Natural gas is a dangerous name for a climate pollutant – Vox

Source: Natural gas is a dangerous name for a climate pollutant – Vox

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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.”