I got salty earlier about the fossil gas "bridge." It's not b/c I've got all the answers on the role of gas in deep decarbonization (I don't!).

But I worry the enviro community will see lower gas demand as validation of "bridge" theory, so I wanna talk into the void about it...
The gas industry is on shaky ground. Renewables are set to eat its lunch. I thought today's Bloomberg article did a good job of noting that both politics and economics (and, um, a global pandemic) might mean peak gas is on the horizon. https://twitter.com/climate/status/1319335711741480960?s=20
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug. Lots of people advocated for a gas bridge under the assumption that other policy would ultimately drive it back out of the system. It's tempting to embrace a revisionist history that "hey, empirically, the bridge sorta went according to plan!"
I'd argue that the natural gas bridge has proven (with 20/20 hindsight, of course) to be a bad move, and still haunts the enviro community. It is only through the diligence of climate advocates and an unforeseen pandemic that there's now an end in sight.

Here's what I mean...
This makes a ton of sense on paper (or, more aptly, in energy system models). Even in deeply decarbonized scenarios, modelers continue to see a role for natural gas with CCS (see @JesseJenkins et al).

I'm not here to start beef with any of that.

https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf
The "bridge," though, is a narrative outside of models. It suggests gas is an important step on the path to clean.

It encouraged gas R&D, put enviros in bed with energy dominance hawks, redistributed political capital, and told frontline communities that CO2 is the priority.
Per @ClearPathAction, for decades DOE had been spending millions on fracking R&D to set the stage for an industry... that now had enviros' blessing.

In the 2000s, fracked gas eventually took off. State & federal policy focused on coal, and cheap gas was there to take its place.
The result is a ~50% increase in extraction over the last decade. This is the upward slope of the "bridge." As of 2019, it was still going up.

What will cause the bridge to slope back down? In theory, policy... to price carbon and deploy renewables.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9010us2a.htm
I am not quibbling with that theory of change. We gave it a shot, and I'd argue it is still worth doing! But it didn't happen.

As gas got dirt cheap, we made to much to handle. So we became a net exporter (and flared it). A win for energy independence and the environment, yes?
Well, that argument relies on at least three assumptions:

1) Gas mostly replaces coal.
2) Other environmental impacts of NG are accurately identified and mitigated.
3) Gas doesn't stymie climate action in other ways.

Let's interrogate those.
Assumption 1: Gas mostly replaces coal.

This is happening! Gas has accelerated coal retirement.

But there's a counter-factual: Has cheap gas, bolstered by good PR, undercut zero-carbon power that might have done the replacing?

Unfortunately, also yes. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/mit-cheap-gas-not-renewables-caused-nuclear-woes/514310/
Assumption 2: Other environmental impacts of NG are accurately identified and mitigated.

Proponents of "bridge" theory always caveat with the importance of addressing non-CO2 impacts, like methane pollution and induced seismicity. But power gained is hard to take away.
A2 cont'd:

As fracking took off, the industry began regulatory capture and scientific suppression in places like Oklahoma.

At this point, we had lost control over the increasingly scary consequences of fossil gas, even as it was generating CO2 benefits. https://bit.ly/35Hvenl 
Assumption 3: Natural gas doesn't stymie climate action in other ways.

The industry's political power, which allowed it to undermine science on issues like seismicity, is bad enough. But perhaps most damning are the consequences for broader climate action.
A3 cont'd:

I'm saying that "clean gas" was a gift to climate delayers that still hangs over every Congressional hearing.

How many times have you heard Republicans cite our marginal progress on CO2 emissions due to natural gas as an excuse to delay other climate action?
How many times have industry stakeholders or politicians pointed to gas as an example of how fossil fuels are "part of the solution"?

Why does nuclear energy, which produced more electricity than gas until ~2005, have far less political support than gas today?
Do communities now have less trust in environmental groups to lead them in the right direction?

Was gas a "bridge" to a political map that now requires Joe Biden to campaign on *not* banning fracking? How many states are hesitant to climate action due to the gas industry?
We could always make the carbon math on gas pencil out for a bit. Maybe the incremental progress has been worth it.

But my point is that the natural gas "bridge" has been damaging in difficult-to-quantify ways, including by confusing what and who is good vs. bad for the climate.
Could we be starting to see an end to the gas era? Yes.

Is it possible that, in the history books, it will look like gas made a "bridge" from coal to a high renewable penetration future? Yes.

Great, so the lesson is that the gas "bridge" advocates were right? I'd argue no.
If not for the current pandemic, gas production was poised for another record year.

If we are lucky enough to move off fossil fuels to a 100% clean future... and that's a big IF... it won't be because some folks were ✨prescient✨ enough to pave us a bridge of natural gas.
It will be because scientists and climate advocates worked like hell to expose the costs of fossil gas, push for ambitious policy, and bend the gas demand curve back down. They are the ones to bail us out of this uncontrolled experiment.

Any other narrative is just insulting.
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