 Good morning, John. We're gonna do Nuance today. It's the internet, so I don't know how this is gonna go. I recently had a tweet go viral. No, not that one. Or that one! I've had a lot of tweets go on viral lately. This one, it's a quote tweet of a tweet that referenced an infographic of coal use in the UK over the last eight years. That was the sentence. And my response to this, like, very good-looking news was, like, we can do this! Except slightly more vulgar than that, because it's Twitter. And when you've only got 240 characters to work with, you have to be more attention-grabbing, one might say, maybe a little more vulgar, more outraged. But that's a topic for another video. My point is that we're facing a climate crisis, and a lot of people talk about how, like, the solutions are impractical or impossible, but we can do this! Like, look, the UK used to be, like, the center of the universe of coal, and now there are some days when they don't produce any coal-fired power at all. So we can do this, or can we? Here's another graph. What really hit coal in the nuts in the UK was natural gas. And this is great because natural gas is a cleaner fuel, and it also produces less carbon dioxide per megawatt of energy produced. Like, we would produce way more carbon dioxide in the US if there weren't suddenly a bunch of cheap natural gas. That's kind of putting coal out of business. Now, obviously renewables like wind and solar are part of this as well, but natural gas is a really important bet. And the reason that natural gas got cost competitive compared to coal is hydraulic fracturing, or what we call fracking, which is in environmental circles considered to be universally a bad thing. And, like, it is bad. It's bad for local environments, it uses a huge amount of water, it comes with the risk of spills, it impacts wildlife, there are potential health hazards, and if done poorly, methane gets released into the atmosphere, and methane is itself a greenhouse gas. But then again, natural gas is also a really good complement to renewables like wind and solar that don't necessarily track their power production into when the power is needed. Unlike coal-fired power plants, which have to be on all the time, natural gas plants can be easily turned on and off, and that allows them to pick up the slack when demand spikes at certain times of the day, or if it's just not very windy or sunny. In the long term, there are other ways that we might solve this problem, but right now, natural gas is a really good way to solve it, and it makes the transition to renewables much easier. Now, there are regulations that can decrease the potential negative effects of fracking, but there are no ways to completely eliminate the negative effects. It's just not a possible thing. But I say over and over again that climate change is like the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced. The ways that we're going to mitigate that problem are going to, in themselves, have environmental impacts. And that's not necessarily a super comfortable thing to think about or talk about. Of course, in a form and a video, I'm not going to decide whether fracking is, like, ultimately good or ultimately bad. I think that that depends on how and where it's done. And it's also obviously not a long-term solution. It's a bridge to get us to the future we need to be in. I just think it is far too easy to create a villain that is, like, sort of standing in the way of some magical solution that isn't really there. But this transition, while it's going to take a long time, has to be done as fast as possible. And the fact that coal, in the last ten years, has become an economically unviable way of making power, at least in America, is huge. It is very good news. And it is something that was largely brought to us, not entirely, but largely brought to us by hydraulic fracturing. That's something that I, the guy who is often, you know, like, mad at all fossil fuels, have to think about. And, like, include in my worldview and in my imagining of the path forward out of this mess. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.