Environmentalists Hate Natural Gas Now : Competition for Green Energy

The Environmentalists have only one consideration in mind and that is self preservation of their personal agenda - everyone has to give up most of their ideas of success and much of their personal happiness to save the planet. They demand others must do what they believe is best.

This is brought to light in Texas, and other southern states, of late when the EPA shut down oil exploration and drilling along the southern boarder because they found a lizard that they believe might become extinct if not allowed to exist without interruption from outside forces. That the nation might become extinct without more oil sources for economic growth means nothing at all.

One has to wonder what the environmentalist uses for a moral compass. Maybe that's the problem with their agenda, they have no morals and why the liberal Democrats are on the same page with the environmentalist. It's about power to control the lives and fortunes of others. competition

Environmentalists Reverse Opinion on Natural Gas Fracking
Source: Ronald Bailey, "Environmentalists Were For Fracking Before They Were Against It," Reason Magazine, May 10, 2011.

Until a decade ago, experts believed that it would be technically infeasible to exploit the potential resource base of natural gas locked in 48 shale basins in 32 countries around the world. Then horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, was perfected.

The shale gas rush was on, and last year the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issued an analysis revising its estimates of available natural gas dramatically upward, says Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine's science correspondent.

Given its greenhouse gas benefits, environmental activists initially welcomed shale gas. That was then, but this is now. The environmentalist community has now collectively decided that natural gas is a "bridge to nowhere." Why? In an overview published last week by the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, journalist Matt Ridley explains: "As it became apparent that shale gas was a competitive threat to renewable energy as well as to coal, the green movement has turned against shale." Indeed natural gas is cheaper than renewable sources of energy even if one includes the costs of carbon capture and sequestration.

Electricity produced using natural gas in a combined cycle generating plant comes in at $66 per megawatt-hour. If one includes carbon capture and sequestration, basically burying carbon dioxide underground, the cost rises to $89 per megawatt-hour.

In contrast conventional coal costs $95 per megawatt-hour rising to $136 using carbon capture and sequestration.