Technology

It's environmental geopolitics 🤷 seeing widespread adoption of a policy that the US (Reagan) ignored get traction in Ireland helps highlight how shortsighted that view was. Considering the US has had a small hand in building the world's energy supply, it seems at least tangential to remind people why such policies have existed.

I'd recommend reading the EU's reasoning for allowing both natural gas and nuclear energy projects to receive "green" funding - https://www.dw.com/en/european-commission-declares-nuclear-and-gas-to-be-green/a-60614990

But basically it burns much, much cleaner than coal, and is easy to fire up, so works great whilst transitioning the baseload to nuclear and renewable power.

The difference is to turn a large coal generator off, then back on again generally takes about a week. Which makes them completely useless for providing overnight power when solar isn't available.

Coal can only really be paired with something like hydro where you know well in advance that the hydro power plant is going to run out of water.

These days coal power plants often actually pay for the grid to take power from them. They are fine with making a loss during the day if it means they can make a profit at night when nobody has solar. This significantly impacts the financial viability of solar power and is the main reason there aren't very many large scale solar plants in the world.

Because of coal - you can only make significant profits selling power to the grid at night. And nearly all solar power is primarily intended to be consumed by whoever owns the solar panels.

I am not an expert, but I try to be pragmatic. Here's what socalgas.com says about the topic.

You're right that natural gas is methane and that leaks are bad. However I think a nuanced view is important here for a few reasons.

• Many developed countries have the infrastructure and workforce in place to not just safely deliver methane to buildings as an energy source but also to correct leaks.

• Methane can be produced via a variety of sources both at a large and small scale. I've toyed with the idea of making a black soldier fly larvae farm and methane would be a by product

• Gas tanks to hold methane have maximum a lifespan of 10 years. However many other methods of storing potential energy have a much shorter maximum lifespan, making methane a decent backup energy source in cases of emergency.

I don't know how good the energy conversion rate of burning methane is but I would be surprised if it is low.

Personally I think we should leverage every option, especially the lower hanging fruit before dismissing these options as being not ideal when the alternative is continuing to do worse.

But the methane gets burned to CO2. Sure leaks are worse as a greenhouse gas, but then you'd need to count air pollution, radiation, water pollution, etc. from coal mining and burning too.