Fouling The Nest - Followup

Some reading for ya today - to go with your assignment to search out and watch Gasland & Gasland2.

Bloomburg via Seattle Times:

Riding shotgun in a Toyota 4Runner rigged with a carbon-fiber pipe and a spectrometer, Duke University researcher Rob Jackson trolled through Washington, D.C., searching for evidence that natural gas is not quite the climate champion President Obama claimed last month.

He was replicating a study he did in Boston, measuring leaks from creaky natural-gas pipes. In addition to being a possible safety risk, methane, the key component of natural gas, is 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. And leaks may undercut much of the climate benefits of gas.
“First and foremost this is a greenhouse-gas question,” Jackson said as he drove near the Capitol. “What we are trying to find out is how big a problem this is for cities.”

Obama's cheerleading notwithstanding, the plan seems to be to go forward with Shale Gas, but to look for the drawbacks and (I'm really just kinda hoping here) to push for a real conversion to renewables as we go.

I don't like the way this feels, tho'.  It looks a lot like we're gettin' suckered again, cuz let's see if we can guess what we're up against.

Here's a piece from MasterResource - "a free market energy blog":

Last month, the EPA released its latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory, in which the agency significantly lowered its estimate of the amount of methane emissions from natural gas systems. But even with those dramatic revisions, EPA still has a long way to go to get this right.

So the struggle continues.  Government remains largely captive to Big Bidness, and we get only the slant that the PR Slicksters pressure the feds to give us.