Q export expansion? You know, the, the gas industry has long said, of course we would want to Burn gas in place of coal, and, uh, over the last decade, it's become pretty clear that gas isn't as clean as initially touted. Just tell us, why is that the case, and what is some of the current researchers, research around LNG emissions specifically mean for the climate impact of this expansion?
A Sure. You burn gas, you produce carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide heats the atmosphere. But you produce less carbon dioxide than you do when you burn coal, so for a while people were like, well, think of it as diet coal, you know, and at least it's better than what we're doing now. Science, as usual, has a way of interfering with all the things that people want to do. When scientists started looking more closely, they realized that unburned natural gas leaks out into the atmosphere. Molecule for molecule, it's like 80 times better at trapping heat than CO₂. So even a little tiny bit of stuff leaking out in the atmosphere is enough to negate whatever small advantage it ever had. It's been clear for years now that natural gas used domestically, because a lot of it leaks out, is pretty much akin to using coal, and now we have really interesting new data from Bob Howarth that Cornell, the kind of dean of methane scientists, who's done the work to show that when you put all this stuff on a boat and send it halfway around the world, the amount that leaks out in that whole process makes it way worse than coal. So that's where a lot of the concern comes from. I would add, though, that it's almost dumb at this point for us to even be comparing it with coal, because that's no longer the logical comparison. We now live, and this is what's changed over the last 10 or 15 years, we now live on …
AI assessment note: “new data from Bob Howarth that Cornell... makes it way worse than coal.”