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Natural gas is a dangerous name for
a climate pollutant
The end of natural gas has to start with its name
The oil and gas industry didn’t invent the
name. But it invented the myth of a clean fuel.
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Locals in the town of
Fredonia, New York, noticed in the early 19th century
how gas would sometimes bubble up in a creek and catch fire when lit.
This wasn’t much more than a curiosity until 1821, when a businessman
captured and sold it for fuel to Fredonia shops. This “inflammable
air,” as one newspaper called it, was cheap to transport relative to
the other lighting fuels of the day — whale oil for candles and gas
produced from coal. From the start, “nature’s gas,” as it was
nicknamed, was celebrated as the healthy and virtually inexhaustible
miracle fuel of the future.
A big part of the early
appeal was how much cleaner gas seemed than coal. In the 19th century,
people could see and smell the particulate matter, sulfur, and
nitrogen leaving a trail of
smoggy air in cities. By comparison, natural gas is almost
entirely made up of methane, a colorless, odorless gas that produces
far fewer of these pollutants when burned.
What no one knew back then
was that methane is pollution, too — just a different kind. A large
body of
scientific research now shows that gas, when it’s produced and
when it’s consumed, poses a danger to human health and to the climate.
In the 19th century, this
ignorance was understandable, but today most people still don’t
appreciate how insidious gas fuel is. When the climate communications
group
Climate Nexus conducted a poll of 4,600 registered US voters last
fall, 77 percent had a favorable view of natural gas, far higher than
when asked about their views on methane. Less than a third were able
to link that natural gas is primarily methane. In the same poll, a
majority incorrectly answered that they think methane pollution is
declining or staying about the same. Other surveys show similar
results.
The reason for the disconnect
is embedded in the very name, “natural gas.” The word “natural” tends
to bias Americans to view whatever it is affixed to as healthy, clean,
and environmentally friendly. Natural foods, natural immunity, and
natural births are among the many buzzwords of the
moment.
“The idea that we ought to do
what’s natural, we ought to use what’s natural, and we ought to
consume what’s natural is one of the most powerful and commonplace
shortcuts we have,” said Alan Levinovitz, a religion professor who
wrote Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful
Facts, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science. “The term influences
people’s attitudes toward natural gas. People are going to be more
likely to see natural gas as better than it is; they’re more likely to
see it as safer.”
The language has broader
ripple effects on consumer choices and political decisions. Countries
around the world have paradoxically encoded policies that incentivize
continued gas production and consumption, even as 100 of them joined a
voluntary
Global Methane Pledge to slash methane by 30 percent in the next
decade. The stakes have only grown as gas production rises to replace
coal as the dominant fuel powering the electricity sector and millions
of homes. Even as cities like New York and San Francisco are working
to phase out gas appliances in their construction, gas production and
exports have boomed to make the US the biggest exporter of liquified
gas in the world.
Some climate advocates have
already dropped the “natural” moniker in their legal filings,
advertising, and communications, when talking about methane. They
favor calling it “fossil gas” or “methane gas” — anything that’s more
descriptive for a dangerous and explosive substance.
“I want my language to
communicate the harms that are inherent in methane, in this
climate-forcing substance. I want to be clear this is a threat to
climate and public health,” said Matt Vespa, an attorney for the
environmental legal nonprofit Earthjustice.
But the oil and gas industry
isn’t ready to lose its biggest marketing advantage. If anything,
industry language like clean, renewable, and responsible, has
proliferated the past few years. The industry is actively at work to
protect its careful branding as it tries to dodge climate scrutiny
from regulators.
For over a century, the gas
industry sold the public a myth about clean energy
Researchers at Yale’s Program
on Climate Change Communication had a hunch about gas that they had a
chance to test in a
peer-reviewed paper published last fall. They knew from previous
public opinion polls that Americans are more likely to view natural
gas far more favorably than other fossil fuels and see it as a
solution for climate change, rather than a driver. Anthony Leiserowitz,
one of the researchers and co-author of the paper, wanted to isolate
the effect the word “natural” had on these views.
They found a big effect, in
line with the large body of social science research showing how food
products labeled “natural” lead people to consider them more
eco-friendly and healthy. The paper, published in the Journal of
Environmental Psychology, examined how 3,000 respondents viewed
different synonyms for gas. More than half of participants had a
positive view of natural gas, but the advantage shrank immediately
when you called it “natural methane gas” or “methane gas,” as well as
for “fossil gas” and “fracked gas.” A second survey asked 500
participants to word-associate with “natural gas.” Only a tiny portion
of the respondents, fewer than 6 percent, associated natural gas with
methane, showing, according to the researchers, “that the relationship
between the two is not a typical top-of-mind association.”
The study unsurprisingly
found that the word “natural” biases Americans in favor of gas. But it
also showed a key ignorance that has been exploited by the gas
industry: The public doesn’t understand that the gas is essentially
the same as methane, a pollutant. Millions of Americans cook
with gas every day, but they don’t necessarily realize it is a fossil
fuel that’s being piped into their stoves.
Though the industry may not
have invented the phrase natural gas, it has leaned into its
advantages in decades of advertising. In 1930, one Pennsylvanian gas
company promoted its fuel as clean, healthful heat. And the
advertising wasn’t always limited to just gas: One pamphlet from the
1940s, dug up by Levinovitz in the research for his book, likened coal
to a cake baked by sunlight and heat.
In a few instances, companies have simply opted to drop
the word “gas” entirely, going even further to distance themselves
from the fact that its core product is methane. In 1997, the gas
utility company, Northwest Natural Gas, simply dropped gas from its
name to become Northwest Natural.
The gas industry advocacy group
Natural Allies for
a Clean Energy Future also omits gas from its name. It has
blanketed
Politico newsletters in the last year with ads promoting gas as a
solution for climate change, linking to a website that depicts two
young children playing with a skateboard. You have to read the fine
print to understand what’s being advertised is switching from one
fossil fuel (coal) to another. (The group has connections with the
Democratic Party, and recently added two former Democratic senators,
Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, to its
leadership council. Heitkamp told
The Hill she would be working “changing hearts and minds of people
in the climate movement.”)
![](images/images_02_11_2022/pic2Crop.jpg) |
![](images/images_02_11_2022/pic3Crop.jpg) |
A 1930s ad for the Greenville Natural Gas Co. in
Pennsylvania advertises “healthful heat,” similar to industry
advertising of “clean gas” today.
Newspapers.com |
A vintage pamphlet from a Philadelphia coal company
advertises a “layer cake filled with ‘buried sunshine.’”
Provided by Alan Levinovitz |
Environmentalists, meanwhile,
have been complaining about how the gas industry misled consumers for
decades. In 1994, the environmental group Greenpeace filed a complaint
to the Federal Trade Commission, the independent body that has the
power to fine and stop false advertising. Greenpeace urged the FTC to
take action against the American Gas Association’s advertisements that
had appeared in outlets like Newsweek, the New Republic, and Time. The
complaint charged that the trade group’s claims the fuel was the
solution for environmental problems and acid rain went too far to be
reasonably supported by the science.
The FTC would have had the
power to rein in this type of advertising as early as the 1990s. It
didn’t use that power. The gas industry, free from FTC restrictions,
has now embraced even more flagrant greenwashing 30 years later, with
major consequences for climate change.
As gas’s reputation has
soured, industry has gotten more creative
The concentration of methane
in the atmosphere is
rising
alarmingly fast, with human activities mostly to blame. It has
taken scientists some time to track down exactly where all that
methane was coming from, but in the last few years, more research has
shown methane leaks to be a systemic problem in the oil and gas
industry. Wherever you find gas, you can potentially find some methane
leaking out — at
drilling sites,
from pipelines,
in cities, and even inside the
home.
As the gas industry’s
reputation has soured, world leaders are starting to take
a harder look at these methane leaks and cities are moving toward
phasing out gas in new building construction. Rather than slowing
down, the natural gas marketing campaigns have become even more
aggressive.
Democratic politicians and
some environmental groups a decade ago
embraced the thinking that gas could be a “bridge fuel” to phase
out the more polluting coal industry. They didn’t just favor policies
that promoted gas over coal, but at times prioritized gas over wind
and solar. The lobby group American Petroleum Institute has pivoted
from saying gas is a bridge fuel to arguing it is the fuel of the
future. One API leader argued in 2019, “I would urge that it’s not a
bridge but a foundation and will be a foundation for years to come.”
Today, Democratic leaders
including President Joe Biden have largely backed away from that
language, as methane is more than
80 times more capable of warming the atmosphere over a 20-year
period than carbon dioxide. A politician can’t claim to be serious
about fighting climate change if he ignores that methane
concentrations have
hit
record highs.
As Democrats have gotten to
be more skeptical of “bridge fuel” rhetoric, it’s become common for
gas producers and suppliers to claim
that their gas is cleaner than the gas produced somewhere
else. That’s where newer phrases have come from, like
“responsibly sourced gas” and
“renewable natural gas.” Other times, the gas industry rallies
under the banner of the American flag, calling its product “freedom
gas.”
Whatever the label, the
industry has adopted shifting language to promote gas as a climate
solution, rather than a climate problem.
In the last year, API,
ExxonMobil, and a number of other oil companies ran a blitz of
Facebook ads that emphasized “clean natural gas,” first reported by
the Guardian. SoCalGas, a utility that supplies gas to 22 million
California customers, has run online ads claiming it is “renewable.”
One company that sells biogas trapped from landfills and sewage
treatments, which is identical to methane, claims it is a renewable
energy company producing “zero-emissions” from the “cleanest fuel in
the world.”
The oil and gas industry is
adamant that gas is essential to transitioning off of other fossil
fuels. “Natural gas is the leading reason the U.S. has reduced CO2
emissions to generational lows, and exporting that progress abroad by
enabling coal-reliant nations to turn to cleaner fuels is critical to
reducing emissions globally,” said API spokesperson Megan Bloomgren in
a statement emailed to Vox.
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A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery
illuminates the sky in Norco, Louisiana, on August 21, 2019. Located
about 10 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, the plant
agreed to install $10 million in pollution monitoring and control
equipment in 2018 to settle allegations that flares used to burn off
emissions were operating in violation of the Clean Air Act.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The same type of rhetoric has
shaped policy decisions that have much bigger stakes for climate
investments. For example, in January, the commission overseeing the
European Union became embroiled in a controversy when it said natural
gas and nuclear power were sustainable investments, angering climate
advocates, as
first reported by Politico. The document declared that recognizing
gas and nuclear energy can clean up climate pollution in the EU. This
categorization would allow investors to count funding for future
gas projects as sustainable and clean.
Climate campaigners are dealt
a losing hand in these kinds of policy debates as long as gas is
viewed as natural. It’s why they’re looking to challenge the way
natural gas is used in company advertising.
In a bid to accelerate a
transition away from gas, environmental groups have submitted a
new complaint to the Federal Trade Commission to regulate
misleading natural gas claims in advertising. Matt Vespa, an attorney
for Earthjustice, hopes to see the FTC finally tackle the fossil fuel
industry’s advertising claims. One important turning point could be
how the FTC treats the issue in its upcoming Green Guide, updated
every few years, on how food and cosmetic companies can use “natural”
in their advertising.
While no single move can
erase natural gas from our popular discourse overnight, Vespa hopes
that a strong FTC stance against natural gas “will percolate into
regulators’ minds that this is harmful.”
This language is “too
dangerous to have around”
Climate advocates point to
the polling, the greenwashing, and the policy implications as pressing
reasons it’s important that everyone, especially the media, drop the
natural gas label.
For Alan Levinovitz, the name
natural gas is simply “too dangerous to have around.” Stopping calling
it natural gas is the necessary first step for the world to move away
from gas as a climate solution.
“My general rule of thumb for
effective climate communication is don’t echo Big Oil sloganeering,”
said Harvard scientist Geoffrey Supran, who researches oil
disinformation. “So, at this point, it seems quite obvious that if
they like using this term, the rest of us should avoid it.”
Following Supran’s logic,
activists, political leaders, and some academics have shifted away
from calling it natural gas.
But the name has had a
200-year head start. “It’s hard to penetrate the decades of ‘natural
gas’ [messaging] just being ingrained in people’s brains,” said Vespa.
As for what should replace
our default language, Anthony Leiserowitz’s 2021 Yale study had
another finding that’s important to consider: Calling gas “fossil” or
“fracked” could backfire if the objective is to reach as broad an
audience as possible. The Yale polling found Republican voters viewed
gas more favorably when it was called fossil gas or fracked gas, but
more neutrally when it was called methane gas.
Despite these findings, some
climate activists, politicians, and scientists have settled on calling
it fossil gas anyway. Katharine
Wilkinson stopped using natural gas in favor of simply gas or
methane a few years ago, dropping all references to “natural” in the
2020 republished online version of the climate solutions book
Drawdown
and the podcast she co-hosts,
A Matter of Degrees.
House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ)
prefers “fossil gas,” and the phrase can be found in several committee
reports and legislation. And
a handful
of
scientific papers over the years have used fossil
gas.
If the movement to rename
natural gas were to catch on, it would have bigger ripple effects on
consumer choices and even political decisions. “It could shape your
everyday behavior in terms of whether you decide to buy a natural gas
stove or an induction stove,” Leiserowitz said. “These are marketing
slogans and campaigns that have changed the way Americans think about
what they do.”
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
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