Don’t break out the champagne just yet, but you might want to start icing down the bottle.
U.S. carbon emissions from electricity-generating power plants dropped 3.8 percent in 2012, to their lowest level since 1994, according to the federal government’s Energy Information Administration.
That recent reduction is not a one-year anomaly: Energy-related carbon emissions have declined in five of the last seven years, for a 12 percent reduction between 2005 and 2012.
The U.S. decline is part of a long-term trend due in large part to power plants increasingly switching from coal to cheap and cleaner-burning natural gas, which emits about half the CO2 that coal does.
Gas is cheap because of huge supplies — a direct result of expanded “fracking” and other innovative extraction techniques.
And we’re likely to see that reduction trend accelerate. While power plants are the primary source of carbon emissions, they’re not the only one.
Engine manufacturer Cummins has begun building and shipping big-rig engines that run on natural gas. And United Parcel Service (UPS) intends to expand by nearly 800 percent by the end of 2014 its fleet of 18-wheelers that run on liquefied natural gas (LNG), according to The New York Times.
Transportation consultant Karl Ziebarth thinks that within five to eight years the trucking industry will have largely shifted to natural gas.
He notes that another reason for the shift is EPA regulations that require new pollution-control technology that’s driving up the price of diesel engines.
Of course, challenges remain, including the need for a refueling infrastructure. But he says the growing demand will likely induce truck stop operators to make the needed investment.
Will cars follow suit?
They already are, although the numbers are small. The Washington Post cites Dave Hurst of Pike Research estimating that out of 14.5 million passenger cars and trucks sold in the U.S. in 2012, a little more than 20,000 ran on natural gas.
And even trains may be headed down the same track. BNSF Railway announced earlier this year that it is working on a new engine that will run on liquefied natural gas — ironically, to transport what it hopes will be 1 million barrels of oil a day, according to CNBC.
But even as the U.S. makes progress, global CO2 emissions between 2005 and 2011 increased by 15 percent. That means for every one step forward the U.S. makes, the world takes two steps back.
The best way to address that problem is to remove a decades-old restriction on exporting natural gas to other countries without approval from the federal government.
Strangely, not everyone is happy about the country’s CO2 reduction success story.
In a type of man-bites-dog scenario, some environmentalists see the increased availability and adoption of natural gas as a failure because it relaxes the economic pressure on government to mandate individuals and companies to switch to renewable energy such as wind and solar power.
Nothing creates more public support for renewable energy sources than high fossil fuel prices. Of course, nothing is worse for the economy than high fossil fuel prices, too.
The day may come when we can get most or all of the energy we need from renewable sources, but that day is a long way off even under the best of circumstances.
The public policy goal should be to meet our energy needs while doing as little damage as possible to the environment and the economy. Natural gas is helping us do that.
With the right policies coming out of Washington and the states, we could start celebrating the CO2 reduction success story soon.