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by nerderloo
1774 days ago
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The metric used was emission intensities: emissions per
unit of generated electricity "If coal and oil plants in the top 5 percent of polluters switched to natural gas, global emissions would drop by 29.5 percent." So, if top 5% just switch to natural gas of the same electrical generation capacity, the global emission still drops by ~30%. |
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Reading the actual study, it does seem their rank for "top 5% polluting" is total emissions. They do calculate relative intensity, as you say. But the ranking for plants with greatest emissions was done without regard for capacity.
Also, the "73%" reduction would only be for GHG's from electricity-generation, not all sources.
I mean, obviously coal is a pretty awful fuel from an environmental standpoint and it's good to quantify these things. Just reading these are hard when the authors didn't necessarily make 100% clear the last few tables.