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Fossil methane
(lemmy.world)
Yes, I know it's not technically just methane, but methane is its primary constituent.
"Fossil gas" is also probably a suitable term, but I like "fossil methane" because it gets that spooky chemical name benefit.
Feel free to correct me, but this sounds incredibly ill-informed. Yes, methane itself is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas, far more potent than CO2. But there are several types of "natural" gas. You are talking about fossil fuels, the type of methane either trapped underground or beneath the arctic perma frost. Methane is created by decomposing organic matter though. Livestock is one of the biggest producers of natural gas as far as I know. If released into the atmosphere, methane would be devastating, as it takes about ten years for it to degrade into CO2 first. I don't know the impact of using "natural" gas compared to other kinds of fossil fuels. Burning it definitely seems like the lesser of two evils though. A quick Google search says that "emissions per unit of energy produced from gas are around 40% lower than coal and around 20% lower than oil." While this is far from perfect, putting it on the same level seems either ignorant or disingenuous.
TLDR: Methane doesn't necessarily mean fossil fuels. Burning methane and using it as an energy source is less bad than releasing it directly into the atmosphere.
Again, if there's anyone with actual knowledge on the subject, please correct me.
That's why I specified fossil methane, the stuff we're getting out of the ground to burn in power plants. I'm all for burning non-fossil methane (e.g., from compost piles) for reducing the impact of those.
Still, stating it's 40 times more potent than carbon dioxide also feels deceptive. While it's technically true, it's not a fair comparison. I'd like to clarify here, that I'm not defending gas as an energy source. I don't own a gas stove or anything in that regard.
I know what you mean, but methane leaks are a real problem, so while combusting it produces mostly CO2, all the infrastructure and pipelines bringing the gas to where it's burnt leak a loooot of methane. And methane is overall the second-most responsible greenhouse gas in anthropogenic climate crisis (after carbon dioxide), although a big chunk of that methane is from industrial animal agriculture of course.
That's what I mean. The biggest source of methane and therefore one of the biggest contributor to climate change is cattle. Which could be considered "natural", but even if we deny it that label, as it is clearly man-made, we wouldn't refer to it as fossil fuel. I'm not sure how much of an impact those methane leaks have on the climate compared to the steady release of agricultural gas, but I bet it's not exactly helping.
But the thing is nobody is calling cow farts "natural gas"; they call them "methane". Even the wikipedia page for "natural gas" refers solely to the fossil fuel we get out of the ground:
I think the key distinction is that "natural gas", as a term, only actually refers to the fossil fuel. That is, "natural gas" != "methane".
The meme is about stopping saying "natural gas" — i.e., the fossil fuel, not other non-fossil sources of methane — and instead calling it "fossil methane". Given we already call cow farts methane and landfill emissions methane, calling the fossil fuel form of methane "fossil methane" seems fitting to me. That way we have overall methane, then we can specify source by saying "fossil methane" or "landfill methane" or "agricultural methane" and so forth.