Lies, damned lies, environmental "feel good" reporting and the Natural Gas BIG LIE

The Western media, including the media specializing in environmental and clean technology areas, shows a consistent misrepresentation of data to frame a more hopeful picture than actual reality paints.

An excellent example is the arsTechnica article entitled “40% of US electricity is now emissions-free”, a classic case of hiding the lead. The first obfuscation is to use “emissions-free” rather than “new renewables”, which allows for the inclusion of nuclear electricity generation (18% and with no growth prospects) and hydroelectricity (6% and also with no growth prospects). So the new renewables, of wind and solar in fact only provide 16% of US electricity generation (10% wind, 6% solar); with wind static from 2022 and solar up from 5% to 6%, far too slow to make an appreciable impact this decade.

Then we have what should be the actual lead of the story, the fact that natural gas electricity generation has risen to a 44% share of US electricity generation, with NG generation having grown by 40% year over year. That’s the reason why coal generation has fallen to only 16% of US electricity generation. Together NG and coal still provide 60% of US electricity generation, with little change in the wind and solar share year over year. With NG domestic prices at long-term lows, the NG share of generation may grow even more next year. The sources of US electricity generation for the first 10 months of 2023:

1. Natural Gas (growing rapidly): 44%

2. Nuclear (stable): 18%

3. Coal (falling due to NG substitution): 16%

4. Wind (no growth year over year): 10%

5. Hydro (stable): 6%

6. Solar (grew from 5% in 2022): 6%

Then, to make things even worse the article repeats the natural gas BIG LIE that NG has less carbon emission per unit of electricity than coal. The usage of “less carbon emissions” is itself a useful term of obfuscation, why not use greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs)? Well, that’s because it allows the ignoring of the massively underestimated fugitive methane emissions from NG production, transport and usage. “Fracked” natural gas, the predominant source in the US, is the worst source of fugitive methane emissions (apart from LNG from fracked gas, which causes up to 3 times more emissions than coal), with such NG actually being worse for climate change than coal! We have known this for at least a decade, but the writer still tells us the NG BIG LIE so that we can all relax in our wonderful eco-modernist delusional world. This is just fossil fuel greenwashing:

The article title should more accurately be “Natural Gas bridge to disaster electricity generation share leaps to 44% while wind and solar hardly grow”. I have been seeing this feel good journalism since the start of the 2010s and it just gets more and more outrageous the worse the actual real climate situation gets. Much of the alarming acceleration in the rate of increase of atmospheric methane in the past few years is due to natural sources (e.g. wetlands) increasing emissions as global temperatures rise, but a significant cause is methane emissions from the rapid expansion of fracked natural gas production.

The focus on electricity generation is also a form of denial, as it leaves out the majority of energy use which is overwhelmingly derived from fossil fuels, i.e. the massive use of oil and natural gas in transportation and for the petrochemical products that abound in the products that we buy - from plastic bags to cosmetics to fertilizers. US electricity generation only represents about one third of energy consumption domestically. In 2022, all renewables (predominantly wind, hydro and solar) only provided 13% of the US energy supply, with petroleum at 36%, natural gas 33% and coal 10%. That’s a 79% fossil fuel share!

China is continuing to be the outstanding bright spot for the new renewables, “most of the growth, or more than 58 gigawatts, was added in China, according to research from Wood Mackenzie. China is on track to surpass its ambitious 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind power capacity five years ahead of schedule if planned projects are all built”. Outside China, wind energy is struggling, with installations in Europe down 6% year over year and the US wind energy sector facing significant problems. The global wind industry is forecast to grow at 12% in 2024, and add a total of 1 Terawatt of new wind capacity globally within the next 7 years; which will double global wind capacity to 2 Terawatts. At a 33% rate of utilization that will produce 5,840 TW hours of electricity. Problem is that, global electricity consumption was 25,530 TW hours in 2022 and electricity represents only about a fifth of global energy consumption; so by 2031 wind energy will still only provide about 4% of global energy consumption (and that assumes no growth in energy consumption in the meantime). Even if solar manages to equal the contribution of wind (a big question as solar has a lower utilization rate), wind plus solar will still only provide 8% of global energy consumption in 2031. Hardly making a dent in fossil fuel consumption during that time, a time when anthropogenic GHG emissions need to be falling rapidly.

That’s the real headline “wind and solar to hardly make a dent in fossil fuel consumption between 2024 and 2031”. That would represent honest reporting, the kind of reporting needed to galvanize populations and governments into the type of actions required. As 2024, a year when average global surface temperatures may well exceed 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial for the year as a whole, beckons.