. gas to take the load that coal has produced.

Soo... the best way to reduce emissions is to use nat. gas until a solution is built up and ready. (cough, nuclear, cough)

Renewables will most likely never be able to handle the peak load, you need a baseline source, that's either fossil fuels or nuclear energy thanks to their densities.

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-links-fracki...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27012022/fracking-air-pol...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4016083/

Studies you don't like are fake right ?

> I've worked on companies who organized those through call centers to spread the misinformation about fracking.

Is that supposed to make you sound more truth-worthy ?

They're in top 30 by energy production in the world, around 50% of the energy produced being nuclear. And there untapped gas reserves as well. Coal has been disrupted since Russia invaded the east in 2014

If I'm not mistaken, nuclear capacity was to be expanded considerably in 2022 - 2023, to sell more energy to EU (specifically Poland)

Compare a map of Ukraine’s gas deposits [1] with one of Russian-occupied territory [2].

> oil and gas, both items that Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of

Ukraine has enough to rival, if not dethrone, Moscow [3]. It is accurate to say the Kremlin is burying Russians in large part to protect its energy profits.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-gas-potential-of-ind...

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/War_Mapper/status/158542369079528...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_Ukraine#Prove...