…at the New York Times:
Natural gas just might be the energy solution environmentalists say they want, but actually can’t stand because nothing would put them out of business faster. Forbes blogger Chris Helman words it perfectly:
We would have thought that the Times would be in favor of plentiful, low-cost natural gas. It burns a lot cleaner than coal, and with nuclear off the table for now, gas is poised to fuel U.S. economic growth for more than a generation to come. I can only guess that the problem, as the Times sees it, is that as long as we have all that cheap gas, there’s precious little need for solar panels, windmills and other cornerstones of their much-heralded but slow evolving green jobs revolution.
Forbes, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty awesome that thanks to drilling ingenuity the U.S. has proven to have one of the world’s biggest and cheapest hoards of clean-burning gas. Now that’s a story.
This may be a solution to some of the idiocy in California as well, given out high electric rates due partly to NIMBY reluctance to build generating capacity and the insane carbon law they passed. We’re currently paying fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour in SoCal (more for amounts exceeding baseline). I can buy a generator like this one (or smaller), and produce the same power for about a quarter of that at current gas prices (and they’re likely to continue to go down). But I imagine if I were to do that, the carbon nazis would come after me. Also, I’m not sure if they’re designed for steady use, but I think that if you could come up with one that was fairly quiet and could run 24/7, it will become pretty attractive to a lot of people around here.