1. Fracking reduces carbon emissions

This is big. For the first time, ever, natural gas is set to overtake coal as the nation’s leading producer of electricity. Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner than coal, meaning our CO2 emissions, which are already at a 20-year low, will continue to decline.

And we got here despite, rather than because of, government regulations.

“For decades, coal has been the dominant energy source for generating electricity in the United States,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported. “EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook is now forecasting that 2016 will be the first year that natural gas-fired generation exceeds coal generation in the United States on an annual basis. Natural gas generation first surpassed coal generation on a monthly basis in April 2015, and the generation shares for coal and natural gas were nearly identical in 2015, each providing about one-third of all electricity generation.”

The change came about almost entirely in response to market forces.

“The recent decline in the generation share of coal, and the concurrent rise in the share of natural gas, was mainly a market-driven response to lower natural gas prices that have made natural gas generation more economically attractive,” EIA explained. “Between 2000 and 2008, coal was significantly less expensive than natural gas, and coal supplied about 50 percent of total U.S. generation. However, beginning in 2009, the gap between coal and natural gas prices narrowed, as large amounts of natural gas produced from shale formations changed the balance between supply and demand in U.S. natural gas markets.”

In other words, the shale revolution, brought about by U.S.-driven technical advances, including hydraulic fracturing, upended the markets and changed the debate.

As the journal The American Interest pointed out: “Natural gas emits just half as much greenhouse gases as coal, and far fewer of the dangerous local pollutants that can lead to the sorts of toxic smog choking China’s megacities. The fact, then, that natural gas is increasing its market share at the expense of coal is a green triumph.”

Of course, natural gas has its detractors. While it makes sense to see natural gas as a viable bridge between coal and renewable sources of energy, some said America must be forced off of fossil fuels, cold turkey.

MIT economist Henry Jacoby admitted natural gas has its advantages.

“Shale gas is a great advantage to the U.S. in the short term, for the next few decades,” he wrote. “But it is so attractive that it threatens other energy sources we ultimately will need.”

He argued natural gas is bad because it’s cheaper than wind and solar power.

“In the long run, we need renewables, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power,” he wrote. “Shale gas is a good thing overall, but we’ve got to keep our eye on the long term.”

This is called “making the perfect the enemy of the good.”

Natural gas isn’t perfect, but it’s an improvement over coal.

The shale revolution is still new; we haven’t seen the last of its upheavals. This is a big one.