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gas
It's Time to Make Gas a Dirty Word
The natural gas industry is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.
Jul 28, 2026
We talk regularly about Big Oil, but it would probably make more sense to at least occasionally refer to it as Big Gas—many of the same players are involved, of course, and the two are often found in the same places, but it’s been clear for some time that oil is not a growth industry. The rapid rise of electric vehicles in most of the world undercuts projections of future use—we’re at or near the top of the plateau now, and by 2030 or so the amount of oil we use should be going down.
That’s why the hydrocarbon industry’s growth story has been largely about natural gas. It’s used for many things—heating, cooking—but above all for generating electricity, and it’s on that ground that the fossil fuel industry has set out to build its market, stressing constantly that it is clean and cheap. Two important new reports in recent days make it clear how false those claims really are.
The first comes from a Center for Climate Integrity team led by Rebecca Leber and Rebecca John. Leber has a long record covering the industry—her 2020 report in Mother Jones about the industry paying Instagram influencers to plug natural gas was an early landmark in our understanding of pay-for-play social media, as well as the lengths the industry would go to in order to tell its fibs. (“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.”)
But as they document in the new report, which should be read in full, this is a very old story. It turns out that the natural gas industry has been playing the PR game for a very long time. As far back as the 1950s, gas had a bad image: it was known to contribute to respiratory problems when burned indoors (more on that later!), and to local air pollution. And as scientists first started analyzing the greenhouse effect in the 1970s, most of the concern was about carbon dioxide, but there was a growing realization that methane—which is essentially what natural gas is—was the smaller but still important sibling greenhouse gas. And so the industry began doing what it did best, which is lying, or, to use the technical term, “public relations.” They constructed a whole mythology around natural gas, turning it into the fossil fuel equivalent of the “other white meat”:
In the late 1980s, the gas industry and major oil companies started to brand gas as a “bridge fuel”—a clean-burning transition fuel to a renewable energy future. In reality, they planned a long-term future for natural gas, while simultaneously undermining renewables, obstructing the destination to which gas’ “bridge” was supposed to lead. Over the next 20 years, the industry effectively solidified the bridge fuel myth by co-opting the science and oversight originally intended to keep carbon and methane emissions in check.
Working together in a growing coalition that included the oil majors and ultimately several major environmental groups, the industry managed to temper concerns about methane using strategies crafted by the same firms that for decades undermined the scientific consensus about the harms of tobacco. AGA and allied groups aggressively challenged the science around methane through industry-funded studies and the creation of the objective-sounding Gas Research Institute.
But their approach was multidimensional. While muddying the waters on the industry’s methane problem, the gas industry was careful not to deny the issue of climate change outright, instead focusing attention on carbon dioxide. It paired this with relentlessly promoting the concept of gas as clean—certainly cleaner than coal or oil—and positioning gas as a bridge fuel and climate solution. In the process, the gas industry solidified partnerships with EPA with the explicit goal of fending off regulations in favor of voluntary emissions management, while also recruiting environmental organizations that would lend legitimacy to their arguments.
I want to highlight the effectiveness of this strategy with a story about… me. In 1988, before this campaign took off, I was writing The End of Nature, sometimes called the first book for a general audience on climate change. And in it I wrote:
A common suggestion is to replace much of the coal and oil we burn with natural gas, since it produces only about half as much carbon dioxide. But it natural gas—methane—escapes into the atmosphere before it burns, it traps solar radiation more efficiently than CO2… As a result, switching to natural gas may have no effect on the greenhouse effect. It might even make it worse.
So give me credit for knowing this crucial science when I was 27.
But not really, because I think I more or less forgot it over the next two decades, as the gas industry rearranged the terms of the debate, and turned it into the lesser of two climate evils, the “bridge” to a future of cleaner energy. This argument was bought wholesale by politicians, especially Democratic ones—if you go read Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses, most of them include a paragraph praising the fracking revolution as both an economic boon and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; we were replacing coal with something cleaner. The Sierra Club’s leader, Carl Pope, barnstormed around the country with one of the fracking industry’s chief spokespeople, promoting this “solution” to the climate crisis.
And so it seemed novel to me when two Cornell scientists, Bob Howarth and Tony Ingraffea, about 15 years ago, began publishing data showing that leak rates from fracking meant that natural gas was no cleaner than coal—the argument that had been there all along. I wrote some early pieces on their work for The New York Review of Books, and then published a long piece in The Nation that made the same point I’d made more than a quarter-century earlier:
Our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.
I’ve made up for my forgetfulness, I think, by helping lead battles against fracking, and against the buildout of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals; those of you who have been long subscribers to this newsletter got to participate in that latter fight, which we won in the Biden years and then lost in the Trump risorgimento. But if the PR campaign flummoxed me, imagine how well it worked on people who weren’t paying much attention at all (which included virtually everyone in political life, especially Democrats who saw natural gas as a way to have their green cake and reccycle it too). Many thanks to Leber, John, and their whole team for laying the story out in all its gory detail.
The other claim about natural gas is that it’s cheap—this is the formulation that “leaders” like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul are currently relying on as they link fracked gas and affordability as an excuse to cut back on moving towards renewables, and that data center developers are using to justify a buildout of natural gas generation.
But a report out this morning from the good folks at Oil Change International puts paid to all that. It makes clear that the industry is running out of the really cheap stuff—the fracked gas from the Permian and Appalachian shales that it’s been pumping for the last two decades. Many of those wells are playing out fast, and now it’s going to need to turn to the more “geologically complex” Haynesville shale of east Texas and Louisiana, and that will drive up costs—especially since more and more of the gas is, at least theoretically, going to be exported to Asia as the industry builds out massive shipping terminals along the Gulf of Mexico:
If industry succeeds in locking in unprecedented demand for US gas by expanding exports and domestic consumption, US supply may be pushed to its limits. Gas supply can only meet such high levels of demand if prices rise to cover the higher production costs of marginal gas supplies. This connects rising dependence on gas to rising energy costs. US consumers and those in LNG-importing countries must push policymakers to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy
The numbers are fairly startling:
Between 2026 and 2040, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade of US LNG exports, a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the US and LNG-importing countries. Prices could double relative to the 2020 to 2025 average by the late 2030s.
In other words, those politicians locking us in to natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending. Because politicians in those countries are starting to wake up. A big piece in the Times yesterday described the ways that many governments are now trying to “unshackle” themselves from natural gas, after watching the supply dry up with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the Philippines, for example:
The country’s largest solar project began delivering its first megawatts of power in March. That came two weeks after the outbreak of the Iran War, which pushed up energy prices and knocked out 20% of the global LNG supply.
“That was fortunate timing. It was like fate,” said Emmanuel Rubio, the chief executive of Meralco PowerGen, the utility-backed power generation company that operates and invests in Terra Solar and gas- and coal-fired power plants in the Philippines.
For a country that imports nearly all of its fossil fuels, the solar project has proved that “we can actually be, to a certain extent, self-reliant,” he added.
The collection of lies around natural gas are collapsing in other ways, too. Another new study, this one from an Ohio team, went back to those fears around gas and indoor air pollution that dated all the way back to the 1950s, and what it found was truly startling. As Gary Fuller summarizes, replacing a gas stove with an electric burner—say, an induction cooktop, available online for $60—reduces childhood asthma dramatically. And when I say dramatically, I mean: better than the best medicine:
Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.
Prof Ash Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, the project’s leader, said: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.”
The team finished the stove replacements that were underway and closed the project, but to the researchers’ surprise, the benefits could be clearly detected even in the scaled-down study of 72 homes.
Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to–or even greater than–those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”
Angela Bland, a 38-year-old resident of Akron, Ohio, said: “I didn’t realize my gas stove was the issue until I used the electric stove. I now need my inhaler way less often.”
If you want more on this study, check out Sammy Roth’s Climate Colored Goggles newsletter. He interviewed Segal too: “Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” the researcher said. It truly is remarkable to think how much good we could do simply by dousing the campfire that most people have in their kitchen.
Anyway, to summarize: The natural gas industry is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.
Any effort to slow it down is met with massive resistance. In Colorado, for instance, some towns have tried to prevent gas hookups in new buildings, requiring them to go all-electric. The industry has responded by organizing on behalf of a constitutional amendment called the “Right to Natural Gas,” which will go on the November ballot. As Maya McDaniel writes:
The proposed amendment states that “producers and utilities have the right to sell natural gas to homes and businesses.” That could force changes to building codes that encourage electric heating and cooking, undoing progress toward electrification.
“Really, it’s just a cynical attempt to lock fossil fuel industry profits into the state constitution,” said Kelly Nordini, CEO of Conservation Colorado, an environmental nonprofit. “That’s bad for people’s pocketbooks, for clean air, for clean water; it has no provisions for public health or safety.”
Really, the first lucky break for natural gas came back in the 19th century, when it acquired that moniker, to differentiate it from “manufactured” or “town” gas, made by burning coal in the absence of air, and then piped through municipalities for street lighting and other tasks. These gasworks shut down as big deposits of naturally occurring gas were discovered, hence the name.
I’ve taken to calling it ‘fracked gas’ in recent years, since that industry term for the new methods of liberating the fuel from tight rocks makes it sound almost as disgusting as it is. “Fossil gas” works too, or perhaps “asthma gas.” But our job is to make it a dirty word of some kind. The future depends on it.
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Trump and Wright Are Turning America Into a Gas Station Masquerading as a Nation
Much of what they’ve been doing—from cutting funding for the arts to cancelling major renewable projects—seems designed to insure that fracked gas will be our central legacy.
Sep 09, 2025
Way back in January of 2015, six months before Donald Trump began America’s escalator-like descent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona took to the floor of the Senate to describe Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country.” He was responding to the invasion of Crimea, and demanding the US stand up to Moscow; within a few weeks others has shortened his bon mot to “gas station with nukes.” It hit at an essential truth: Russia, for all its size and might, hadn’t developed much of anything in recent decades; Vladimir Putin survived by pumping gas to the rest of the world, resting on the weapons his Soviet predecessors had bequeathed him.
Eight months into the second Trump administration, what are we? The president and his minions have been enriching themselves, and doing it by stripping the state that better women and men had built in the decades before. Our scientific and medical prowess? Our great universities? Our shared culture, from public broadcasting to the National Endowment for the Arts to the Kennedy Center? Even our history, as the Smithsonian comes under attack. But we still have a lot of fracked gas, dammit! And—viewed one way—much of what they’ve been doing seems designed to insure that fracked gas will be our central legacy.
On the list of odd things the administration has done, shutting down work on offshore wind projects off the New England coast may be among the oddest. These projects are enormous investments, have been in the works for many years, and have acquired (with painful slowness) the necessary permits. Now, just as they’re coming online, they’re being shut down. I can’t really think of any equivalent—it’s as if, in the 19th century we built the Erie Canal and then decided, forget it, let’s keep using wagons. It’s as if in the 20th century, we built the interstate highway system and then decided to simply seal off the exits and let it just lie there unused. What kind of logic turns a paid-for and productive asset into an aqueous Stonehenge?
This kind of logic: If those turbines start funneling electricity into New England, they won’t need to burn as much natural gas to produce electricity. They won’t need the new pipelines that Big Oil wants to build north. And who would that hurt? Well, Christopher Wright is Trump’s secretary of energy. He was formerly CEO of Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest fracking firm. Here’s how the Energy Department describes his background (after describing him as a “dedicated humanitarian”):
He founded Pinnacle Technologies and served as CEO from 1992 to 2006. Pinnacle created the hydraulic fracture mapping industry, and its innovations helped launch commercial shale gas production in the late 1990s. Chris was chairman of Stroud Energy, an early shale gas producer, before selling to Range Resources in 2006. Most recently, Chris served as chairman and CEO of Liberty Energy, where his team helped to expand the shale revolution to include oil as well as natural gas.
And here’s Christopher Wright, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on the eve of a trip to Europe next week to “promote American gas.” According to him, the Paris climate accords are “silly” and “climate change, for impacting the quality of your life, is not incredibly important. In fact, if it wasn’t in the news, in the media, you wouldn’t know.”
I have my guesses how well this will go down with Wright’s European hosts—the continent has just endured its worst wildfire season since record-keeping began. Portugal, Spain, and Greece have been especially hard hit; France recorded its biggest wildfire since at least 1949, which shrouded much of the country in smoke. As one local mayor said, “Everything is burned. More than half or three-quarters of the village has burned down. It’s hellish, a lunar landscape.” Even that green and pleasant isle of England has had its worst fire season ever, which makes sense since it was the hottest summer in UK history.
But for the moment let’s forget about Europe, and indeed about climate change, and instead focus on East Coast electricity users, because they’ll be paying the highest price for Wright’s folly. Canary Media’s Jeff St. John, in an epic account last week, laid out the costs of shutting down a massive source of supply that regional energy planners had been counting on:
It would leave a gaping hole in New England’s energy mix, driving up the region’s already-high electricity prices and leaving its grid more vulnerable to collapse during winter storms. New England’s grid operator has already factored the 704-megawatt wind farm into its plans starting next year. Delaying delivery of that power “will increase risks to reliability,” ISO New England warned in a statement last week.
In fact, that warning from the ISO, or Independent System Operator, in New England is worth reading. It comes from a largely anonymous agency charged with keeping the region online:
“Unpredictable risks and threats to resources—regardless of technology—that have made significant capital investments, secured necessary permits, and are close to completion will stifle future investments, increase costs to consumers, and undermine the power grid’s reliability and the region’s economy now and in the future,” ISO New England said in the statement.
That’s not the language these guys usually use. Abe Silverman, a Johns Hopkins researcher, called it “unprecedented.” But then, so is taking a huge energy generator offline for no reason:
“We’re talking about a really significant hit to consumers, at a time we’re all hyper-concerned about inflation and energy prices generally,” Silverman said. Losing Revolution Wind’s electricity could cost New England consumers about $500 million a year, he estimated, based on the value the project has secured in ISO New England’s forward capacity market and its potential to supplant costlier power plants used during grid emergencies.
And “we don’t need a bunch of fancy studies to tell us that these units are needed for reliability,” he said. New England has long struggled to meet electricity demand during winter cold snaps and summer heatwaves. When temperatures surpassed 100°F for several days in June, “they had every single generator on,” he said. “Here we have a unit that should be operating as of next summer that is now in doubt.”
But it’s during the winter months that the loss of Revolution Wind could be most keenly felt, said Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. That’s when the region’s limited supply of fossil gas is stretched even thinner, since the fuel is used both for building heating and power generation. ISO New England is banking on offshore wind—which blows most strongly in the winter—to meet energy needs as temperatures plummet.
As the Times reported, “Revolution Wind was expected to generate electricity for more than 350,000 homes at 9.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, a rate that would be locked in for 20 years and is cheaper than the average cost of electricity in New England, according to America’s Clean Power.” In fact, a new study released last week found that if Revolution Wind had been in operation last year, it would have saved consumers $400 million, lowering their energy prices 11% and “insulating ratepayers from expensive, volatile natural gas.” Given America’s insane levels of inequality, that might not mean much to “humanitarian” Wright: he sold his fracking stock for $53 million when he took the Energy Department job. But I live in New England—I know lots of people who have trouble paying their power bills.
There is no mystery here. Across the country, as Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins was the latest to point out, the old canard about renewable electricity being expensive is simply not true—many states with more wind have cheap power prices. It’s not less reliable; with new batteries just the opposite is true. In fact, in the heart of the shale fracking belt in Texas, the head of the state’s Energy Reliability Council said earlier this summer that its blackout risk had been greatly reduced. Read the numbers here to get a sense of how backwards Wright and Trump have it:
The addition of more than 9,600 megawatts of capacity to the state’s grid since last summer, coupled with conservative operations and reliable management, has produced this result, Vegas said at an ERCOT board of directors meeting this week.
“The state of the grid is strong, it is reliable—it is as reliable as it has ever been and it is as ready for the challenges of extreme weather,” Vegas said. “I feel confident that we are ready for this upcoming summer season.”
Of the new capacity added, 5,395 megawatts came from solar, 3,821 megawatts from energy storage and 253 megawatts from wind power. Kristi Hobbs, ERCOT’s vice president of system planning and weatherization, said the risk of emergency as the sun goes down and Texans continue to pump their air conditioners has been greatly reduced due to the large contributions from solar and battery storage.
“That does put us in a better position to get over those evening ramps as we go into late summer,” Hobbs said.
In the same time frame of the solar and storage additions, there’s been a net loss of natural gas capacity. Retirements, deactivations, and derates, or a loss of available capacity, of gas plants, resulted in a reduced capacity of 366 megawatts on the grid since last summer.
I am pretty sure that Christopher Wright knows all this. He tweeted out the other day that “wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing.” This is not a mistake, I think; it’s a lie. Surely he’s heard about batteries, and surely he knows that they’re now one of the biggest sources of nighttime supply in California because they’ve been soaking up sunshine all afternoon.
But Wright and Trump don’t care about consumers of electricity. They don’t care about the big companies building the wind farms that they’re driving close to bankruptcy (these, remember, are competitors with Big Oil). They don’t care about the thousands of jobs lost in the process. Here’s how the head of the Building Trades unions described the stop work order:
Let’s call the Department of the Interior’s stop-work order for Revolution Wind what it is: President Donald Trump just fired 1,000 of our members who had already labored to complete 80% of this major energy project. A “stop-work order” is the fancy bureaucratic term, but it means one thing: throwing skilled American workers off the job after they’ve spent a decade training, building, and delivering.
This project isn’t some pipe dream; it’s real steel in the water and $1.3 billion in investment already on the ground. And with the stroke of a pen late on a Friday, President Trump personally signed off on killing these jobs and creating chaos. He pulled the plug on an almost-finished project, taking jobs, paychecks, and food off the tables of working families in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
No, I think it’s pretty clear that Trump and Wright are engaged in an effort to turn America into a—well, a gas station masquerading as a nation. They’ve already coerced New York Gov. Kathy Hochul into potentially allowing a natural gas pipeline through the state in return for allowing work to continue on the Empire State’s offshore wind project. They’re now at work on Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, and she appears to be caving; in truth, she may not have much choice. If the federal government cuts off the biggest and cheapest source of energy supply, she still has to keep the lights on and furnaces running.
Exactly the same thing that’s happening with wind is happening with solar—a new report Sunday warns that that “these policies could cut 44 GW of US solar growth by 2030—an 18% decline. Compared with pre-HR1 forecasts, that’s a total loss of 55 GW, or 21% fewer solar projects by 2030”:
“Solar and storage are the backbone of America’s energy future, delivering the majority of new power to the grid at the lowest cost to families and businesses,” said SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper. She added that the administration is “deliberately stifling investment, which is raising energy costs for families and businesses, and jeopardizing the reliability of our electric grid.”
And if New England’s wind farms make an easy target because these states voted against Trump, that’s not true of the solar damage: “This year, 77% of new solar capacity has been built in states Trump won. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations—Texas, Indiana, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas—all went red in 2024.”
This is an all-out effort to stifle competition with Big Oil. It could not be more cynical—it’s the Putin playbook, producing misery for normal people and big profits for politically connected oligarchs. That’s what “energy dominance” means. It won’t work in the rest of the world, I think—just at random, here’s a story about how battery storage is surging in Pakistan and another about the spread of solar to Brazil’s poor urban favelas and another about the island that Belgium is building to anchor its wind industry, and another about how even fast-growing India is now using less fossil fuel to generate electricity. Globally, solar construction surged 64% in the first half of the year.
So the world will continue on its rational course. But the US is now building solar at only about 8% of the pace of the Chinese. If this looting succeeds here at home, than in a decade foreign tourists who can still get a visa will arrive to gawk at the colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion, to see how primitive societies powered their lives. By then Trump will be gone, and Wright will still have his millions. For the rest of us, at least we will still have nuclear weapons to make us a “great nation,” just like Russia
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Trump's War on Clean Energy Could Be His Downfall... If the Dems Exploit It
Team Trump has mishandled American energy policy in every possible way literally since day one, setting the stage for higher electric bills.
Aug 20, 2025
The next two elections should be decided on the great questions of democracy versus authoritarianism, openness versus racism, science versus ignorance. But my guess is that electric bills may play at least as large a role.
And that should be a good thing for the forces of virtue, because team Trump has mishandled American energy policy in every possible way literally since day one—they’re setting up a debacle. But as we should know by now, Democrats are particularly good at turning debacles into nothingburgers. So let me try and lay out the script right now.
Let’s go back to US President Donald Trump’s first day in office. He declared an “energy emergency” because the production and “generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs. We need a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy to drive our Nation’s manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and defense industries, and to sustain the basics of modern life and military preparedness.” If we didn’t get more electricity in particular, the White House said, we would fall behind China in the AI race, with disastrous consequences.
You can debate whether or not we need new AI data centers (My guess is that the technology has been oversold, and that we’re actually going to see fewer of them developed than people think). But you can’t debate two things.
Trump’s crusade against clean energy is obviously idiotic—windmills don’t cause cancer. But it’s more than idiotic—it’s the reason you’re paying more for electricity.
One, the obvious way forward for this country was to develop more sun, wind, and batteries. We know this because it’s what this country, and every other country around the world, had been doing for the last two years. More than 90% of new electric generation around the world last year came from clean energy, momentum that continued through the first quarter of the year. This was not because everyone in the energy business had “gone woke.” Texas, after all, installed more renewable capacity than any other state last year. It was because you could do it cheaply and quickly—we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
But, two, the Trump administration immediately began to do absolutely everything in in its power to stop this trend and to replace it with old-fashioned energy—gas, and coal. They have rescinded environmental regulations trying to control fossil fuel pollution, ended sun and wind projects on federal land, cancelled wind projects wherever they could, ended the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for clean energy construction and instead added subsidies for the coal industry. Again—short of tasking Elon Musk to erect a large space-based shield to blot out the sun, they’ve done literally everything possible to derail the transition to cheap clean energy.
And as a result, electricity prices are starting to skyrocket. If you don’t believe me, listen to this excellent recitation of a power bill in the style of Faulkner from a fellow with an excellent beard. And they are skyrocketing because our power systems are not moving into the new world.
For example: Trump issued an executive order designed to “reinvigorate America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” which explained that:
Our Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers. We must encourage and support our Nation’s coal industry to increase our energy supply, lower electricity costs, stabilize our grid, create high-paying jobs, support burgeoning industries, and assist our allies.
This is nonsense on a cracker, of course, and a new independent report last week found that consumers will be paying an extra $3-$6 billion dollars a year for the privilege of keeping coal-fired power plants open past their expiration dates:
Forcing utilities to continue to operate unneeded and costly coal-fired power plants past their planned retirement increases the electric bills paid by homeowners and businesses. It also undermines the competitiveness of US businesses such as manufacturing by raising electric rates.
Anyone who pays an electricity bill in any region outside the Northeastern US could be footing the bill. Electricity costs could increase by tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars per year in most states.
If you want more detail on this topic, by the way, David Roberts has a very fine interview with the (very fine name) Frank Rambo, who also points out that the coal-fired power plants they’re trying to keep open are not just the most expensive possible source of electric but among the least reliable:
Now, the thing about coal, as it’s been circling the drain, the coal plants that are left are running much less. They’re not running as these baseload where you run it, you might dial it down at night when demand for electricity is lower, but you’re basically always running it.
They are now running much less. They’re running more where they’re having to cycle through, to cycle on and off. And a coal-fired boiler is not built to operate that way. Again, it’s a 20th-century resource for a 21st-century grid, and that causes a lot of maintenance issues. So that they have to—all of a sudden it’s called a "forced outage."
They have to take it offline. So it’s somewhat ironic they are relying on—the DOE is relying on —the one, one of the resources that’s becoming less and less reliable.
Anyway, this level of corruption and incompetence—remember, all this is happening because candidate Trump literally told the fossil fuel industry they could have anything they want if they gave massive contributions to his campaign, and then they did—should open up his party to scrutiny and to scorn. At some level Democrats are figuring this out—as the Washington Post said last week, they have lots to work with, beginning with Trump’s promises that electric bills would fall:
“Under my administration, we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months,” he told an audience in North Carolina in August 2024.
Trump’s first 12 months aren’t over yet. But so far, the data show prices trending in the wrong direction. And Democrats are keen to make Trump pay for that.
They are crafting an argument that not only have prices not come down but the sweeping tax and spending law Trump signed into law in July will make energy costs worse.
In fact, as NPR reported recently, electricity costs are now climbing twice as fast as inflation, which should give the Dems a huge opening. And indeed the Senate Dems have put together a bill that would cut those costs. But take a look at the press release from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—really, just look at the headline—and ask yourself if the Dems have really figured out the snappy rhetoric they need to take advantage of the situation.
I’d say the real danger is the GOP will go on the attack instead, blaming electricity price hikes on their favorite target, Joe Biden. You can already see it happening—here’s Murdoch’s New York Post trying to blame Biden (and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy) for being Green New Dealers. (Ironic, since they’ve actually done much to disappoint enviros in their states). And here’sTrump’s Energy Secretary (and former fracking exec) Christ Wright yesterday moaning that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault:
“The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies, for sure that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Wright told Politico during a visit to wind- and cornrich Iowa. Still, he said: “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who's going to get blamed for it? We're going to get blamed because we're in office.”
This is all inane. Wright was standing in Iowa, which has some of the lowest electric rates in the country—the average Iowan will spend 39% less on electricity than the average American. Why? Because it produces 57% of its electricity from the wind, the second-biggest wind state in the country. The same thing is true across the country. Here’s Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, explaining the math in the Wall Street Journal:
How do the 12 highly renewable states rank in terms of electricity prices? Ten of them are among the 19 states with the lowest electricity prices. Seven are among the 10 states with the lowest prices. South Dakota, with renewables supplying 95% of demand, has the ninth-lowest electricity price. North Dakota (52% renewables) has the lowest. More renewables mean lower prices.
Only California and Maine have high renewables and high prices. Why? California’s industrial price of natural gas, needed for electricity backup, is routinely the third highest in the US and twice the US average. Plus, utilities have passed to customers the costs of wildfires from transmission-line sparks, undergrounding transmission lines, the San Bruno and Aliso Canyon gas disasters, retrofitting gas pipes following San Bruno, and keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear-power plant open.
California’s use of more renewables and batteries in 2024 than in 2023 increased grid reliability, however, as evidenced by 52% lower spot electricity prices this March to June, versus the same period in 2023. This slowed retail electricity-price rises.
More renewable electricity generators and batteries reduce energy prices. Even in states with high electricity prices caused by other factors, renewables and battery storage keep prices lower than they otherwise would be.
So Democrats need to get good at saying this. They need props—solar panels, batteries. They need sound bites. They need lots and lots of solar installers speaking up, and lots of people with solar on their roofs holding up their teeny tiny bills for the camera. The Dems need to be on the offensive, and sometimes they need to be offensive. The basic line: Trump’s crusade against clean energy is obviously idiotic—windmills don’t cause cancer. But it’s more than idiotic—it’s the reason you’re paying more for electricity.
The Department of Energy literally put out a tweet last month with a picture of a hunk of a coal and the legend “She is the moment.” But in fact coal is 18th-century technology, and gas is 19th-century technology, and now we’re in the 21st century where people know how to intercept the rays of the sun and the breeze in the air and turn them into the cheapest electricity the world has ever seen. And Trump’s getting in the way of that.
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10 XR Protesters Blockade UK Site to Stop 'Blatantly Unlawful Oil Extraction'
"This new normal isn't static, it will get worse as we continue to burn more fossil fuels," one protester said.
Oct 14, 2024
Ten Extinction Rebellion protesters blockaded an English oil and gas field on Monday in support of a landmark U.K. Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to stop drilling at the site.
In June of this year, the court ruled that the Surrey County Council failed to consider the climate consequences of burning the oil obtained from a site near London's Gatwick Airport when it granted U.K. Oil and Gas (UKOG) permission to exploit the so-called Horse Hill oil extraction site. Despite the ruling, however, UKOG continues to pump oil.
"The Supreme Court decision was a beacon of light in a world of dire climate news," protester Helen Burnett, a Parish priest who lives within five miles of the site, said in a statement. "With U.K. crop yields plummeting, flooding at scale on every continent, droughts, intense hurricanes supercharged by a hotter sea, one after the other. This new normal isn't static, it will get worse as we continue to burn more fossil fuels. I urge Surrey's officers and councilors to respect the Supreme Court decision, and order UKOG to stop work at Horse Hill immediately."
"It's really quite simple. Surrey County Council need to tell Mr. Sanderson to stop all activity at Horse Hill until UKOG have planning permission."
A small group of protesters sat in front of the site to block any vehicles from entering, holding signs reading, "Surrey County Council, Stop UKOG Flouting Supreme Court Horse Hill Ruling," "[UKOG] CEO Stephen Sanderson Stop Pumping Oil Unlawfully at Horse Hill," and "No More Planet Killing Emissions—Time to Restore Horse Hill to Nature."
At stake in the Supreme Court case is whether or not a governing body, when considering approval for a new fossil fuel site, must consider only the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced directly by activities at the site or whether it must account for the climate pollution produced by the oil, gas, or coal once extracted.
When the Surrey County Council granted UKOG permission to drill for 3.3 million metric tons of crude oil for 20 years at Horse Hill, it only weighed the impacts of the former, prompting Extinction Rebellion member Sarah Finch to sue. Finch argued that 2017 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Regulations required review of downstream emissions. After an appeals court failed to reach a decision, the Supreme Court agreed.
In a June 20 judgment, Lord Leggatt wrote:
It is agreed that the project under consideration involves the extraction of oil for commercial purposes for a period estimated at 20 years in quantities sufficient to make an EIA mandatory. It is also agreed that it is not merely likely, but inevitable, that the oil extracted will be sent to refineries and that the refined oil will eventually undergo combustion, which will produce GHG emissions. It is not disputed that these emissions, which can easily be quantified, will have a significant impact on climate. The only issue is whether the combustion emissions are effects of the project at all. It seems to me plain that they are.
At the time, the ruling was considered a major win for the climate movement, with the potential to halt larger scale projects such as the Rosebank and Jackdaw North Sea fossil fuel fields.
"The words 'Finch ruling' now invoke dread in oil, coal, and gas company boardrooms," The Times wrote in September.
Yet the ruling will have no impact if companies like UKOG simply ignore the courts and local authorities don't stop them.
"Stephen Sanderson, CEO of failing oil company UKOG, is making Surrey County Council look weak and ineffectual in the face of blatantly unlawful oil extraction," said protester James Knapp from Dorking, who has three children.
Knapp also expressed concerns that UKOG's attitude of lawlessness could extend to other issues at Horse Hill:
The site has been plagued by incidents in its short history including a rig fire, local residents and grazing horses affected by noxious fumes, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage from the earthquake swarm which coincided with oil workers returning to the site, and a fine from the Health and Safety Executive for irregularities which left the oil well vulnerable in blow out situations.
Another protester, 69-year-old retired teacher Jackie Macey, summed it up: "It's really quite simple. Surrey County Council need to tell Mr. Sanderson to stop all activity at Horse Hill until UKOG have planning permission. They will be enforcing a Supreme Court judgment and no reasonable person could possibly criticize them for that, so I urge them now to do what they should have done as soon as the Supreme Court decision was handed down; instruct them to stop the works now."
As to what should happen to the site going forward?
"If a new planning application does ever arrive from UKOG, we will be making the case that the site should be restored to nature," Macey said. "Enough is enough!"
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We Don’t Need Fossil Fuel Peaker Plants
New Englanders are fighting for a just transition to a better electric system.
Sep 12, 2024
Our electric system is intentionally complicated. We are expected to receive our bills from the electric companies every month, pay without question, and have little say in what that money is used for.
In the New England, New York, and PJM regions, a portion of our electric bills every month goes to a mysterious “auction” in the “capacity markets” that promise power plants funding into the future even if they never operate. We are told this is the system we have to work within to ensure reliable energy. But that is not true.
Just because a system is in place does not mean it is the best way to operate. When I was in elementary school I learned how to use the lattice method for multiplication. My Mom taught me long multiplication. Both methods got me to the solution to the equation. So why can’t our electric grid think like this?
The time is now—for energy efficiency, community conservation, and clean energy in New England and beyond.
Our regional electric grid operators here in New England, ISO New England (ISO-NE), oversee a process called the “Forward Capacity Auction,” which enables fossil fuel power plants across the region to stay in operation. They claim that this market approach will ensure certain energy sources can stay on our grid for backup energy. Instead of being a mechanism for reliable energy supplies though, this auction has become a huge waste of money and an enabler of climate chaos. Right now this system keeps fossil fuel peaker plants online. Peaker plants are those oil, methane gas, and coal burning plants that are only called on during peak energy usage—like during a cold snap or heatwave—and thus only get turned on a handful of days a year. These plants currently get hundreds of thousands of dollars to mostly sit idle.
This doesn’t have to be the way we handle our electric grid. We can do better—we just have to imagine better.
The No Coal No Gas campaign showed up at the fossil fuel peaker plants in New Hampshire this August to demand a transition to clean energy, community conservation, and a better grid system. There are three peaker plants in New Hampshire without closing dates that are really harming our communities: Newington Station on the Piscataqua River, Lost Nation in Groveton, and White Lake in Tamworth. Our electric bills gave each of these plants hundreds of thousands of dollars last year despite the fact that they ran just a handful of times (10-15% of our bills fund the system this money came from). These three plants burn oil, methane gas, or jet fuel on the occasion that they do get turned on, resulting in all sorts of pollution impacting the communities they inhabit.
The thing is, if we changed the way we managed our energy grid, we wouldn’t need these peaker plants. They could easily be replaced with solar and battery storage. The regional electric grid operators could prioritize more immediate energy conservation resources both from the public and from large energy users to reduce the peaker energy load so that we don’t need as much backup on the grid. We could improve energy efficiency across the board to reduce the amount of energy we need as a region, even with an increase in electric vehicles. We could decrease electricity bills for people across the region if we didn’t need to promise all this money to peaker plants.
We can have clean energy and reliable energy—this isn’t a compromising situation. Transitioning off of fossil fuels does not make our energy less reliable—especially when those fossil fuels cause the devastating storms we’ve seen lately that cost a whole lot of money to recover from. On top of that, most of the failures on our grid, including huge price spikes like what the grid saw on December 24, 2022, were caused by fossil fuel plants. This situation is reflective of the problems other regional grids across the country are facing as climate change gets worse.
So what’s the hold up? ISO-NE board and staff members who say, “This is the way it’s been.” Elected officials and Granite Shore Power (who owns the New Hampshire peaker plants) who want to protect the profits of fossil fuel corporations. Grid operators who claim that electric grid management needs to be “fuel neutral” in their policies. The fact is, we need to stop thinking inside these tiny boxes we’ve given ourselves. If new ideas are not working in the system we have, it means it’s time to change the system.
When I watched friends drop a massive banner down the side of Newington’s smokestack just a few weeks ago, I thought about how they were not stuck in what doesn’t seem possible. Instead, they acted. They didn’t think a 175-foot banner would be impossible to make. They just made it. They showed the owners of that peaker plant that we can do difficult things, including transitioning off of oil and gas. They showed all of us that we can imagine a better future together.
I walk into energy regulatory meetings with experts even though the people there made those spaces inaccessible to the general public and community organizers. I have been working to understand the complexities of the energy system even though the people I’m challenging to think outside the system don’t want me there. I know a transition to clean energy and justice-focused solutions to the climate crisis won’t happen overnight, but I also know that people in positions of power are dragging their feet in the fossil-fueled past.
We don’t need fossil fuel peaker plants when much simpler solutions to energy reliability exist. The time is now—for energy efficiency, community conservation, and clean energy in New England and beyond. I know we can build an energy system that works for the everyday people who this grid is meant to serve.
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Massive Climate Coalition Demands Biden Kill LNG Export Licenses
"We deserve a future that protects our families and our planet, not one that fuels further destruction," one frontline advocate said.
Sep 09, 2024
A coalition of more than 250 climate, environmental, and frontline community organizations on Monday urged U.S. President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to reject all requests for approval to export liquefied natural gas to non-fair trade agreement countries.
The demand came in the form of a letter following a recent ruling by Trump-appointed District Judge James D. Cain Jr. to lift a pause that Biden's Department of Energy had placed on new LNG export approvals while it updates the criteria it uses to determine whether these exports are in the public interest. It also comes a week after the DOE signed off on the export of LNG from an offshore New Fortress Energy plant near Altamira, Mexico.
"After the hottest summer on record, on track to be the hottest year, it's clear that expanding climate-heating gas exports is not in the public interest," Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said in a statement. "There's no reason on Earth to approve more LNG exports that lock in decades of damage to the climate, human communities, and imperiled species like Rice's whales. The Department of Energy must reject every single one."
"With climate-induced disasters becoming a regular part of our lives, it's hard to understand how anyone can prioritize fossil gas exports over our health and safety."
The Center for Biological Diversity is one of the many signatories of Monday's letter, backed by dozens of large national groups as well as scores of smaller, more local organizations. Other groups include Earthworks, Food and Water Watch, Oil Change International, the Sunrise Movement, Public Citizen, several branches of 350.org and Extinction Rebellion, Port Arthur Community Action Network, and the Vessel Project of Louisiana.
In the letter, the groups applauded the administration for instituting the pause on approvals in the first place and for acknowledging that the data it used to determine whether exports were in the public interest was "outdated and insufficient."
Since the court ruling leaves the department without a deadline for updating its data, the groups urged the DOE "to continue seeking the best available information on the impact of LNG exports on the public, the environment, and economy."
"When the department completes its analyses, the weight of evidence will make it clear that new LNG exports are not in the public interest and that all pending applications to export LNG must be rejected," the groups wrote.
With the world "on the verge" of exceeding the 1.5°C limit enshrined in the 2015 Paris agreement, the coalition warned against new infrastructure and export policies that will only exacerbate the global emissions crisis at a critical moment in history.
"The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next year, and then steeply decline, for our planet to have the best chance of avoiding this fate," the letter reads. "The only way world leaders can avoid this moral and political failure is to work together to end fossil fuel production."
This goal has been hampered by the record rise in U.S. gas production facilitated by the fracking boom. Whereas global gas production had been predicted to be on the wane, it is now expanding instead. At the same time, new research has shown that, due to methane leaks, gas is not a "bridge fuel" to cleaner energy but in fact just as detrimental to the climate as coal.
Another major concern raised by LNG opponents is the local pollution generated by export facilities. Many of these new facilities are located in, under construction in, or slated for the Gulf South, which is already overburdened by toxic emissions from oil, gas, and petrochemical production.
"As a mom living in a community surrounded by industry, I feel the weight of every decision made about our environment," Vessel Project founder and director Roishetta Ozane said in a statement. "With climate-induced disasters becoming a regular part of our lives, it's hard to understand how anyone can prioritize fossil gas exports over our health and safety. The Department of Energy has the power to reject these LNG export permits, and it's crucial they do so. We deserve a future that protects our families and our planet, not one that fuels further destruction."
The letter suggests the broad environmental movement, both at the local level and nationally, is united behind the demand to halt the LNG buildout as the groups applauded Biden's efforts to curb exports thus far but also asked him to go further.
"We initially urged you to pause approvals of LNG exports," they wrote to Biden and Granholm, "we fiercely celebrated and defended your decision to do so in January, and now we write to let you know we continue to stand behind you as we insist that you take the next step of stopping new LNG exports."
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Ecuador Fails to Eliminate Gas Flaring Despite Court Order: Amnesty
"It's not just Ecuador it's affecting," said one woman leading the fight against gas flaring, "it's the atmosphere of the entire world."
Aug 12, 2024
More than three years after a court ruling that left a group of young women hopeful that their legal action had helped "restore nature" for future generations in Ecuador, a report by Amnesty International on Monday found that gas flaring that the Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos had ordered to be eliminated has actually continued—threatening public health and a just energy transition.
In its report, titled The Amazon Is Burning! The Future Is Burning!, Amnesty found the Ecuadorian government and public and private oil companies have avoided "any concrete and ambitious steps to remove the flares," instead taking measures that will allow them to "maintain oil production at all costs."
Following a legal action brought by nine women and girls from Sucumbíos and Orellana, supported by the Union of People Affected by Texaco's Oil Operations (UDAPT), the court ruled in January 2021 that Ecuador had ignored the rights that the plantiffs had to live in a healthy environment, and ordered that gas flares be shut down with officials prioritizing the removal of flares near population centers.
The flares burn natural gas, a byproduct of oil extraction—long a top industry in Ecuador—and the air pollution it causes has been linked to health problems including cancer.
A 2017 study by Clínica Ambiental found higher incidences of cancer among people who lived near oil facilities and gas flares in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A lawyer representing the women and girls and UDAPT also said two years of research had found 251 cases of cancer in Sucumbíos and Orellana, with women accounting for 71% of them.
As Amnesty noted, gas flaring is also linked to the emission of super pollutants like methane, which is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its global heating potential.
Complying with the 2021 ruling in the case against the Ecuadorian Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources and the Ministry of Environment and Water is a matter of "climate, environmental, and racial justice," said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty.
"The Ecuadorian state must put an end to the routine burning of gas in flares, a practice that is today endangering the Amazon, the world and the future of the children who will inherit the planet," said Piquer.
Amnesty verified that at least 52 gas flare sites are within three miles of population centers, continuing to put local communities at risk despite the provincial court's ruling.
In a video posted to social media by Amnesty, Evelyn Mora, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said the global community will ultimately be affected by Ecuador's refusal to comply with the 2021 ruling.
"It's not just Ecuador it's affecting," she said of the oil industries' continued use of gas flares, "it's the atmosphere of the entire world."
Amnesty emphasized that state-owned and private companies in countries including Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States use routine flaring during oil extraction as a cost-cutting measure in marginalized and low-income areas known as "sacrifice zones."
"By eliminating gas flares and committing to a transition to a fossil fuel-free economy, Ecuador can become a standard bearer for climate and environmental justice for the sake of the planet, now and in the future," said Piquer. "Oil 'wealth' has never reached the Ecuadorian Amazon; rather, the region is a large oil sacrifice zone where children, including the girls and young women in the gas flares case, are one of the most vulnerable population groups."
The group's report calls on the Ecuadorian government to take steps including:
- Designing and implementing a plan to eliminate the use of gas flares as soon as possible to comply with the 2021 ruling;
- Accelerating the removal of gas flares within three miles of population centers and requesting the necessary technical assistance to prevent methane leakage and other emissions;
- Phasing out fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy in a manner consistent with human rights by 2030, respecting the rights of oil industry workers; and
- Working with the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon to develop plans in accordance with their values and providing them with the necessary means to implement them.
Piquer credited "the courageous girls and young women plaintiffs in the gas flares case" with showing the global community "that children and young people around the world are urgently demanding climate, racial, and gender justice, as well as radical changes for human rights and nature."
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'Worrisome': Global Methane Spike Imperils Climate Goals, Study Warns
"It is imperative to rapidly reduce methane emissions to reduce the accelerating climate damages so many people around the world are suffering," one study author said.
Jul 30, 2024
Methane emissions are rising faster than expected, a new study has warned, and the surge is putting global climate goals at risk.
The study, published Monday in Frontiers in Science, found that methane emissions have risen quickly since 2006, with the growth rates for atmospheric methane seeing an "abrupt and rapid increase" in the early 2020s.
"The growth rate of methane is accelerating, which is worrisome," lead study author and Duke University climate scientist Drew Shindell, told The Guardian. "It was quite flat until around 20 years ago, and just in the last few years we've had this huge dump of methane. It's made the job of tackling anthropogenic warming all the more challenging."
"Reducing CO2 will protect our grandchildren—reducing methane will protect us now."
Methane is the second leading greenhouse gas heating the atmosphere and contributing to the climate crisis. It is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide during the first 20 years after being emitted, but it also fades from the atmosphere much more quickly—in around 12 years rather than centuries. Methane emissions released between the industrial era and 2019 have caused 65% as much global heating as carbon dioxide, according to the new paper.
Methane emissions have spiked in recent years, reaching record levels in 2021 and 2022. The increase in atmospheric methane concentrations in 2021 was also the highest ever recorded. The growth rates in the early 2020s "far exceeded" predictions, and the situation is not expected to improve on its own.
"This study shows that emissions are expected to continue to increase over the remainder of the 2020s if no greater action is taken and that increases in atmospheric methane are thus far outpacing projected growth rates," the authors wrote.
Methane is emitted primarily by leaks and flaring during fossil fuel production, animal and rice agriculture, and the decaying of organic matter. The authors considered what had caused methane production to spike in the early 2020s specifically, and concluded that the two main drivers were fossil fuels—primarily oil and gas production—and an increase in decomposition rates from wetlands as higher temperatures interacted with La Niña conditions in the tropics.
Despite the significant role that methane plays in accelerating the climate emergency, only around 2% of climate finance is dedicated to targeting it, and current policies only respond to around 13% of total methane emissions. Given the rising rates of methane growth, the authors argued that this must change.
"It is imperative to rapidly reduce methane emissions to reduce the accelerating climate damages so many people around the world are suffering," Shindell said in a statement.
Why has the world dragged its feet on methane so far?
"The world has been rightly focused on carbon dioxide, which is the largest driver of climate change to date," Shindell explained. "Methane seemed like something we could leave for later, but the world has warmed very rapidly over the past couple of decades, while we've failed to reduce our CO2 emissions. So that leaves us more desperate for ways to reduce the rate of warming rapidly, which methane [cuts] can do."
Methane, Shindell told The Guardian, "is the strongest lever we can quickly pull to reduce warming between now and 2050."
"There's just such a rapid response to cutting it," Shindell continued. "We've already seen the planet warm so much that if we are to avoid worse impacts we have to reduce methane. Reducing CO2 will protect our grandchildren—reducing methane will protect us now."
Refusing to curb methane could also undermine efforts to reduce CO2: for every 50 megatons of methane that are not eliminated in keeping with low-warming projections, the remaining carbon dioxide budget is reduced by 150 gigatons.
The scientists outlined three "imperatives" for tackling methane:
- Reverse the rise in emissions;
- Make a plan to tackle CO2 and methane together; and
- Optimize methane-reduction plans and technologies for maximum effect.
To that end, the study authors developed an online tool that policymakers and other interested parties can use to gauge the effectiveness and economic benefits of different technologies and strategies.
"The benefits of methane mitigation nearly always outweigh the net costs," Shindell said in a statement.
Each ton of methane emitted in 2020 caused between $470 and $1,700 in damages, without considering methane's contribution to deadly air pollution. If that is taken into account, the true cost per ton could be $7,000 or more.
The most effective action a stakeholder can take to reduce emissions will depend on where they live and their position in society. For governments in countries with large fossil fuel industries, for example, the most important tools would be regulating production, offering incentives for companies to capture any methane, or charging the companies for emitting methane, the study authors argue.
For individuals, the most effective actions may be altering their consumption patterns or taking political action.
"People can make sure they avoid overconsumption of beef and dairy, and compost their organic waste whenever possible," said Shindell in a statement.
"If it's not possible where they live, they can vote for those who'll create programs for composting in their towns. They can also vote for those who will make polluters pay for methane emissions rather than letting them profit while society picks up the tab for the damages they're inflicting."
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No Amount of Greenwashing Can Make Gas Clean
Despite what the industry says, fracked methane gas is far from natural and isn’t a climate solution.
Jul 07, 2024
In response to multiple complaints, Ad Standards Canada recently found that advertising for fossil gas gave an “overall misleading impression… that B.C. LNG is good for the environment, amounting to greenwashing.”
The ads, by industry front group Canada Action, promoted the debunked message that so-called “liquefied natural gas”—which is mostly the deadly greenhouse gas methane—is good for the environment and climate because it can replace higher-emitting coal-fired power. “B.C. LNG will reduce global emissions,” the ads claimed over a bright green background. Other industry groups and gas companies are using similar messaging.
Although the standards branch has no enforcement power and doesn’t release its findings publicly, the issue illustrates the lengths to which the fossil fuel industry will go to keep profits rolling in, even in the face of disaster. (The decision was leaked by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, which was not a complainant.)
Far from a “green” replacement for coal, LNG development locks up investment in fossil infrastructure, locks in emissions, and locks out renewables.
For a relatively brief, albeit far too long, period of human history, global economies have run on coal, oil, and gas. These fossil fuels appeared to be almost limitless, and could be quickly burned in gas-guzzling vehicles and factories, driving profits to the point that the industry became the most lucrative in history.
The fuels conferred real and imagined benefits for large numbers of people, offering mobility, heat, and light; faster production, and more. Used wisely, they might have provided a net benefit to humanity. But burned wastefully and rapidly in the name of greed and obscene profits, they’ve polluted air, land, and water; harmed human health; reduced biodiversity; and spewed climate-altering greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. We’re now reaping the consequences with heat domes, floods, droughts, illness, death, migrant crises, biodiversity loss, water shortages, and more.
Most or all of the true benefits fossil fuels offer can be better realized with cleaner energy sources and less-polluting products—along with a shift away from wasteful, unnecessary consumerism.
As the consequences of burning coal for power and oil for transportation and more become clearer, the sector has seized on numerous survival strategies. For decades, industry executives and allies downplayed or covered up the evidence—some from its own scientists—that its products would heat the planet to dangerous levels if used as intended. Although that tactic is still employed, mounting evidence and real-life experiences of global heating have made it more difficult to fool the public.
So the industry is resorting to other plans—scaling up plastic production (plastic is an oil and gas byproduct) and touting the benefits of “natural” gas among them.
But fracked methane gas is far from natural and isn’t a climate solution. Throughout its life cycle, it devastates landscapes, pollutes waterways, uses excessive amounts of water (often in drought-stricken areas), consumes massive volumes of energy to process and liquefy, and creates emissions during transport and burning.
Not only that, flaring and leaks from wellhead to power plant emit massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane, of which the gas is composed, is up to 87 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. It breaks down much faster than CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for centuries, but it causes a lot of heating while it’s there. That’s why reducing and eliminating it is a good, quick climate solution.
New research from the David Suzuki Foundation shows British Columbia’s rush to develop LNG is bad on every front, from economics to climate. Far from a “green” replacement for coal, LNG development locks up investment in fossil infrastructure, locks in emissions, and locks out renewables. The International Energy Agency and others predict that LNG demand will drop precipitously as cheaper renewables are deployed at accelerating speed. A massive oversupply in gas is also being developed, much of it by low-cost competitors for Asian markets, where B.C.’s gas would be exported.
Every credible agency and person—from the International Energy Agency to the United Nations to universities worldwide and climate scientists everywhere—has warned that further development of gas, oil, and coal will propel the world into irreversible climate chaos.
We must leave fossil fuels in the ground. Our future depends on it. No amount of greenwashing or gaslighting will change that.
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New Report Debunks Industry-Backed Greenwashing Scam of 'Certified Gas'
"Hundreds of hours of on-the-ground research has made it more clear than ever that certifiers are not living up to their claims," one report author said.
Jun 18, 2024
Methane emissions monitors operated by third-party gas certification companies only picked up one of the 23 pollution events detected by anti-extraction group Earthworks.
That's one of the findings in Certified Gaslighting, a report published by Earthworks and Oil Change International on Tuesday that reveals how fossil fuel companies are increasingly turning to private gas certification companies to prove that they are reducing their methane emissions.
The evidence indicates that the "certified gas" label is just another industry smokescreen thrown up by climate arsonists to shield themselves from public pressure.
"'Certified' gas is the industry's latest effort at greenwashing, not an earnest effort at halting the accelerating climate crisis," Dakota Raynes, report author and Earthworks research and policy manager, said in a statement. "Hundreds of hours of on-the-ground research has made it more clear than ever that certifiers are not living up to their claims."
"If we want to stop rising methane emissions, then we must stop the gas certification farce."
For the report, Earthworks carried out 81 surveys at 38 oil and gas sites in Colorado over the course of 10 months in 2023, reviewing both pollution levels and the continuous emissions monitors (CEMS) designed to detect it. While Earthworks detected pollution events during a quarter of its site visits, the CEMs only caught one.
What's more, Earthworks looked at the monitors operated by Project Canary, one of the leading gas-certification companies. The environmental group found that the company's monitors, advertised as "continuous," were actually offline more than 25% of the time.
"Fossil fuel companies are scrambling to maintain relevance amid mounting pressure from communities and climate advocates, so they resort to third-party 'certification' schemes as a last-ditch effort to portray their operations as 'clean,'" Oil Change International research director Lorne Stockman said in a statement. "Our research reveals these certification scams are deceptive, enabling gas companies to expand under the false pretense of emission reductions. This greenwashing scam must end so we can focus on what's urgently needed—phasing out oil and gas."
Tuesday's report builds on a growing body of evidence that "gas certification" is another trick from what Raynes described as the "industry's grab bag of dangerous distractions." While private companies certify almost 40% of U.S. gas, the nation's oil and gas sector emits more methane than any other country's. In 2023, it released 13.8 million metric tons, translating to almost 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent or the emissions of 301 coal plants, according to International Energy Agency figures. Globally, the oil and gas industry spewed more than 79.5 million metric tons of methane last year.
The report also follows previous research from Earthworks and Oil Change, which found that Project Canary monitors failed to detect every pollution event picked up by Earthworks' Optical Gas Imaging cameras.
The fact that the monitors only picked up one Earthworks-detected event a year later "suggests that operators have made minimal changes to monitoring efforts to account for the findings in our report," the authors of Tuesday's report wrote.
The latest report also points out what it terms a "dangerous loophole": The companies are not required by Colorado law or by certification standards to address pollution events that occur due to normal operations as opposed to malfunctions. Yet most of the events detected by Earthworks were part of normal operations.
"These emissions are no less harmful to communities exposed to the pollution nor less impactful with respect to the climate crisis," the authors wrote.
Despite the many problems with the gas-certification process, the industry is rushing to adopt it as the U.S. Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Treasury Department are considering incorporating it into regulations. Some public utilities are also buying certified gas and then charging customers more to deliver it as they claim to make progress on climate goals.
"As they have for decades, the fossil fuel industry is deliberately lying, manipulating, and gaslighting the public," Leah Qusba, executive director for Action for the Climate Emergency, said in a statement. "Before 'certified gas' there was 'next-gen gas,' before that there was 'natural gas,' and before that there was the myth of 'clean coal.' All these fancy terms to hide the truth: Fossil fuels are deadly, and they're stealing our future."
In response to their findings, the report authors recommended that methane-reduction efforts should be carried out under government overview and within a regulatory framework that prioritizes the well-being of communities and consumers. Further, they advised that regulators should not include certification schemes as part of their efforts and that CEMs should be used transparently and in accordance with peer-reviewed best practices and with all of their data made publicly available.
"It's no surprise that the same industry that has spent decades marketing gas as 'safe,' 'clean,' and 'natural' is now looking for new ways to greenwash its product," said Gas Leaks Project executive director James Hadgis. "Third-party gas certification schemes are unable, or unwilling, to capture emissions events that intensify the climate crisis while poisoning nearby communities. If we want to stop rising methane emissions, then we must stop the gas certification farce."
Moreover, the report emphasizes that, while important, simply reducing oil-and-gas methane emissions is not enough. The government must encourage and facilitate a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels.
This includes resisting the industry push to increase the production and export of liquefied natural gas (LNG). LNG has emerged as a major front in the battle to combat the climate emergency, as the Biden administration has announced a pause on export approvals to assess their impact on the climate and consumers, even as fossil fuel companies and allied politicians protest.
"LNG exports are a certified disaster. No amount of greenwashing changes the fact that continuing to expand fossil fuels will perpetuate harms to our climate and the communities in the path of the fracking industry's drilling pads, pipelines, and export facilities," Jim Walsh, the policy director of Food & Water Watch and Food & Water Action, said in a statement.
"We continue to see major fossil fuel companies move forward plans to increase exports of fracked gas, despite the limited pause on new export approvals," Walsh continued. "The health of our communities and the planet depends on President Biden rejecting these misleading industry certification schemes and starting a real and robust effort to phase out fossil fuels."
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