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Rod Adams's avatar

Cheap natural gas is an incredible boon for America. Gas itself is an irreplaceable raw material that isn't just a fuel source.

So wouldn't it be worthwhile for us to work on pathways that can keep gas cheap and available for as long as possible? Our progeny many generations from now will thank us if we don't use up all of the cheap, reasonably available methane as fast as we can.

Natural gas interests, of course, want us to burn as much as we can now so that they can book their profits and so that their product becomes ever more rare and valuable in the relatively near future decades.

A fair portion of the war against coal has been directly – sometimes openly – funded by natural gas interests like the late Aubrey McClendon. He gave the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign $25 M between 2007 and 2010. Those years were at the start of the shale gale that his company – Chesapeake Energy – was working hard to create). Those donations were planned to continue for an indefinite period of time before the scheme was discovered by reporters at Time Magazine.

https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/

Bloomberg also has substantial interests in the continued prosperity of natural gas. Some of those who want to move as many end users as possible from direct gas consumption in furnaces and stoves know that similar quantities of gas will be burned to supply the electricity that replaces those uses.

Bottom line - gas is great and doesn't deserve to be demonized. Some gas interests, however, don't have humanity's long term interests at heart.

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Michael Farris's avatar

Became a fan of Robert Bryce when I heard him give a keynote address to an API conference that I attended in early 2024. He speaks the truth in plain language with numbers and quotes that cannot be disputed by any rational, honest person.

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