Long touted as a bridge to a low-carbon future, natural gas is actually a detour, according to a September 24 report by Christine Shearer and colleagues in the journal Environmental Research Letters. “Our results suggest that without strong limits on GHG emissions or policies that explicitly encourage renewable electricity, abundant natural gas may actually slow the process of decarbonization, primarily by delaying deployment of renewable energy technologies,” they write. According to Politico Morning Energy, the team from UC-Irvine, Stanford, and Near Zero “modeled the effects of various gas supplies and concluded that ‘abundant’ natural gas cuts down on the use of coal and renewable energy, and that overall power demand rises alongside gas supply without a climate policy.”
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