In a November 4th column, Max Fawcett argued that LNG's role as a "bridge fuel" has started "to wobble" because of changing technological and market dynamics.

He’s right, in part: there’s increasingly little reason for developing countries in Asia to invest in the expensive infrastructure required to import LNG when solar, wind and batteries have become so cheap. Indeed, the buildout of renewable infrastructure has progressed so rapidly that some Asian countries are cutting domestic gas production and begging suppliers to defer or cancel LNG shipments.

But in making this argument, Fawcett reproduces a pernicious myth that has managed to become conventional wisdom in Canada: that fossil gas could ever have been a “bridge fuel.”

This bridge fuel narrative — the argument that we need to develop an entirely new fossil fuel resource, unconventional shale gas, in order to solve climate change — wasn’t accurate in 2009 when advisors to former president Barack Obama first laundered the idea into the mainstream, and it’s certainly not accurate today, more than a decade and a half and hundreds of billions of tonnes of emissions later.

Its basic premise is this: when burned, fossil gas produces fewer greenhouse gases per kilowatt hour of energy generated than coal, so if we replace coal-fired electricity generation with gas over relatively short timescales, net emissions will go down.

The United States has been the poster child for this story. By 2023, the US had reportedly 

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