[Greenbuilding] low flow shower heads

Norman Feldman nfeldman at fountainhouse.org
Sat May 21 22:12:02 CDT 2011


Re methane's impact on global warming compared with that of co2:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April11/GasDrillingDirtier.html
"Extracting natural gas from the Marcellus Shale could do more to aggravate global warming than mining coal, according to a Cornell study published in the May issue of Climatic Change Letters (105:5).

While natural gas has been touted as a clean-burning fuel that produces less carbon dioxide than coal, ecologist Robert Howarth warns that we should be more concerned about methane leaking into the atmosphere during hydraulic fracturing.

Natural gas is mostly methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas, especially in the short term, with 105 times more warming impact, pound for pound, than carbon dioxide (CO2), Howarth said, adding that even small leaks make a big difference. He estimated that as much as 8 percent of the methane in shale gas leaks into the air during the lifetime of a hydraulic shale gas well -- up to twice what escapes from conventional gas production.

"The take-home message of our study is that if you do an integration of 20 years following the development of the gas, shale gas is worse than conventional gas and is, in fact, worse than coal and worse than oil," Howarth said. "We are not advocating for more coal or oil, but rather to move to a truly green, renewable future as quickly as possible. We need to look at the true environmental consequences of shale gas."

Howarth, the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology, Tony Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering, and Renee Santoro, a research technician in ecology and evolutionary biology, analyzed data from published sources, industry reports and even Powerpoint presentations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

They compared estimated emissions for shale gas, conventional gas, coal (surface-mined and deep-mined) and diesel oil, taking into account direct emissions of CO2 during combustion, indirect emissions of CO2 necessary to develop and use the energy source and methane emissions, which were converted to equivalent value of CO2 for global warming potential."



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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 17:32:17 -0700
From: "JOHN SALMEN" <terrain at shaw.ca>
To: "'Green Building'" <greenbuilding at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] low flow shower heads
Message-ID: <005401cc174e$89f75f00$9de61d00$@ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Volcanoes are a half to a third of the methane production from livestock and
I think methane is about 20x (gwp) than co2. Which would mean that volcanoes
are pretty low on the list compared to cows (unless they are grazing under a
volcano???)

Not sure how that relates to low flow shower heads but definite relief for
my head to upload some statistics loaded into memory and make room for some
more.






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