Fracking great for the environment

Real Clear Politics reports:

The U.S. Department of Energy published data last week with some amazing revelations — so amazing that most Americans will find them hard to believe. As a nation, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by 2 percent from last year. Over the past 14 years, our carbon emissions are down more than 10 percent. On a per-unit-of-GDP basis, U.S. carbon emissions are down by closer to 20 percent.

A fracking great result.

Even more stunning: We’ve reduced our carbon emissions more than virtually any other nation in the world, including most of Europe.

 How can this be? We never ratified the Kyoto Treaty. We never adopted a national cap-and-trade system, or a carbon tax, as so many of the sanctimonious Europeans have done.

The answer isn’t that the EPA has regulated CO2 out of the economy. With strict emission standards, the EPA surely has started to strangle our domestic industries, such as coal, and our electric utilities. But that’s not the big story here.

The primary reason carbon emissions are falling is because of hydraulic fracturing — or fracking.

This is where the Greens fall down. They say time and time again that climate change is the most vital issue of all time, yet they refuse to have anything to do with other energy sources with lower greenhouse gas emissions such as fracking and nuclear energy.

Fracking is simply a new way to get at America’s vast storehouse of tens of trillions of dollars worth of shale oil and gas that lies beneath us, coast to coast — from California to upstate New York. Fracking produces massive amounts of natural gas, and, as a consequence, natural gas prices have fallen in the past decade from above $8 per million BTUs to closer to $2 this year — a 75 percent reduction — due to the spike in domestic supplies.

This free fall in prices means that America is using far more natural gas for heating and electricity and much less coal. Here is how the International Energy Agency put it: “In the United States, (carbon) emissions declined by 2 percent, as a large switch from coal to natural gas use in electricity generation took place.”

The problem with many in the Greens and environment lobby groups is they don’t care about facts or science. They have a quasi-religious view that anything extractive is unnatural and hence should be banned. So even though fracking has seen the US decrease their greenhouse gas emissions, they still want it banned.