Thursday, January 3, 2013

Natural Gas Fables and Energy Independence Myths | Common Dreams

Natural Gas Fables and Energy Independence Myths | Common Dreams
"Unless you’ve been dead for the past couple of years, you’ve been hearing lots of enthusiastic forecasts like this, but not one of them is true. They are generally accompanied by sweeping predictions about geopolitics that are equally misleading, at least insofar as they depend on assumptions about cheap and plentiful supplies of shale gas and other forms of “unconventional” oil and gas.

For example, we are assured that the United States, no longer dependent on Arab oil, will break its habit of intervening militarily in the Middle East, since what happens there will no longer matter to Washington. But this new era of cheap and plentiful energy from fossil fuels will also result, alas, in sky-high greenhouse gas emissions and runaway global warming.
These statements are also untrue, at least in the formulation given above, since they are based on quite mistaken assumptions."

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