Re: “Our View: Midcoast pipeline rejection shows climate questions aren’t easy to answer” (March 5):

Despite attempts by the American Petroleum Institute to convince the world that “clean” natural gas will help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, recent studies suggest that it is no cleaner than oil or coal. Natural gas is just a nice phrase for methane, which is 86 times more powerful over 20 years than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

A study published last year in the journal Nature concluded that emissions from methane are 25 to 40 percent higher than past research had estimated. Hard-to-track methane leaks are a key source of those emissions. While natural gas does indeed burn cleaner than oil or coal, extracting and transporting that gas to customers makes natural gas just as dirty.

According to the co-author of a study published in the journal Energies in 2020, “natural gas pipelines are some of the worst offenders” when it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions. Building an infrastructure to transport natural gas is locking in those emissions for decades – the amount of time it will take to pay off the cost of building pipelines.

We don’t have decades to wait to battle climate change. Natural gas may be promoted as a bridge fuel to cleaner, greener energy, but in reality it is a bridge to nowhere.

David Kuchta
Portland