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The release of methane from coal production, storage and transit accounts for less than 8% of total methane emissions in the US. 24% comes from natural gas production, storage and transit. The tanks and pipe lines are far from “air tight”, even if they meet industry defined standards for the term. Source for EPA numbers on emissions if you are curious
The idea of gas power plants as a supplementary system to pick up the slack is a sham, the vast majority of gas generator capacity being built does not shut down when non-emitting systems can meet demand. Especially in the context of replacing coal plants with gas plants. These are base load plants, not peaker plants.
Every time we build a new base load gas plant to replace a coal plant, we’re locking our selves into burning and leaking methane for another 30 years. Something we can not afford to be doing given that we can not wait 30 years to reach net zero emissions, even 20 years is a catastrophe.
It’s bad faith to try and move the goal post and act like this conversation was about anything but heating effect and climate change.
It is a fact that natural gas (read methane) infrastructure and power generation has a greater heating impact than coal.
Edit: want to be very clear here, I’m not sayin coal is clean. I’m not saying it is good to live next to a coal plant. I’m not saying build more coal plants.
I’m saying, don’t replace coal with natural gas. Put in solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal, hydro electric, ANYTHING but natural gas. If none of that is possible, then leave the damn coal plant until it is possible. Locking our selves in to 20~30 years of gas is basically guaranteeing a catastrophic climate disaster.
Natural gas is 95% methane. Coal is a fraction of a fraction of a percent methane. When coal leaks, it ends up as a bunch of rocks on the side of a rail track. When natural gas infrastructure leaks, it dumps Megatons of methane into the atmosphere. The research and reporting on this topic are clear, natural gas has a significantly higher heating impact than coal, with no doubt.
Natural gas as a “bridge fuel” was just as much a lie as “clean coal”, a PR campaign to support lobbyists in their efforts to prevent regulation.
Natural gas can never be clean ether, and the cost of sealing up the supply chain is more expensive than just drilling more, some states have tried to put in laws to set a minimum leak rate and natural gas companies lobbied to prevent the bills from passing. Far from the first example of natural gas companies lobbying against laws that would cut in to their profits.
Natural gas as a bridge fuel was a distraction to divert the public away from actual solutions. It’s worse for climate change than coal is and plenty of in-depth reports, papers, and research bear this out.
Honestly, better than gas. Like, yah, natural gas has lower co2 per unit of power at the power plant, but there’s methane leaking all along the supply chain, a green house gas 40 times more potent than Co2.
between 5-10% of the methane that comes out of a well ends up leaking somewhere along the line. To make the heating effect even break even with coal the leak rate would have to be closer to 1%.
Not advocating to keep burning coal, just saying that what we’ve been replacing it with is worse. I’d rather we keep a coal plant open and wait for an opportunity to replace with with a non-carbon emitting power source than build a shiny new gas plant that’s going to be kept around for at least 20 years.
8·13 days agoMad Maximillian: the slope warrior. He can only go down hill for so long before he must fight his way up the lift.
Lmao, they use solid tires. Probably because of how hard it is to replace a punctured tube on a wheel like this. Solid tires have no bounce, so in turn with a rigid wheel you get a rigid tire. So no cushioning. You get every bump and bounce of the road right in to the frame.
Corporate/marketing decision making is basically just a slow moving AI. It takes in a huge amount of data, process it through a black box of processing and decision making, and spits out a decision that is pure hallucination.
They do work, but are basically worse in every way.
Bearings are really impressive pieces of engineering that require really tight tolerances to reduce wear and friction. On a traditional bike you have a small bearing at the center that is a standard mass manufactured commodity part.
On these they’re turning the whole wheel in to a giant speciality bearing. It has to spin faster, has to deal with force being applied to a small section rather than the whole bearing, and has way more surface area where dirt could get in and grind against the surfaces.
So these are more expensive, way heavier, higher friction, less reliable, harder to repair, and faster to wear out.
But they look futuristic don’t they?
Landsknechte trio’s day out
They can’t afford to have the bubble burst, so many important organizations and companies need this to succeed.
If it fails… then what was the point of the mass harvesting of data? What was the point of them burning billions of dollars to lock down peoples interactions on the internet in to platforms? What will be left fix search engines other than preventing SEO and stop selling places on the page?
There are of course other reasons, but not ones that can be admitted. For them to admit what a farce this all is, would be to admit that they’ve been wasting all our time and money building a house of cards, and that anyone who’s gonna along with it is complicit.
Ironlilly is a fun artist.
Lmao, reading the line direction as part of the line moment. “ So we meet again, long pause” or “This isn’t my world, DISAPPOINTED!”
Almost like the system is compensating for more than just a “minor hiccup” caused by the pandemic, almost like that’s a convenient excuse to cover up a decade of mismanagement of investment.
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You can yell at them all you like, but do you think that will change their minds? Do you think that does any good?
Maybe go yell at the party for dropping the ball so hard that those people feel this is their only recourse.
If trump wins, it will be the fault of the party in charge of beating him, not the fault of the people they failed to convince.
Change is slow, and you will get none if politicians do not make concrete commitments. And we don’t get any concrete commitments from them unless they think they need them to win.
Voting is not enough, and only voting does not free one from complicity. Especially if the side one votes for loses because they refused to make commitments that convinced voters to show up for them. Right now, the democrats are not making commitments that are getting voters out. And condescending to other voters because you think they are naïve does not get voters out ether, if anything, it might push them away.
If we want to prevent trump we need to get the Democratic Party to make commitments that will get voters to show up. Not tell people they are dumb for demanding more from their government than “not being trump”.
Right now, voting for the current set of candidates will not support the values of the left, it will promote the values of the moderate middle. if the moderate middle wants to prevent another term of trump, they need to give real commitments to policy agendas that will convince disaffected voters to show up. Threatening them with another term of trump clearly is not working, telling them that they should be grateful for what they already got clearly is not working.
If the Democratic Party wants disaffected voters to show up, then the democrat establishment needs to work to earn those votes. If they do not then trump will win, and it will be as much their fault as the people who didn’t vote.
Gas turbines base load still take time to spin up and have lengthy shut down and start up procedures, even if they can be shut down. They are faster than a steam plant, but are not designed shut down and start up repeatedly over the course of a day.
The real question is why we are building any fossil fuel plants at all, and the answer is simple, they have immense lobbying power and vast full spectrum media campaigns that they use to prevent entirely viable existing alternatives from being built.