Teaching Tips

• The educator can engage students by assigning student groups to research the pros and cons of natural gas issues (fracking, greenhouse gas content, comparison to coal, comparison to renewable energy) and have students share their findings with the class.

About the Science

• Video merely introduces the pros and cons of natural gas and is not intended to present deep scientific concepts. This same web page offers a series of video interviews with energy experts across industry and government, representing researchers/scientists, business owners/CEOs, and governments officials.
• Pros and cons of fracking are introduced in the video.
• Comments from expert scientist:
  Scientific strengths:
  The resource provides an extremely accurate presentation of the current state for natural gas in the energy scenario.
  The main different uses of natural gas are presented, as well as the main sources, and challenges.
  Concerns:
  Some sentences in the first video in the resource are probably a bit too optimistic about natural gas. For example, it is said that natural gas is "cheap, abundant, and would help us reduce our carbon emissions". Although technically true (if compared to coal), there are other energy sources (wind for example) which are cheaper, and would definitely reduce carbon emissions in a much larger measure.
  As correctly stated in the “The fossil fuel environmentalists love to love” video, natural gas is not clean enough to provide the carbon reduction that is foreseen by many of the international climate agreements.
  The message which should be conveyed is that natural gas is cleanER than coal, but still not as clean as renewables.

About the Pedagogy

• This resource does not come with a teacher’s guide. It could be used as additional information in an energy unit.
• The group of interviewees lack diversity; all the additional interviews are with white men.

Technical Details/Ease of Use

• There is no transcript or closed captioned version available.
• Teachers must create an account to access resources from this organization. Membership is free and the only information that needs to be provided is name, email, and a password.

Related URLs These related sites were noted by our reviewers but have not been reviewed by CLEAN