Marcellus shale drilling operation
Article by E. Mayfield, J. Cohon, N. Muller, I. Azevedo & A. Robinson, Nature Sustainability, Vol. 2, Pp. 1122–1131(2019)
ABSTRACT — Natural gas has become the largest fuel source for electricity generation in the United States and accounts for a third of energy production and consumption. However, the environmental and socioeconomic impacts across the supply chain and over the boom-and-bust cycle have not been comprehensively characterized.
To provide insight for long-term decision-making for energy transitions, we estimate the cumulative effects of the shale gas boom in the Appalachian basin from 2004 to 2016 on air quality, climate change and employment.
We find that air quality effects (1,200 to 4,600 deaths; US$23 billion +99%/−164%) and employment effects (469,000 job-years ±30%; US$21 billion ±30%) follow the boom-and-bust cycle, while climate impacts (US$12 billion to 94 billion) persist for generations well beyond the period of natural gas activity.
Employment effects concentrate in rural areas where production occurs. However, almost half of cumulative premature mortality due to air pollution is downwind of these areas, occurring in urban regions of the northeast.
The cumulative effects of methane and carbon dioxide emissions on global mean temperature over a 30-yr time horizon are nearly equivalent but over the long term, the cumulative climate impact is largely due to carbon dioxide.
We estimate that a tax on production of US$2 per thousand cubic feet (+172%/−76%) would compensate for cumulative climate and air quality externalities across the supply chain.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0420-1
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CMU study suggests taxing natural gas to offset environmental damage
Article by Paul J. Gough, Pittsburgh Business Times, December 10, 2019
PHOTO in ARTICLE: A drilling rig stands about 100 feet tall on a well pad being developed in the Utica shale play near Marietta, Ohio. From Jeff Bell | Columbus Business First
A Carnegie Mellon University study said a $2 per thousand cubic foot tax on natural gas production would help compensate for the climate and air quality impacts of drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Appalachian basin and elsewhere.
The study, co-written by former CMU President Jared L. Cohon and Princeton University’s Erin N. Mayfield, was published in Nature Sustainability, an academic journal published by the same company that owns the globally respected journal Nature. The article, published in Nature Sustainability’s December 2019 issue, looks to reconcile what it said was the environmental and socioeconomic costs of drilling not just in the field, but through the supply chain.
The researchers found benefits and costs on both sides of the equation, including economic development and job gains, while at the same time an increased amount of deaths from air quality related to the shale gas activity. The study estimated between 1,200 and 4,600 premature deaths due to shale activity between 2004 and 2016, and about 469,000 job years in the period. Job years are defined in the study as a part-time or full-time job over a year.
The analysis projected $12 billion to $94 billion in additional climate impacts over the course of 30 years. It also found long-term impacts further away from the shale drilling areas, with what it said was half of the premature mortality happening downwind in the Northeast. The drilling activity modeled occurred in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio between 2004 and 2016.
“The cumulative effects of methane and carbon dioxide emissions on global mean temperature over a 30-year time horizon are nearly equivalent but over the long term, the cumulative climate impact is largely due to carbon dioxide,” the study said.
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Well, this is completely problematic for at least four reasons.
First, there are health costs in the drilling and fracking areas that don’t come under the category of air pollution and so are presumably not included.
Second, the tax does not solve any problem, unless it somehow protects people over a scattered large area from the effects of air pollution, and somehow reduces the effects of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. That’s not where the tax money would go–states would put it in their general fund. If the benefits go to one group of people and the costs go to another, that is the definition of environmental injustice.
Third, it’s rather meaningless to assign a dollar value to lost life. If you were one of the casualties, would you be okay with dying young as long as the people burning the gas paid more for it? This tax would not be a “tax the bads” sort, because if assessed on the drillers, who are economically precarious as it is, it would drive them out of business. But it would not be assessed on them — the people in the benefiting category, those with jobs, fat salaries, or dividend checks. It would be assessed on the buyers and might slow down that buying, but the cost of gas is so low right now that it might not matter that much–unless there was cheaper gas that could compete (and thus obviate the virtue of the tax).
Fourth, nothing is said here about the schemes to sell the liquids to a (proposed) petrochemical corridor along the Ohio with a whole raft of new pollution concerns. Or would that be taxed too? If so, how much help would that be for the marine animal thousands of miles away, dying from plastic in its gut or wrapped around its head or flippers?
No, we don’t need a tax. We need legislation to assist in a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, both for energy and for the myriad things plastic is now used for, especially the single-use plastic. The notion that problems can all be solved with economic policies, as the magical Free Market solves all problems, is not science-based, it’s an ideological misconception.
Mary Wildfire, Roane County, WV
Like Mary, I am disturbed with assigning cash value to killing someone. Should an individual murderer get off if he could pay for his crime? Why not, corporations do in this accounting. Wonder what that price is? Does each of us have a value and they reach an average? Maybe the individual’s net worth?
It’s another example of accounting being stretched to fit a know evil into monetary terms. It’s one of the moral evils of fracking, like the racial result that comes from running the pipelines through Indian and Black territories.
It is also evil to cause people, children, old folks and healthy adults to be sick. How do you put a price on that?
It is being done to maximize return to a nameless list of investors, when we all know it is destroying resources needed for the future, too. It isn’t being minimized to get civilization through while better methods are being worked out: solar, wind and eventually fusion. It involves lots of casual lying about both necessity and cost.
It’s like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but on a worldwide scale.