Is Natural Gas Worse Than Coal?

Why the cleanest-burning fossil fuel is more dangerous than you thought.

Climate activist and author Bill McKibben has likened 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming to the legal drinking limit, and the global carbon budget to a six-pack shared between friends. The total proven coal, oil and gas reserves? That’s “the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.”

Sixty to 80 percent of the coal, oil and gas reserves of publicly listed companies need to stay in the ground if the planet is to have a decent shot of keeping global warming to less than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, the limit agreed to by world leaders. Extending McKibben’s analogy, coal is the moonshine of fossil fuels — cheap, dirty and extremely dangerous. Oil is an off-brand whiskey. Natural gas is Grey Goose vodka — clean, refined and widely unobjectionable. It should appeal to free-market libertarians and left-leaning environmentalists alike. That’s received wisdom, anyway. In actuality, natural gas simply poses a different range of threats. Gas may be just as hazardous as oil and coal.

Read the rest at Live Science.