I came across a strange Google search request recently.
Which may seem like a question that doesn't need asking.
After all natural gas is gas, we burn gas.
So how can it be renewable?
But, once you see some of the information currently being provided
by the natural gas industry,
the question starts to make sense.
Natural gas can provide positive environmental and health benefits
to our cities and towns, that is available, flexible and environmentally sustainable.
So how and why is gas being sold as green when it's not?
let's just be clear gas is a fossil fuel,
whether it's called natural gas, liquid gas or even coal gas.
It all releases the same pollutants.
Compared to coal and oil, natural gas does produce less CO2 and particulate matter.
The natural gas produces more methane,
which is significant because methane traps 30 times more heat than CO2
over a hundred year period.
Natural gas isn't either sustainable or renewable.
At our current rate of consumption
natural gas reserves could last for somewhere between 50 and 250 years.
It's also extracted using the same environmentally damaging techniques as oil.
Oil is extracted from beds of shale through fracking,
which can have truly alarming consequences.
Holy ****.
And crucially if the extraction and delivery of natural gas
leaks into the atmosphere gas becomes as polluting as coal.
As far back as the 1960s
oil companies have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars
in PR and advertising.
To convince the public that gas is natural and cleaner than other fuels.
The campaigns continue today, but it's no longer just TV advertising.
In 2020 American Energy Corporation, Williams companies,
which handles about 30% of the natural gas in the US,
needed to win support for a billion dollar pipeline,
that had been blocked by New York State regulators.
So together with other fossil fuel companies
they set about trying to convince young liberal voters,
especially voters of colour that gas is a clean energy,
by running ads like these under the name 'Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future'.
Natural Allies have spent more than $600,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads
and this spending has increased in the run-up to the US midterms.
But other oil and gas companies have taken a more aggressive approach
than social media campaigns.
For example when Democratic state senator José Javier Rodriguez
proposed a bill that would cut into the profits of the biggest power company in the US,
Florida, Power and Light,
the company's PR firm paid a candidate with the same surname $45,000
to run against the Democratic state senator at the following election.
The tactics succeeded in splitting Rodriguez's vote,
he lost re-election by less than 40 votes and his bill was abandoned.
We've had a problem here in Florida with straw candidates and dark money forces,
it was unethical
and there's no question that it had an impact on the race.
And in New Orleans,
when power company, Entergy was being blocked from building a gas-fired power plant,
their PR Company paid a crowd of actors to speak in favour of the project at council meetings.
It worked.
And the gas-fired power station went online in 2020.
Natural gas.
Congratulations, you asked for it and you win!
Win it fast for comfortable, affordable Natural gas.
All this lobbying and greenwashing
has meant that natural gas is now firmly rebranded
as a transitional fuel to reliably fill the gap until renewables can take over.
The European Union has even gone so far as to label gas and nuclear as green investments.
New EU legislation now states
that if a new natural gas power plant
produces emission below 270 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour,
then it counts as a green investment.
Even though the EU made a commitment to the Paris agreement
to keep CO2 per kilowatt hour under 100 grams.
But it doesn't change the reality that natural gas is a major pollutant
or that if there is to be even a 50% chance
of limiting a global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees,
90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves need to stay in the ground.
Any form of clever rebranding doesn't change that fact.