“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 98

Environmentalists are wary of the local risks posed by fracking, but a
powerful weapon against coal looks awfully at ractive to many of them
too.
A heated debate has thus ensued among experts, activists, and poli-
cymakers who worry about climate change. For some, since natural gas
is only half as bad as coal, it is a godsend. Switch your electricity source
from a typical coal plant to a regular gas one, and emissions are cut in
half. For others, gas is ini nitely worse than zero carbon energy sources
such as wind, nuclear, or even clean coal. Change your power source
from a traditional coal plant to a conventional gas one, which dumps
its carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, they contend, and
you're missing an opportunity to wipe out your emissions entirely.
Which of these is the right way of thinking about natural gas? It all
depends on your emissions goal and on the time scale you're thinking
about. If you're a 350-or-bust sort of person, only zero carbon fuels will
do; the dif erence between coal and gas is a distinction between shades
of disaster. For everyone else, though, natural gas has the potential to
play a strong and positive role.
h ere is lit le question that the i rst few years of the shale boom have
slammed coal. As of May 2012, U.S. power producers had generated 561
terawat -hours of electricity from coal for the year, a 25 percent drop
from two years before. 30 (A terawat -hour is a billion kilowat -hours;
a kilowat -hour is enough to power a normal light bulb for a minute.)
Rising natural-gas-i red generation i lled in most of the other side of
the story. 31 In April 2012, natural gas actually came within a whisker of
edging out coal, an event never before seen in the history of American
electric power. Replacing half the coal-i red power plants in the United
States with gas-i red ones could ultimately cut U.S. carbon dioxide
emissions by nearly 20 percent. 32
h e rapid gains seen so far at the expense of coal could not have
happened (or at least not so quickly) with renewable energy. Between
2010 and 2012, renewable energy increased its contribution by roughly
50 terawat -hours, an impressive achievement. But that paled when com-
pared to the decline in coal. h e rise in renewables would have had to be
more than i ve times as large to deal coal the same blow that natural gas
had. Put another way, instead of rising by about 30 percent, renewable