M. Nolan Gray: "Fracking also resulted in 28% reduction in coal use, likely saving many tens of thousands of additional lives through cleaner air—to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives saved down the line by a 45% GHG reduction."

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M. Nolan Gray

‪@mnolangray.bsky.social‬

Fracking also resulted in 28% reduction in coal use, likely saving many tens of thousands of additional lives through cleaner air—to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives saved down the line by a 45% GHG reduction.

‪dylan matthews‬ ‪@dylanmatt.bsky.social‬

The fracking revolution, by reducing heating costs for poor families in the US, saved about 12,500 lives annually, mostly in places with concentrated poverty. Paper by @seema.bsky.social/Janjala Chirakijja/Pinchuan Ong. Few years old but new to me! seemajayachandran.com/heating_mort...

Our empirical design uses spatial variation across the United States in the energy source used
for home heating. Natural gas and electricity are used for heating by 58% and 30% of US
households, respectively. Importantly, there is considerable variation across counties in whether
natural gas versus electricity is mainly used. We combine this spatial variation with temporal
variation in the national prices of natural gas and electricity. The price of natural gas varied
substantially over the 2000 to 2010 study period, relative to the price of electricity; it first rose,
partly due to supply disruption from Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, and then fell after 2005, mostly
due to the supply influx from shale production of natural gas (Hausman and Kellogg, 2015). We
use the fact that, when the price of natural gas rose or fell, households in areas that rely on natural
gas for heating experienced a rise or fall in their home heating price, relative to households in
areas reliant on electricity.
We find that lower heating prices reduce mortality in winter months.1 The estimated effect
size implies that the 42% drop in the price of natural gas in the late 2000s averted 12,500 winter
deaths per year in the United States. Moreover, we find that this effect does not just represent
a short-run postponement of mortality. We also show that the effect, which is driven mostly by
cardiovascular and respiratory causes and is larger in high-poverty communities, is robust to
several stress tests of the empirical specification.

ALT

November 30, 2024 at 2:31 PM

8 reposts

56 likes

‪Jake‬ ‪@excitedgiraffe.bsky.social‬

I’m not sure you can count lives saved by lower heating costs in the US, but then not count the lives lost due to climate change. What’s killing people here is poverty (not being able to afford heat), and we don’t need fracking to solve that.

‪M. Nolan Gray‬ ‪@mnolangray.bsky.social‬

The "no action" scenario for fracking in the 2010s is: a bunch of coal plants are fired back up and GHGs are much, much higher.

‪Jake‬ ‪@excitedgiraffe.bsky.social‬

I’m not calling for “no action”, but we’ve had many many decades of wasted time where we could have been investing in renewables. Nuclear power was been an option well before 2010, and wind/solar could have been viable earlier if we’d pushed for investments earlier.

‪Pukey Lukey‬ ‪@pukeylukey.bsky.social‬

Those three great options still have no pathway for displacing FF in the USA today in the mid 2020s. Is it really so dangerous to celebrate the harm reduction that has been fracking?

‪Jake‬ ‪@excitedgiraffe.bsky.social‬

I don’t think it’s really fair to say it’s harm reduction— it causes a LOT of future harm (via emissions) to reduce prices now. If the issue is people not being able to pay for heat, can’t we address that with social welfare programs?

‪wrileys.bsky.social‬ ‪@wrileys.bsky.social‬

Yes of course, but not viable nationally in the US. Coal to combined cycle natural gas plants is ½ the CO₂, less PM, NOx, SOx, etc. It’s also better for matching renewables production. The Allam Cycle may be viable with CO₂ capture (i.e. not a complete scam). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allam_p...

Allam power cycle - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

‪Jake‬ ‪@excitedgiraffe.bsky.social‬

The harm being reduced here was that people could not afford to heat their home. That's a real harm, but it's something we can fix with better welfare programs (without touching energy supply at all). There is no energy shortage in the US severe enough that people should be freezing.

‪Jake‬ ‪@excitedgiraffe.bsky.social‬

I agree that natural gas is probably less bad than coal, but imo spending effort to shift the industry to that instead of solar/wind/nuclear is a mistake. I see it as just another way for companies to delay transitioning that needs to happen asap. The LCOE for solar/wind are pretty good these days.