World May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking, Says Cornell Scientist

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In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning frackedย gas worse for the climate thanย coal.

In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team,ย Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, outlinedย more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playingย in changing the world’sย climate.

The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accordย in just 10ย to 15ย years, says Ingraffeaย in a 13-minute lecture titled โ€œShale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,โ€ which was posted online on April 4.

That’s if Americanย energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000ย today.

The Difference of a Halfย Degreeย 

An average global temperature increase of 2ยฐย Celsius (3.6ยฐ Fahrenheit)ย will bring catastrophic changes โ€” even as compared against a change of 1.5ยฐ Cย (2.7ยฐย F). โ€œHeat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater,โ€ with just that half-degree difference, NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climateย change.

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked this January, concludes that it’s โ€œextremely unlikelyโ€ that the world will keep to a 1.5ยฐ change, estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years, somewhat slower than Ingraffea’s presentationย concludes.

Earlier models, like an often-cited 2012 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, dramatically underestimated the rise in temperatures, when its projections are compared against more than a half-decade of additional temperature recordings,ย Ingraffea says. โ€œEvery one of these scenarios under-predicted actual global warming,โ€ he points out as he describes the models presented in that landmark 2012ย study.

โ€œWhereas the worst-case scenario brought us to 1.5 degrees Centigrade in 2040,โ€ he adds, โ€œwe’re almost thereย today.โ€

A Different Energy Future, if Notย forย Fracking?

So whatย happened?

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, U.S. natural gas production was flat or falling. If that trend had continued along the same track it was following fromย 2006-2008, then wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources might have had a chance to displace both natural gas and coal as major energy sources in America, according toย Ingraffea.

Instead, the shale gas rush, propelled by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), swept across the U.S., with drillers snapping up land to drill for previously inaccessible fossil fuels locked in geologic formations of shale rock from coast toย coast.

If the shale gas rush hadn’t disrupted trends around that time, Ingraffea estimates that the wind energy sector alone could have produced roughly triple the amount of energy expected by the end of this coming decade, a difference of roughly 400ย gigawatts.

โ€œWe can easily see there is a loss of potential โ€” large amounts of wind energy โ€” because of the injection of shale gas into our energy economy,โ€ย Ingraffea explains in theย lecture.

While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and American energy security, Ingraffea notes, those benefits would have been almost exclusively aimed at just 5 percentย of the world’s population, North Americans. But the harms will affect the remaining 95 percentย of the world asย well.

It’s an alarming message โ€” even though the shale rush has stumbled somewhat as gas prices collapsed and many drillers went bankrupt, the cumulative impact of American fracking appears to have set the entire world on a collision course with climate change’s most extremeย effects.

The climate is changing faster and more dramatically than it might have otherwise, and โ€” far from serving as a bridge fuel โ€” fracking hugeย amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role in pushing the world towardย a vastly more difficultย future.

Ingraffea’s lecture, part of the Spring Creek Project’s Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and Climate Change series, can be viewedย below:

Main image: Screenshot, โ€œShale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Takenโ€ by Anthony Ingraffea, published on YouTube.

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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.

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