Ideally, NG developments are just part of the picture --- they occur in the context of other developments, including renewable energy, atomic energy, and increased energy efficiency.
None of the stated downsides for NG are wrong, and those familiar with depletion rates for shale gas have justified concerns. The first linked article pays no attention to other concurrent and positive energy developments, thus giving negatives more weight than they deserve.
It remains to be seen whether by themselves, market forces will dictate the optimal course for NG, or energy. These days, that's the question concerning just about everything, isn't it? We're seeing a divergence in approaches; command economies take a hybrid approach; corporations and the economy still take their cues from elites and government, while here corporate forces pretty well dictate outcomes; the role of government is discredited.
We're at the confluence of ideas and events that have reshaped the world, with new modulators in the form of impending scarcity and ecological concerns. With the diminished role of government in North America we're pretty well reduced to what corporations give us in finance and industry. We have no effective input on the course of future events; we're reduced to the role of passive observers with impotent votes.
So NG and indeed, energy as a whole will take a course that may or may not align with what was once called the public interest. Reagan said "Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."
Command economies reject that message; yet even as we watch our relative decline, we cling to the idea that we have a better solution.
---
To some extent, advances made by NG will be limited by large capital requirements for infrastructure and transport; that may be a disguised positive. The first linked article argues for coal; I've argued history and economics which forecast that dirty old coal will re-emerge despite ecological objections, simply because it will be a low-cost alternative. Gregor treats it nicely here:
gregor.us
Here, current thinking is that market forces will bring NG to its proper place in the spectrum of energy use.
They might. Even if they do, we'll get a temporary reprieve from greater problems for which we should have prepared long ago, and now, have no coherent plan.
Jim |
