good morning john we're gonna do nuance
today
it's the internet so i don't know how
this is gonna go i recently had a tweet
go viral no not that one or that one
i've had a lot of tweets going viral
lately this one it's a quote tweet of a
tweet that referenced an infographic of
coal use in the uk over the last eight
years that was the sentence and my
response to this like very good-looking
news was like we can do this except
slightly more vulgar than that because
it's twitter and when you've only got
240 characters to work with you have to
be more
attention-grabbing one might say maybe a
little more vulgar more outraged but
that's a topic for another video my
point is that we're facing a climate
crisis and a lot of people talk about
how like the solutions are impractical
or impossible but we can do this like
look the uk used to be like the center
of the universe of coal and now there
are some days when they don't produce
any coal-fired power at all so we can do
this or
can we here's another graph what really
hit coal and the nuts in the uk was
natural gas and this is great because
natural gas is a cleaner fuel and it
also produces less carbon dioxide per
megawatt of energy produced like we
would produce way more carbon dioxide in
the u.s if there weren't suddenly a
bunch of cheap natural gas that's kind
of putting coal out of business now
obviously renewables like wind and solar
are part of this as well but natural gas
is a really important bit and the reason
that natural gas got cost competitive
compared to coal
is hydraulic fracturing or what we call
fracking which is
in environmental circles considered to
be universally a bad thing and like it
is bad it's bad for local environments
it uses a huge amount of water it comes
with a risk of spills it impacts
wildlife there are potential health
hazards and if done poorly methane gets
released in the atmosphere and methane
is itself a greenhouse gas but then
again natural gas is also a really good
complement to renewables like wind and
solar that don't necessarily track their
power production to when the power is
needed unlike coal-fired power plants
which have to be on all the time natural
gas plants can be easily turned on and
off and that allows them to pick up
their slack when demand spikes at
certain times of the day or if it's just
not very windy or sunny in the long term
there are other ways that we might solve
this problem but right now natural gas
is a really good way to solve it and it
makes the transition to renewables much
easier now there are regulations that
can decrease the potential negative
effects of fracking but there are no
ways to completely eliminate the
negative effects it's just not a
possible thing but i say over and over
again that climate change is like the
biggest
challenge that humanity has ever faced
the ways that we're gonna mitigate that
problem are going to in themselves have
environmental impacts
and that's not necessarily a super
comfortable thing to think about or talk
about of course in a four-minute video
i'm not gonna decide whether fracking is
like ultimately good or ultimately bad i
think that that depends on how and where
it's done and it's also obviously not a
long-term solution it's a bridge to get
us to the future we need to be in i just
think it is far too easy to create a
villain that is like sort of standing in
the way
of some magical solution
that isn't really there but this
transition while it's going to take a
long time has to be done as fast as
possible and the fact that coal in the
last 10 years has become an economically
unviable way of making power at least in
america is huge it is very good news and
it is something that was largely brought
to us not entirely but largely brought
to us by hydraulic fracturing that's
something that i the guy who is often
you know like mad at all fossil fuels
have to think about and like include in
my world view and in my imagining of the
path forward
out of this mess
john i'll see you on tuesday