Another level of irony is that this is partly because Europe does not want to develop shale gas for environmental reasons, so it imports US LNG... which is mostly shale gas [1].
The US love Europe's policies...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/surging-us-lng-expor...
That's not especially ironic though. In doing that Europe avoids the pollution associated with shale gas exploitation. The gas itself isn't different once it is extracted, so it doesn't matter if the imported gas is shale gas or whatever else.
The root problem is needing gas at all, of course.
If a problem has no solution then it's not really a "problem", it's just a fact to be accepted. Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals. There is no conceivable future where we don't need that stuff to maintain a modern industrial civilization.
> Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals.
Maybe, but the vast majority of gas use in industry is for heat and power and electricity is a trivial substitute there.
And even the direct use as process input is far from unavoidable, because in a lot of cases this use could be reduced/eliminated or shift to synthetic inputs, which would happen organically if prices shifted long-term anyway.
The hypocrisy is that, like many other polluting industries, Europe is just sending pollution somewhere else. Then it self-congratulates on how green it is. And it pays foreign powers through the nose at the same time, and then European governments say that "there is no money".
There is very little strategic thinking in Europe.
Also, both Europe and the US are happy to have China do the dirty jobs so that they stay clean in their countries. With the consequences we all know today in terms of dependence.
Furthermore, China doesn't want to be dirty anymore, in fact they are maybe the ones who take green technologies the most seriously. So the dirtiest jobs are pushed to other countries, mostly in southeast Asia.
"China doesn't want to be dirty anymore" and yet China boosting coal capacity at record high
> Also, both Europe and the US are happy to have China do the dirty jobs so that they stay clean in their countries
Can you give examples? What "dirty jobs" is China, and now apparently other countries, being purportedly forced to do? So is Trump really an environmentalist when he levied massive tariffs on countries in the region?
No, when countries devastate their environment they do it on their own volition. China was disastrously dirty mostly due to domestic reasons like the absolute lack of pollution controls, coal burning, and so on. China introspected and decided that they wanted to be better than that (the Olympics might legitimately have been a major turning point) and have done an amazing job cleaning the country up, and many areas are now truly Western. Air quality is infinitely better...at the same time that the country is making more than ever for the rest of the world.
Other countries haven't got there yet. India, the Philippines and so on have only themselves to blame for the state of their country, however self-comforting the delusion that it's really outsiders that are to blame might be.
> What "dirty jobs" is China, and now apparently other countries, being purportedly forced to do?
In past decades, we had this system that China manufactures goods, they are shipped in ships to US and Europe, and because US and Europe don't manufacture much anything, often the ships would travel back empty. Western countries started to legislate mandated plastic waste recycling, but didn't really have facilities to actually recycle. So we would ship our plastic waste to China, with a promise that it will be recycled. Legislators were happy. In practice, plastic waste is not so easy to recycle, and was often just dumped somewhere in Asia.
In 2017, China stopped accepting imports of plastic waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
Some countries like Sweden, burn their household waste in combined heat and power generation plants. If you incinerate in sufficiently high temperatures, and have exhaust filters, you can do in cleanly without causing air pollution.
https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/blog/turning-waste-energy-...
There are no outsiders when it comes to pollution. We get one planet. That's it.
So, China is free to choose to pollute, as is Europe and the US free to choose production from a source that doesn't pollute as much.
Their electrical infrastructure that is built on coal (60% of current generation) even if they've made huge improvements. Rare earth mining and building of all those electrical batteries and solar panels is a pretty dirty business. Reality is China produces a colossal amount of stuff, and much of it is pretty dirty (it would probably be dirty anywhere as that's the nature of making things at an industrial scale)
Right now China seems headed in the right direction for pollution, moreso than the US. And probably the only way they end up reducing pollution completely is to grow wealthy enough to replace old methods.
The US literally dumped their trash in China for "recycling". China doesn't want to anymore and India and several southeast Asia countries took over (Indonesia, Vietnam, ...).
And sure the the western world wasn't forced to trash China, but when a country decides to buy Chinese production that we know was made with no regard for the environment because it is more competitive than doing it locally where one has no choice but to care, then you are effectively exporting pollution.
As for Trump being an environmentalist with his tariffs. A few decades ago, he would have been, not so much anymore. If he didn't insist on trashing his own country that is.
> The US literally dumped their trash in China for "recycling"
No one "dumped" anything. There weren't random ships sneaking onto the coast and dumping their contents. No airdrops tossing out garbage bags.
This was a pull industry and China had such a negligent position on their environment that people -- Chinese people, in China, allowed by China -- made money tendering for recycling contracts and then just stacking it into a giant pile, presumably awaiting some innovation that would make it worthwhile to process. That precisely speaks to exactly what I was saying, and externalizing that and blaming it on others is the sort of patronizing, laughably bigoted infantilizing that people do about developing nations, and it's extraordinarily unhelpful. China started caring, and regulated these exploiters out of business.
> and India and several southeast Asia countries took over (Indonesia, Vietnam, ...)
Vietnam is a surprisingly clean country. Like you can drop a Google Maps pin almost anywhere in Vietnam and while it might not be glitzy and rich, there is a sense of pride in environment and a care and a concern about the commons.
India and Bangladesh, on the other hand... Yeah, this isn't covertly imported garbage, but instead is 100% domestic sourced, just as the vast majority of China's was before it became more enlightened. Countries that are cesspools overwhelmingly have themselves to blame.
I just had to respond because this sort of infantilizing "every bad thing is caused by outsiders" angle isn't remotely helpful. Like almost all of the world's ocean plastics come from Southeast Asia, and it's amazing seeing people try to rationalize how in cultures where plastics are used for everything, and discarded thoughtlessly everywhere, actually it's somehow the West's fault.
The environmental issues with shale gas are local, if you ignore global warming as a whole. So in that sense, not doing it in your own back yard makes a lot of sense.
Global warming is the biggest harm though so it doesn't make sense to ignore it.
I'm not so sure. As a whole, yes, global warming is a huge issue, but one shale gas well alone will surely have very marginal effect on that. Comparing that to the fact that it can seriously contaminate groundwater and air in your imminent vicinity seems like a more serious issue in that regard.
I assume they don't want fracking. Let Texas and North Dakota keep their earthquakes and polluted water tables.
It makes sense not to invest a lot of money into fossile infrastructure when you plan to be fossile free in about twenty years.
Considering that the industry is highly profitable I'd say that Europe spends more importing gas than producing it locally, which would also benefit the economy and improve strategic independence.
Investments in fossil fuel infrastructure still happen, too, in the form of LNG terminals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/environment/energ...
Fracking is only profitable when oil is $120 a barrel or more.
I don't think this is true, Europe just doesn't have these reserves. If Europe had oil and gas reserves, they would not even build gas pipelines from Russia in the first place.
Europe has 14 billion cubic metres of technically recoverable shale gas reserves.
That's 5% of Europe's yearly consumption.
Fossil fuel reserves are not a fixed number. When prices rise, energy companies expand exploration and find more. Many areas are still basically unexplored for deep minerals. There are undrilled shale basins across western Europe, and the Black Sea and Ionian Sea have barely been tapped. Technical innovations like fracking and horizontal drilling also expand the reserves that can be economically extracted.
There may be valid political and environmental reasons not to go this route but it's silly to claim that fossil fuel reserves are so limited when no one has really looked.
From what I've read so far it seems people have really looked and we have some estimates (not yet proven reserves). The highest estimates I found are around 10-20 years of current consumption rate. That doesn't seem like a lot, and Europe's consumption is going down so it doesn't feel like this will change much for shale oil.
But Norway still has big gas reserves and supplies 33% of Eueropian consumption, so I was actually wrong in the original comment and the US LNG impact is pretty overstated, it's just 15%. Most of the rest comes from middle east.
That's not how the world works...
Shale gas exploitation is banned in Europe so no-one is spending money looking for it, but estimates are that reserves are significant.
Yea, the world works by imagining shale gas into existence.
Please don't do that...
Sorry, you won't get any reasonable response for that condescending tone, especially since you clearly didn't even do a basic google search for that estimate to see how low it is, so your "I'm gonna teach you how the world works, kid" attitude is not even justified.
It makes sense from EU point of view. We'll let another continent destroy itself environmentally and leverage their output during the process. Better that destroying our own soil.
We already damaged Europe in many ways, so yes what you say is true. One day US population will realize the same, but I guess things need to get worse before they start to improve.
Have you seen the environmental impact of shale gas?
If the US is willing to destroy certain areas of its country in exchange for money, Europe will give them the dollars.
If Europe has nobody else to do it for them, I'm sure they'll do it themselves.