At the Christian Science Monitor, Clayton Jones points out an important benefit of the BP Oil Spill: It has dimmed the chance that the natural-gas lobby will convince legislators that replacing coal-burning power plants with natural-gas plants is a good environmental move. Gas does release about half the carbon dioxide as coal does, and there's a ton of it being profitably removed from shale across the country right now.
But as Jones makes clear, burning anything that is created by decaying life forms and trapped underground for millennia is not sustainable and is not the answer for a green future.
The BP spill offers an opportunity to say, whoa, let's remember that the global energy future should truly look carbonless green, starting with greater efficiency, renewable sources, and, yes, nuclear power.
Whether that will actually happen is up for debate. Natural gas is one of the stopgap solutions that would be fine were it easy and temporary, but digging deeply into the earth has consequences. There are also much more effective things we can do to adjust our lifestyles that would cut more carbon than simply switching to natural gas would. But even after the spill, it's hard to image Americans driving less or eating less meat -- both of which are things we do a lot that emit a large amount of greenhouse gases -- without strong personal incentives to do so.
-- Monica Potts
