Climate Hawk Obama: ‘If Congress Won’t Act Soon To Protect Future Generations, I Will’

[NickB79]

29. Like I said, domestic oil and gas is dirty

FAR dirtier than, say, Saudi oil or Mexican oil.

How does replacing conventionally pumped oil from a Saudi well with oil extracted from the Bakken reserve, or Alberta tar sands, make things better for the climate?

Have you seen what we're doing in the Bakken fields now? http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2013/01/julia-sklar-reporter.html

Seen in this photo taken by NASA's Suomi NPP satellite, the glow comes from hundreds of flares from rigs drilled into the Bakken formation of North Dakota. The huge amount of unwanted gas being burned off from the production of shale oil creates a light the size of metropolitan Boston.

Bakken is a 360-million-year-old tectonic plate made primarily of shale rock. Fracking has liberated the oil that lies within it, propelling North Dakota to the second-largest oil producing state in the US, behind Texas.

Flaring is a way to burn off excess natural gas during oil production, but the process effectively wastes a natural resource while simultaneously emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As of 2011, more than 35 per cent of North Dakota's natural gas production was burnt off in flares, according to a study done by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

How does this further the process of switching to renewables or addressing climate change? Switching to domestic sources of energy may well solve a host of problems, and definitely has merit on that basis, but based on current science, climate change is NOT one of them. This thread was about addressing climate change, not stopping foreign wars for oil.