7 ms·

By the way, another problem they recently discovered is that states are ignoring or not properly doing air quality testing around fracking and some seriously ba

by ck2 13y ago

By the way, another problem they recently discovered is that states are ignoring or not properly doing air quality testing around fracking and some seriously bad chemicals are being released into the air. It is insane how we are going gung-ho into this with basically the whole USA as a testing ground, so what if it causes cancer clusters a decade later, the wells and the owners will be long gone.

sentenza 13y ago
It's also wreaking geopolitical havoc. The USA now have a lot of cheap energy available. Good for them. Bad for the green energy revolution in Europe.
- lugg 13y ago
  How so exactly? Less research funding? Offsetting the global prices making it cheaper in euro therefore more expensive to go green? Just curious. I wouldn't have thought it would be that big of a deal. I also wouldn't call fracking cheap in any sense of the word, far more expensive than liquid oil extraction and the repercussions of it are at least somewhat unknown so far. (Yeah yeah I know its totally safe if you do it right and Exxon et al are soo trustworthy when it comes to this stuff.)
  - m_mueller 13y ago
    It's amazing to me how people keep being so ignorant about the likely most troubling issue for the next two centuries. Climate prognosis for the next 80 years keeps getting worse. The most recent studies suggest one degree of warming per decade on average, assuming that CO2 production levels out just about now. Until humans are CO2 balanced, every ton we blow into the atmosphere simply keeps raising temperature with some time delay. 8 degrees warming on average worldwide means that some outlier regions, potentially the ones where raising temperatures are the most damaging, will see a temperature increase of 15 degrees. We're the frog inside the heating pot, except we even steer the gas burner - and we're still discussing which way to cook ourselves would be the most economical.
    - lugg 13y ago
      I was halfway through my post when I reworded it to avoid this point. Not really sure how hn likes the doom talk yet, but seeing as you brought it up.. I watched a ted talk a while back where the speaker basically laid it out like this: 2 degrees c = screwy weather patterns, extreme storms 4 degrees c = sea level rise, no real seasons anymore, just a big swinging mess from extreme drought to extreme storms 6 degrees c = mad max 8 degrees c, he basically said humans were long gone at this point. Remember, 1 degree average = massive localised changes. Hmm now that I've written all this, I'm not sure, were you speaking in celsius or fahrenheit? edit, specified celcius, also I think this may have been the guy but not quite the same talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznsPkJy2x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznsPkJy2x8
      - m_mueller 13y ago
        I was talking Celsius / Kelvin. I'm assuming the speaker was referring to Fahrenheit - I'm thinking mankind as a whole might be able to survive +8 degree K iff we find efficient synthetic food sources that work in such a climate (which I assume we will) - however it would probably be at a fraction of the population we have today - whether our civilization could survive an indirect genocide on a global scale to have the infrastructure to do this is another question. edit: re your edit: if it's true that +6 degrees sets perpetual heating mechanisms in motion which lead to +12 degrees by 2300 (as suggested in the ted talk), yes, we probably wouldn't survive +8 in the long run. it's damn scary, really - if we screw this up in the next 20 years, we basically damn the whole planet.
        adambard 13y ago
        You mean, mankind might survive +8 degrees F (about +4.5 deg celcius)
        m_mueller 13y ago
        I meant Celsius, but see my edit - I have to revise that guess. Given that +6 degree C will probably cause runaway warming processes to initiate (which I wasn't thinking about before), surviving for even a few more centuries suddenly becomes a tough order.
  - bsder 13y ago
    Less oil consumption by the US. Natural gas isn't as easy to transport or store, so it tends to get consumed locally. It's actually a good thing as it should displace some of the dirtier coal-fired power plants. Not to mention that gas-fired power plants should be easier to spin up and down with power demand. However, it lets the US off the hook in terms of political will to remove themselves from fossil fuels because the economics demands it. Fortunately, it seems like the world is now paying enough attention that green energy companies now can make their own way economically.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Actually, its going to be pretty awesome. We're going to start shipping our coal to China, since we'll have switched aging coal plants to combined natural gas turbines. The price of natgas will then go up in the future (duh); at that point, we'll either have to try to outbid China for the coal or drive more money into renewables. I'd like to think we'll go the right route, but this is America. We don't do the right thing until we've tried everything else.
    - lugg 13y ago
      You can convert natural gas into synthetic petrol pretty easily these days. New Zealand has been subsidizing its fuel usage this way with a 20%?synthetic at the pump mandate since the 70s?. As the price rises america will do the same if it isn't already. I thought that was kind of the point for fracking?
  - sentenza 13y ago
    Basically yes. "Going green" increases energy prices and thus comes with a disadvantage regarding the cost of production/doing business. This cost is proportional to the relative offset to the global energy prices caused by green energy. So if the shale gas revolution drags down energy prices, it becomes politically harder to maintain the "go green" plan over here.

by ck2 13y ago

sentenza 13y ago

It's also wreaking geopolitical havoc. The USA now have a lot of cheap energy available. Good for them. Bad for the green energy revolution in Europe.

lugg 13y ago
How so exactly? Less research funding? Offsetting the global prices making it cheaper in euro therefore more expensive to go green? Just curious. I wouldn't have thought it would be that big of a deal. I also wouldn't call fracking cheap in any sense of the word, far more expensive than liquid oil extraction and the repercussions of it are at least somewhat unknown so far. (Yeah yeah I know its totally safe if you do it right and Exxon et al are soo trustworthy when it comes to this stuff.)
- m_mueller 13y ago
  It's amazing to me how people keep being so ignorant about the likely most troubling issue for the next two centuries. Climate prognosis for the next 80 years keeps getting worse. The most recent studies suggest one degree of warming per decade on average, assuming that CO2 production levels out just about now. Until humans are CO2 balanced, every ton we blow into the atmosphere simply keeps raising temperature with some time delay. 8 degrees warming on average worldwide means that some outlier regions, potentially the ones where raising temperatures are the most damaging, will see a temperature increase of 15 degrees. We're the frog inside the heating pot, except we even steer the gas burner - and we're still discussing which way to cook ourselves would be the most economical.
  - lugg 13y ago
    I was halfway through my post when I reworded it to avoid this point. Not really sure how hn likes the doom talk yet, but seeing as you brought it up.. I watched a ted talk a while back where the speaker basically laid it out like this: 2 degrees c = screwy weather patterns, extreme storms 4 degrees c = sea level rise, no real seasons anymore, just a big swinging mess from extreme drought to extreme storms 6 degrees c = mad max 8 degrees c, he basically said humans were long gone at this point. Remember, 1 degree average = massive localised changes. Hmm now that I've written all this, I'm not sure, were you speaking in celsius or fahrenheit? edit, specified celcius, also I think this may have been the guy but not quite the same talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznsPkJy2x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznsPkJy2x8
    - m_mueller 13y ago
      I was talking Celsius / Kelvin. I'm assuming the speaker was referring to Fahrenheit - I'm thinking mankind as a whole might be able to survive +8 degree K iff we find efficient synthetic food sources that work in such a climate (which I assume we will) - however it would probably be at a fraction of the population we have today - whether our civilization could survive an indirect genocide on a global scale to have the infrastructure to do this is another question. edit: re your edit: if it's true that +6 degrees sets perpetual heating mechanisms in motion which lead to +12 degrees by 2300 (as suggested in the ted talk), yes, we probably wouldn't survive +8 in the long run. it's damn scary, really - if we screw this up in the next 20 years, we basically damn the whole planet.
      - adambard 13y ago
        You mean, mankind might survive +8 degrees F (about +4.5 deg celcius)
        m_mueller 13y ago
        I meant Celsius, but see my edit - I have to revise that guess. Given that +6 degree C will probably cause runaway warming processes to initiate (which I wasn't thinking about before), surviving for even a few more centuries suddenly becomes a tough order.
- bsder 13y ago
  Less oil consumption by the US. Natural gas isn't as easy to transport or store, so it tends to get consumed locally. It's actually a good thing as it should displace some of the dirtier coal-fired power plants. Not to mention that gas-fired power plants should be easier to spin up and down with power demand. However, it lets the US off the hook in terms of political will to remove themselves from fossil fuels because the economics demands it. Fortunately, it seems like the world is now paying enough attention that green energy companies now can make their own way economically.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Actually, its going to be pretty awesome. We're going to start shipping our coal to China, since we'll have switched aging coal plants to combined natural gas turbines. The price of natgas will then go up in the future (duh); at that point, we'll either have to try to outbid China for the coal or drive more money into renewables. I'd like to think we'll go the right route, but this is America. We don't do the right thing until we've tried everything else.
  - lugg 13y ago
    You can convert natural gas into synthetic petrol pretty easily these days. New Zealand has been subsidizing its fuel usage this way with a 20%?synthetic at the pump mandate since the 70s?. As the price rises america will do the same if it isn't already. I thought that was kind of the point for fracking?
- sentenza 13y ago
  Basically yes. "Going green" increases energy prices and thus comes with a disadvantage regarding the cost of production/doing business. This cost is proportional to the relative offset to the global energy prices caused by green energy. So if the shale gas revolution drags down energy prices, it becomes politically harder to maintain the "go green" plan over here.