RSS Feed
December 8th, 2017 
Awake Goy The gas industry depicts itself as a much cleaner alternative to dirtier fuels like coal and oil. Dave McCurdy, the president and chief executive of the American Gas Association, is a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. In June, he told HuffPost that, “We’re the mainstream guys,” as opposed to “extreme kinds of candidates” on both sides. Natural gas ― the majority of which is captured through the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking ― produces far less carbon dioxide than oil or coal, the source of smog and the main cause of climate change. The U.S. vowed to reduce its CO2 emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, and the gas industry and its allies take credit for shrinking the country’s carbon footprint as gas surpassed coal as utilities’ main fuel for electricity.
But natural gas is mostly composed of methane, which traps 30 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Methane emissions are on the rise, in part because of the fracking boom. The U.S. could be responsible for up to 60 percent of the worldwide surge in human-caused methane emissions since 2002, according to a Harvard University study released last year. The researchers said there was too little data to identify specific sources, but the increase tracked the boom in shale oil and gas production across the country, which leaks large amounts of methane from drilling sites and pipelines.
Source Article from https://popularresistance.org/leaked-powerpoint-reveals-gas-industrys-playbook-for-waging-pipeline-fights/
Posted in 
Tags: 
