Name: Uncomfortable Nuance: Natural Gas Edition
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:56:28.000Z
Duration: 3 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's the Internet, so I don't know how this is gonna go.

Had a lot of tweets going viral lately, this one.

It's a quote tweet of a tweet that referenced an infographic of coal use in the UK over the last eight years.

And my response to this, like very good looking news was like we could do this except slightly more vulgar than that, because it's Twitter.

And when you've only got 240 characters to work with, you have to be more attention grabbing, one might say, maybe a little more vulgar, more outraged.

But that's a topic for another video point is that we're facing a climate crisis, and a lot of people talk about how, like the solutions are impractical or impossible.

But we can do this like look, the UK used to be like the center of the universe of coal, and now there are some days when they don't produce any coal fired power at all.

Here's another grab what really hit Colin.

The nuts in the UK was natural gas, and this is great because natural gas is a cleaner fuel, and it also produces less carbon dioxide per megawatt of energy produced like we would produce way more carbon dioxide in the U.

If there weren't suddenly a bunch of cheap natural gas.

That's kind of putting coal out of business now.

Obviously, renewables like wind and solar are part of this as well.

But natural gas is a really important bit, and the reason that natural gas got cost competitive compared to Cole is hydraulic fracturing or what we call fracking, which is in environmental circles considered to be universally about fit.

And like it is bad, it's bad for local environments.

It comes with the risk of spills that impacts wildlife, their potential health hazards and have done poorly.

Methane gets released in the atmosphere, and methane is itself a greenhouse gases that again, natural gas is also a really good compliment to renewables like wind and solar that don't necessarily track their power production and to win the powers needed.

Unlike coal fired power plants, which have to be on all the time.

Natural gas plants could be easily turned on and off, and that allows them to pick up the slack when demand spikes at certain times of the day, or if it's just not very windy, your son.

In the long term, there are other ways that we might solve this problem, but right now, natural gas is a really good way to solve it, and it makes the transition to renewables much easier.

Other regulations that can decrease the potential negative effects of fracking.

But there are no ways to completely eliminate the negative effects.

It's just not possible thing, but I say over and over again that climate change is like the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced.

The ways that we're gonna mitigate that problem are going to in themselves, have environmental impacts, and that's not necessarily a super comfortable thing to think about or talk about.

Of course, in a four minute video, I'm not gonna decide whether fracking is, like, ultimately good were ultimately bad.

I think that depends on how and where it's done, and it's also obviously not a long term solution.

I just think it is far too easy to create a villain that is, like sort of standing in the way off some magical solution that isn't really there.

But this transition, while it's gonna take a long time, has to be done as fast as possible in the fact that coal in the last 10 years has become on economically unviable way of making power, at least in America, is huge.

 It is very good news, and it is something that was largely brought to us not entirely, but largely brought to us by hydraulic fracturing that something that I, the guy who is often, you know, like mad at all fossil fuels have to think about and like include in my world view and in my imagining off the path forward out of this mess. 