Willa Glickman
“I do rule out banning fracking, because we need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero-emissions,” said Joe Biden in the presidential debate on October 22, 2020, referring to the main extraction method of the US natural gas industry, hydraulic fracturing. Climate change generally was a surprise hot topic of the debates, as Donald Trump sought to use the Democrat’s position on cutting fossil-fuel use as a wedge issue against him, but fracking was a particularly contentious point since both nominees knew that Pennsylvania—the nation’s second-largest producer of natural gas—was a crucial swing state in the election (Biden eventually carried it by just over a percentage point).
Biden seemed to want it both ways: he spoke of moving toward a fully renewable economy, but wouldn’t put the kibosh on oil and gas. “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels,” Biden clarified to reporters after the debate. “We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.”
A common argument in favor of fracking among those who acknowledge the perils of climate change—and a popular industry talking point—is that the abundant natural gas fracking produces will serve as a “bridge fuel,” a lower-emissions alternative to coal that will tide us over while renewable technologies continue to develop and drop in price. The industry’s clean energy credentials are dubious, and the process of fracking itself raises a host of health and pollution concerns, but the shift toward natural gas is already well underway. Natural gas surpassed coal as the primary source of US electricity generation for the first time ever in 2016, and increased its share to 39 percent last year, while coal, renewables, and nuclear were each responsible for around 20 percent.
Even many natural gas advocates agree that current levels of use are not compatible with increasingly urgent long-term climate goals—the bridge, in other words, is supposed to have an off-ramp. But given the US’s disastrously slow track record of curbing oil and coal use in the face of vested economic interests and the continued expansion of natural gas infrastructure today, how long will what Biden called the “transition” take?
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