[whatshisface]

>that may be balanced out by higher climate change impact when it's mined.

What do you mean by that? Natural gas is taken from oil wells, the exact same kind of holes in the ground that produce bunker fuel. It's the highest level on the refinery column.

Edit: Here is a picture of the gas market right now:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare#/media/File:Niger_De...

If LNG pans out we would move those fires into the engines of ships. It would probably be carbon-neutral up to the trucks that the pipe welders drove.

[forapurpose]

> Natural gas is taken from oil wells

There's a large boom, not new at this point, in extracting natural gas via fracking. My understanding is that the process produces emissions with high impact on climate change.

[whatshisface]

Increased production (and the associated environmental risks) would happen no matter what we were burning. Switching between two fuels doesn't change the amount that has to be produced: if for some reason we couldn't burn natural gas, the same increase in energy consumption would cause the same boom in fracking other oilfields in order to satisfy the demand for the other hydrocarbon.

Edit: If the concern is that the economics of NG are driving higher consumption, then you've got to realize that you could still reclaim the net win by doing some legal thing to halt consumption. The important variables here are damage per consumption and consumption: you want to lower both, but if an improvement in damage per consumption raises consumption you don't want to go back and make the damage per consumption worse. The only reasonable course of action if the damage was too high would be to go in and say, keep using the least-damaging fuel but you're going to have to burn less of it.