And thank you for the link; there’s a lot of good material there. (But I could wish Mr. Walters took a little more time proofreading it.)

Wrongo! http://davidwalters.dailykos.com/

I have been traveling the west recently (by bicycle), and have seen wind projects going up at a stunning pace. We need a power source to firm wind (at least until there are enough widely distributed wind farms so they can firm each other). As noted in the post, the dispatch-ability of gas power is very valuable to utilities integrating wind and solar into their portfolios.

However, gas is only less bad, and MUST be a transitional fuel – fortunately the relatively low infrastructure costs for gas power plants will make this transition easier. The combination of gas turbines and compressed air storage from solar and wind makes this an even better option. Cars should not be made to run on CNG – better to build them for

I hate to see gas wells scattered over our beloved landscapes. I despise corporate opportunists making obscene profits from gas in western Colorado and coalbed methane in Wyoming. The Waxman-Markey caps must come down hard and fast to make this necessary evil brief.

You didn’t say so explicitly, so let me guess. You’re against both fossil and nuclear. Am I right?

The problem, as President Obama might put it, is the fierce urgency of now. We have to start lowering CO2 emissions now. Replacing some coal with natural gas will do that — not right away, but sooner than large-scale deployment of renewables or nuclear power.

We might have had nuclear that lives up to its promise, but we stopped research and development on that in 1994. We might have had efficient wind power, but that started off as a tax shelter and is only now recovering. We might have had a lot of things, but our system is geared to cut spending for the future to the maximum extent possible, with the result that we keep running into crises. Like right now.

For instance, with solar thermal you use gas at night so only 1/2 the time. Now the emissions are 1/4 of an equivalent coal plant and you have 24/7 baseload power. That is pretty good.

Natural gas is a good transition strategy to quickly lower CO2 emissions, is more cost effective than nuclear, doesn’t have nuclear waste to contend with, and can be implemented relatively quickly–we need to do something right away.

Longer term, we can include nuclear if it is cost effective. From all the numbers I have seen, there are a lot of renewable energy solutions that are both cheaper and quicker to implement.