IEA's Golden Age of Natural Gas Will Usher in a Dark Age for Civilization & Nature

original article:

http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/iea-golden-age-natural-gas-will-usher-dark-age-civilization-nature.html

You've probably seen the glowing reports about how cheap it is to making fracking safer. There are plenty of them.

But too bad nearly everybody out there apparently stopped reading either the press release or the full report before they got to the part where the IEA says that ushering in a new golden age of natural gas will full and completely ruin the climate...

It's not until page 91 of the full report until the IEA gets into the royally ruining the climate part of increased natural gas development. Here's the IEA:

The Golden Rules Case puts CO2 emissions on a long-term trajectory consistent with stabilising the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse-gas emissions at around 650 parts per million, a trajectory consistent with a probable temperature rise of more than 3.5 degrees Celsius (°C) in the long term, well above the widely accepted 2°C target. This finding reinforces a central conclusion from the WEO special report on a Golden Age of Gas (IEA, 2011b), that, while a greater role for natural gas in the global energy mix does bring environmental benefits where it substitutes for other fossil fuels, natural gas cannot on its own provide the answer to the challenge of climate change.

Energy-related CO2 emissions are higher by 1.3% compared with the Golden Rules Case but, in both cases, emissions are well above the trajectory required to reach the globally agreed goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C

If there was ever a better current example than this of fiddling while Rome burns, I haven't seen it.