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Does a natural gas bridge go anywhere? / Nathan Richardson, Common resources, January 7, 2013http://common-resources.org/2013/does-a-natural-gas-bridge-go-anywhereMichael Levi has a great and provocative new paper on natural gas as a bridge fuel – that is, shifting from coal to gas generation now, with a future shift to zero-carbon renewables. At the risk of oversimplification, the main finding is that natural gas doesn’t matter much if your long-term stabilization target is 450 ppm of atmospheric carbon, since the bridge can’t be very long. A very rapid shift to minimal emissions is needed to meet this target. But if your target is 550ppm or more, it looks much more useful. A secondary finding is that methane leakage is a mostly a sideshow—largely because dangerous warming happens over the long-term, while the high impact of methane relative to CO2 is only short term (it gets broken down eventually)...