“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 103

leaks from pipelines, but those data were for massive pipelines in the
former Soviet Union, not for facilities in the United States. h is list of
misunderstandings went on, but when they were all accounted for, it
was hard to say much about the rate of gas leaks based on the appar-
ently bombshell work.
h at wasn't the only problem. As several observers pointed out,
the scholars were comparing apples and oranges. h ey had estimated
the amount of methane that leaks for each “megajoule” of gas or coal.
A megajoule is a measure of how much energy the fuel contains. It
typically takes fewer megajoules of natural gas than coal to keep your
lights on, because most power plants that use gas are more ei cient than
ones that use coal. As a result, substituting gas for coal would cause
less methane to leak than the authors claimed. h e Cornell scientists
retorted that not all gas is used to make electricity—indeed, as of 2012,
a lit le more than a quarter of U.S. gas was used this way—but if you're
talking about replacing coal with gas in power plants, that's beside the
point. 42
h e last problem was with using the twenty-year timeline. h e schol-
ars were right that hit ing ambitious climate goals requires rapid action.
But this is mostly because the consequences of what we do today will
still be felt in a hundred years, not because the near-term impact of
emissions mat ers more than their long-term consequences. Because
the world already has so much infrastructure pumping out carbon, and
so much heat built up in the oceans that will eventually bubble out, it's
stuck with rising temperatures for the rest of the century. h is would
be true even if it stabilized greenhouse gas concentrations at low levels.
If you want to know what something will do to the ultimate scale of
global warming, then you must ask how it will change the ultimate tem-
perature peak. Because the high point is closer to a hundred years away
than to twenty, a hundred years is the time scale you need in studying
methane. If you combine this with the fact that methane emissions from
natural gas are still far smaller than carbon dioxide emissions, and then
crunch the numbers, you i nd that methane isn't nearly as big a problem
as people have claimed. 43
And what about that NOAA study of the rampant leaks in Colorado?
Soon at er it came out, I started digging into the data. h

e measurements