Environmentalists are not playing it straight on natural gas. Until recently, they have been amongst its most aggressive promoters, even coining the phrase “bridge to the future.”
Future energy: natural gas fracking–who blew up the ‘bridge to the future’?
Jon Entine
Environmentalists are not playing it straight on natural gas. Until recently, they have been amongst its most aggressive promoters, even coining the phrase “bridge to the future.”
“Natural gas is inherently cleaner than coal or oil,” wrote the DC-based NGO, Renewable Energy Policy Project, in 1997, in a typical analysis. “Since renewables will be unable to meet most energy needs for some time, gas is an essential bridge to a renewable energy era.”
As recently as 2008, progressive environmentalists, such the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, heralded its promise. “We also need to consider … how to better support natural gas as a bridge fuel to a more climate-friendly energy supply,” said president Eileen Clausen in a widely circulated speech. Natural gas was seen as a marriage of enlightened capitalism and pragmatic progressivism—a fossil fuel, whose reserves would gradually diminish, as the price of alternative energy became cost competitive.
Now, many activists call natural gas a “bridge to nowhere,” as Earth Island Journal recently headlined. Inexpensive comparatively clean natural gas is portrayed as a Trojan horse that will bring “water contamination, air pollution, global warming, and fractured communities.” The morphing of natural gas from ‘a necessary alternative to dirtier energy’ to ‘worse than oil and coal’ happened, metaphorically, almost overnight. What’s behind this seismic turnaround? (American Enterprise)
What’s behind this is that this bridge was only allowed when the environmentalists thought that there was a very limited supply of natural gas especially in the US. Once fracking allowed for an almost energy independence without the need for renewables it became open to attack.