Marcellus Shale Coalition Overlooks Urgency of Climate Crisis

TIME to Realize We Have Just One Last Chance to Save Earth

Letter from Carolyn Steglich of Harrisville, PA, to Erie Times—News, September 3, 2021

The opinion piece from August 27, “America’s climate leadership rests in Appalachia” by David Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a gas industry trade group, is cleverly misleading. While touting the good work being done by natural gas producers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to coal-burning power plants, there’s a deeper analysis that is being skipped over.

Mr. Callahan points out that natural gas producers are more than meeting their methane intensity targets, which is good. Methane intensity measures the leak rate, or the percent of methane that leaks as a function of total production, per facility. It nicely disguises the real problem — total methane emissions.

Yes, natural gas is better than coal as a fuel for electricity production, but neither coal nor gas will help us reach the targets that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has indicated we must reach in 11 years or less to avoid catastrophic effects of climate change driven by human-produced greenhouse gas emissions. We need to transition to carbon-neutral energy sources now.

We have the tools to do this; we simply need to deploy them. One particularly effective tool is a carbon fee and dividend policy, such as that proposed in the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, which uses market forces to incentivize reduced use of fossil fuels. This legislation would put a price on carbon at its source, and then return the revenue raised to all American citizens with a monthly dividend that would more than offset any price increases for most Americans. Let’s encourage our members of Congress to enact this legislation now.

— Carolyn Steglich, is a Retired Professor of Biology at Slippery Rock University in Butler County, Pennsylvania.