Amused by pathetic attempts at greenwashing? Well, you’re going to love this pair of doozies.
Many decades ago, the fossil fuel industry was handed a gift when household and industrial gas, formerly extracted from coal, started to be supplied from underground reserves similar to the way crude oil was produced. What to call it to differentiate it? The industry called it “natural gas.”
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And in an instant, they had a product that somehow seemed cleaner than its predecessor. Which it was, but still caused considerable pollution when it was burned or leaked, the latter emitting methane, which is a much greater contributor in the short term to global warming than other effluents.
Maybe not on purpose, but it was probably one of the first examples of “greenwashing,” the recently coined term for when a product is hyped as being more beneficial to the environment than it really is.
And it’s something the fossil fuel sector cannot resist employing, with two recent industry pushes in particular demonstrating its seemingly insatiable need to obfuscate and obstruct a true picture of its products’ contribution to global warming.
First case in point: the efforts of the U.S. propane industry, in the form of the fancy-sounding Propane Education & Research Council (PERC), which was heard in recordings highlighted by The Guardian coming up with ways to promote it as “renewable” and/or “clean energy.”
“Twenty-five percent [of people consider] natural gas to be renewable, in this Millennial and Gen Z bucket,” an unidentified PERC board member said. “There’s a perception out there — not reality, but that’s perception. We can attach to that for propane.”
“You can’t say natural gas is renewable,” PERC board member Leslie Woodward cautioned.
“Perception,” the unidentified board member repeated.
Then Erin Hatcher, PERC’s senior vice-president of communications and marketing, agreed that propane should be perceived as clean energy. “We don’t want to be in that coal bucket,” she is heard saying on the recording. “We want to be in that clean energy bucket.” When contacted by the paper, Hatcher said the was “no attempt to mislead whatsoever. It’s to educate, because the narrative that predominates the news is that there’s only one way to a clean future, and we don’t believe that.”
And there’s “certified natural gas.” What? Well, it’s sort of like “appellation contrôlée,” the French wine classification system, and means that it is supposedly produced by a low-emissions methods.
But, critics say, unlike the French system, which is rigorously monitored, “certified natural gas” is nothing more than a “dangerous greenwashing scheme.” That’s the view, anyway, of a group of Democratic U.S. senators, who wrote to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission on Monday, according to The Guardian. The letter anticipates the release of the agency’s updated Green Guides, which clarify when companies’ marketing claims around sustainability violate federal laws barring consumer deception.
“The reality is that gas certification schemes allow the oil and gas industry to justify the continued expansion of methane gas use and undermine efforts towards a just transition to renewables,” says the letter, which was signed by Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Sheldon Whitehouse, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker.
Get ready for more eyebrow-raising euphemisms from the fossil fuel industry as the drive to green energy continues.
