BillHustonBlog: Post Carbon Institute exposes "Natural" Gas Industry misinformation

From the Post Carbon Institute:

Back in November, Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of America's largest natural gas company, told 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl that:  

"In the last few years, we've discovered the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias of oil in the form of natural gas in the United States. Not one, but two."

Fears over the environmental impacts of shale gas drilling — the technique that has led to claims by industry of 100 years of cheap domestic natural gas — are growing, but it seems that everyone is buying the hype that natural gas is cheap, abundant, and "cleaner" than alternatives.

Our esteemed colleague Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, told Stahl, "What we need to do is we need to promote gas as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil, but hold the industry accountable for tighter standards."

We at PCI have become increasingly concerned that energy and environmental policy was being driven by assumptions that didn't pass the smell test. Is shale gas really cheap, abundant, and clean?

So we turned to David Hughes — Post Carbon Institute's Fossil Fuels Fellow — to try to answer that question. His conclusion? That these assumptions are wrong on all counts, as PCI Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg writes in his scathing foreword.

You know as well as we do that energy lies at the heart of everything. And we face unprecedented environmental, economic, and societal challenges as a result of our continued dependence on depleting fossil fuels.

So while the subject of natural gas may seem wonky or irrelevant to our daily lives, it's anything but.

Please take the time to read the report and share it with others.

Thank you, as always, for your support of our work and, more important, your own efforts to put us on a more resilient and sustainable path.

Yours,

Asher Miller
Executive Director