MIT Says Natural Gas Best To Lower Carbon Emissions 284
eldavojohn writes "This week MIT released a comprehensive, hundred-page report entitled 'The Future of Natural Gas' that outlined the many scenarios the United States faces when aiming to reduce carbon emissions. From the New York Times recap: 'The scenario goes like this, according to MIT: Nuclear power, renewable energy, and carbon capture and sequestration are relatively expensive next to gas. Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States. "Natural gas is the substantial winner in the electric sector: The substitution effect, mainly gas generation for coal generation, outweighs the demand reduction effect."' Will this urging help to produce a policy shift from renewable energy (like wind) to natural gas for the United States?"
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:2, Funny)
I believe that when we go 'full bore' we'd exhaust our supplies fairly quickly and have increased expenses.
Not to worry. My engineers are working on a system of getting the gaseous emissions from folks who eat pizza, Mexican, and drink lots of beer. Part of the plan is to open restaurants where you eat and capture the gas at the same time.
We're also working on a capture of gas from cattle.
Our mottoes are "Fart Powered", "Flatulence For Freedom!", "Passing the Wind and the Bucks" and "Make a Stink. Cut out the Terrorists!"
Re:Natural gas has one advantage over renewables (Score:3, Funny)
You are right, of course. Solar power is not cost effective. Government subsidies for green tech distort the market, and are unsustainable. The only sane thing to do is wait for Ayn Rand to descend from the heavens and tell us what to do (I obviously can't predict what that will be, but I bet it'll involve income tax cuts for the upper brackets). And none of that matters anyway, because there's no such thing as global warming.