PowerSwitch

Not surprisingly, a new study suggesting that the greenhouse gas footprint of unconventional natural gas development is far worse than coal is already undergoing a furious deconstruction.

As I write in Tuesday’s Times, Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, concluded in an analysis to be published this week in a peer-reviewed journal, Climatic Change Letters, that somewhere from 3.6 percent to 7.9 percent of methane, the chief component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas, is leaking into the atmosphere at various points along the shale gas production life cycle.