The boom in American natural-gas production is doing what international negotiations and legislation couldn’t: reducing U.S. carbon-dioxide pollution.
With decade-low prices, natural gas is easing out coal in power generation, a change that cuts greenhouse gases by half at the smokestack. That shift, combined with state programs to encourage renewable energy and new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency that could come as early as today, has put the country on course to cut domestic greenhouse-gas emissions 12 percent by 2020, on par with what the failed cap-and-trade legislation aimed to achieve, said Dallas Burtraw, a fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington.
