Because wind-powered cars are still a ways off, I was glad to see that the Obama administration recently made a breakthrough in releasing natural gas from crystals, called methane hydrates, found below the permafrost in the Arctic.
Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and doesn't solve the climate problem in and of itself (most obviously, it still requires drilling), but it is vastly cleaner than petroleum, and would utilize the existing infrastructure of big oil--which, let's face it, is a big part of industry's resistance to truly clean energy sources like wind and solar. Also, the new technique that recently met with success involved injecting carbon dioxide underground, which has the added bonus of isolating it and removing it from the atmosphere.
Even if all the oil dried up tomorrow, I think the history of capitalism has demonstrated quite clearly that we will do what we can with the resources we have, and those resources have pipelines running to them. An all-clean-energy economy would be great, and I do believe we'll get, well, something like that eventually, but fighting natural gas for not being perfect is cutting off the planet's nose to spite it's face - let's take what we can get.
No comments:
Post a Comment