A NEW BALANCE OF POWER
Cheap, plentiful natural gas has relpaced coal as the leading source of electricity in the U.S., but for how long?
King Coal has been kicked off the throne. Natural gas is now the nation’s leading source of electricity. It is abundant and cheap, which has not only crippled the coal industry but has also affected virtually every other source of power that makes up the energy grid. Some have estimated that the U.S. has enough natural gas to meet the country’s energy needs for about 200 years. But “King Gas” has its critics — especially among environmentalists — and a long, smooth reign for natural gas is far from assured.
The gas revolution
As late as 1986, natural gas was used to generate just 10 percent of the country’s power. By 2016, that figure leaped to 34 percent, supplanting coal as the No. 1 source of electricity. The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently projected the nation’s use of electricity from gas will exceed coal by 6 percent by next year.
What changed? Producers have been able to unlock vast amounts of natural gas through the combination of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, and horizontal drilling techniques in shale formations such as the Barnett in Texas, the San Juan Basin in New Mexico, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio and West Virginia.
New Mexico ranks among the top 10 natural gas-producing states, and accounts for 4 percent of U.S. natural gas output. The San Juan Basin, which extends from northwestern New Mexico into Colorado, is one of the largest fields of proved natural gas reserves in the United States.
Just a few years ago, the U.S. had to import natural gas from other countries to meet its needs. Today, there is so much that U.S. producers export natural gas to places like Mexico.
Burgeoning supplies caused the price of natural gas to drop. At some periods between 2003 and 2008, the price approached $14 per million British thermal units, a common industry measurement. Since the fracking boom, prices averaged less than $3.20 per million BTU.
Those low prices are one reason that natural gas is attractive to utilities as a way to generate electricity. Natural gas-fired plants also have the ability to “ramp up” power very quickly.
In addition, natural gas burns twice as cleanly as coal.
“The biggest, most disruptive innovation in the energy sector in the last 30 years is unconventional
there’s a “sweet spot” of social-media use. Where it lies is anybody’s guess.
In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12thgraders’ responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time.
They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens — social media, texting, electronic games, the internet — were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological wellbeing.
By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives.
While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: “Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness.”
The survey that 1.1 million adolescents answered between 1991 and 2016 (called Monitoring the Future) doesn’t track a single group of kids from year to year. So the researchers could draw no conclusions about the evolution of an individual teen’s happiness and selfesteem on the basis of how she spent her time.
But by looking at group snapshots of kids taken in any given year, they could discern consistent patterns — correlations — between how kids spent their time and how satisfied they were with themselves and their lives.
Gathered together, those snapshots also produced a clear picture: adolescents’ psychological well-being was lowest in years when, as a group, they spent more time online, on social media and reading news online, and when more Americans owned smartphones. Psychological well-being was highest in years when adolescents spent more time with their friends in person, reading print media and on exercise and sports.
It’s quite another thing to show that smartphones — and the increase in time spent online that came with them — is the cause of growing teen angst. To do that, researchers needed to align potential “causes” and “effects” with a lag time of a year, and see if the correlation still held.
Sure enough, the downward trajectory of psychological well-being closely followed trends of smartphone adoption and time spent online, not the other way around.
The analysis also suggested that the Great Recession didn’t explain the national souring of teens’ moods. An increase in income inequality and a drop in gross domestic product did correlate with their decline in happiness and satisfaction. But unemployment peaked in 2010 and teens’ psychological well-being began to decline only after 2012. Their satisfaction did not consistently rise or fall in response to changes in median household income, the stock market’s Dow Jones industrial average, the unemployment rate or college enrollment (which is also an economic bellwether).
“The sudden shift in well-being around 2012-13 suggests that the trends in adolescent time use reached a tipping point around that year, perhaps due to the market saturation of smartphones in that period,” wrote the authors, Jean M. Twenge and Gabrielle Martin of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia.
In fact, they noted, after teen ownership of smartphones began to stabilize in 2014-15, so, too, did the national decline in teen happiness and self-esteem.
It’s possible that adults also experienced a change in happiness as smartphones proliferated. But Twenge, Martin and Campbell suggest that teens who were among the first to navigate adolescence with the full range of online offerings in their palms might just be unique in their response.
“The abrupt changes in adolescents’ time use and well-being suggest a possible generational shift appearing among those born after about 1995,” they wrote. Perhaps, they added, the cutoff for the generation known as millennials (thought to be those born between 1980 and 1999) should stop at 1995.
A new generation is now dominating research samples of teens and college-age young adults. They might be called iGen, the authors wrote, and their rapid adoption of smartphone technology in the early 2010s may leave a mark on their young psyches that will distinguish them from Millennials.