It's not at all, that's a terrible emotional analogy that's 100% ridiculous.

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?

Having worked around fracking rigs and gotten covered in fracking fluid during blowouts... and having read the MSDSs for fracking fluid... I'm not convinced the lower emissions were worth the cost in groundwater purity. And boy, do West Europeans care about their groundwater purity.

Generally you only frack where shale oil is, Germany you'd most likely use normal deep drilling.

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.

It's clear that you care about the environment so I'm just going to say that, based on my firsthand experience as a roughneck who did fracking jobs, that it's probably the most greenwashed industry in the world and even if your opinion of it is based on direct reading of official hard numbers, those numbers are gamed at every handoff between field and office. Probably at every handoff between office and press release as well, though I was never in that loop.

So in your mind coal produces the same amount of emissions as fracking just about.

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.

> 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?

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 :)

That's not the whole story. The Netherlands refrains from developing its natural gas fields to their full extent and yet the damage caused by the resulting earthquakes is considerable and widespread - very much like a nuke, just over a much longer timespan:

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.

How deciding against using an available energy source that might might help with alleviating short-term problems (nuclear power being an even more obvious and readily available option) could be considered even remotely similar to nuking a major city is beyond me.

You don't just start a fracking operation "in the short term".

The same applies to building new LNG terminals, drastically increasing the storage capabilities for renewable energy, and making the power grid sufficiently resilient to be able to entirely rely on renewable energy.

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.

Unfortunately, both for fracking and renewables, technical problems are the least of your concern when you want to build anything in Germany.