YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rSvDg5Bh2n0
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View count:12,859
Likes:946
Comments:124
Duration:07:33
Uploaded:2019-06-01
Last sync:2019-06-02 07:10
It's complicated.
So I uploaded a video recently on Vlogbrothers that I was expecting to be contentious and it was for a lot of reasons, and that's okay.

I think that it's a topic that I'm happy to be contentious about. I'm not going to take on all of the pointed in that video, because there's lots, and there's lots of great points. Like obviously, the way that we transmit natural gas, the way that we mine it, it can have outsized effects on certain populations and not others and so I think that has to be taken into account and be treated very carefully.

But the... a thing that... so... as far... I'm not going to get outside of methane because boy, do a lot of people want me to talk about nuclear power: a thing the video wasn't about, and an extraordinarily complicated topic. I don't know what you wanted me to do with that one, commenters.

But there is a think that is important to the climate conversation, and I apologies for not going deeper into some of the conversations about justice, or some of the conversations about pollution, so, but like, I think there's an important climate point here and I want to talk about it to illustrate how fast you can end up in the weeds, or how, how deep the weeds are. Not that the weeds are a bad place, but like, to know that the weeds are there.

So, when you extract methane, which is the same thing as natural gas: CH4, from the ground, some of it will escape. Now there are... methane is a super potent greenhouse gas, it's more potent than CO2, significantly, so you actually will see, in places where methane might be escaping, you will see it being burned, and that's like, 'why are we burning methane when we don't have to?' Well, because it's such a potent greenhouse gas, that it's regulated and so we have to, we try hard to not have it escape. If you burn it on the way out then you don't. Like, that's what these big plumes of fire are at like, fracking sites sometimes, when like, you've got methane but you don't have enough that you can economically capture it, you burn it off. This also happens at sewage treatment plants where lots of methane is produced, they will flare the methane so that CO2 comes out and not methane because methane is a super potent greenhouse gas, and it's better to get rid of.

The thing that we should talk about though, is like, if