“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 97

from the tar sands gives a Toyota Prius the same impact on climate as
a Hummer using gasoline made from oil. ” 28 His assertion rested on the
fact that some oil sands operations produce three times the emissions
of extracting conventional oil. But most emissions from oil come when
it's burned in your tank, not when it's removed from the ground. On
a “well-to-wheels” basis, oil sands crude entails somewhere between 5
and 15 percent greater emissions than most other oil. 29 h at's small beer
in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately a Prius using gasoline made
from oil sands would generate less than a quarter of the emissions of a
Hummer using conventional oil.

m m m

h e entire mat er of climate change looks radically dif erent when it
comes to natural gas. Almost every alternative to oil (save synthetic
fuels made from coal) is bet er than crude when it comes to climate
change. h e same can't be said for alternatives to natural gas. Some, like
nuclear power and solar energy, are indeed superior in emissions terms,
but others, most notably coal, are decidedly not.
h e shale gas boom arrived at an odd moment in American politics. In
2008, both presidential candidates at the time, John McCain and Barack
Obama, promised to implement aggressive policies to combat climate
change. Both pledged to pursue cap-and-trade systems that would drive
down U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by penalizing the use of dirty fuels.
h en the drive collapsed. An economic crisis combined with intense
political polarization turned cap-and-trade into a dirty word and a politi-
cal nonstarter. h ose people who feared global warming most began to
worry that coal, the worst climate polluter of all fuels, would become
ascendant again.
And then something strange happened: another fossil fuel appeared
to come to the rescue. Just as cap-and-trade was collapsing, the
shale boom was rising. Natural gas has long been regarded as the
cleanest-burning fossil fuel; estimates typically peg it as only half as
bad for climate change as coal when both are used to produce the same
amount of electricity. Cheap natural gas would be as powerful a dis-
incentive to coal-plant construction as a strict climate bill could be.