“The end of natural gas has to start with its name,” according to the headline of a recent piece in Vox. Supposedly the reason we use natural gas and do not take more strident action to curtail the use of natural gas is not that natural gas is plentiful and useful and economic. No, the reason is about language: “For over a century, the gas industry has marketed natural gas as “clean,” “renewable,” and “responsible.” Hence climate activists, including the author of the Vox article, argue it’s time for a rebrand. After all, “[s]ome 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.”
Never mind that the explosiveness of natural gas is sort of the point if you are using it to, say, drive a turbine in an energy plant that replaces a much more emitting coal plant or that it’s not really that explosive if you are using it to roast a chicken. Never mind also that since the shale revolution (OK, fine, call it the “fracking revolution,” if you wish), switching to natural gas has been responsible for more than half of U.S. reductions in carbon, something electric cars can’t even hold an LED bulb to. Never mind that largely because of natural gas, at the end of the Trump presidency, the United States had reduced more in total carbon-equivalent emissions than any country that remained in the Paris Agreement. In the minds of people who want everything to improve all at once and therefore can’t accept the existing solutions we have available to us, it’s all a matter of language and public perception of terms. Per Vox:
“[A] 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.’”
Vox even quotes the writer Alan Levinovitz, the author of Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science, who calls the language “too dangerous to have around.” All of this is fantastically misconceived. For one thing, language use is not determined by fiat by the lawyers at Earthjustice and the like. We can’t just delete words that are supposedly dangerous — especially if they’re also accurate, since methane is, in fact, natural. And natural gas is not the only energy source that emits it. Hydroelectric power, according to some studies, creates more emissions than nonrenewable energy sources.
But the main thing is just that this is exhausting. “Yeah because the one thing the left needs is more language policing,” rogue progressive Ben Dreyfuss snarked at Vox on Twitter. Exactly. And if you tell people, “We need to stop using so much fossil gas,” you’ll immediately have to explain to them what that even is, which inevitably means explaining that it’s, yes, natural gas, the term people actually know and use. Public perception is not what drives natural gas use or bans. And anyway, isn’t there enough “we need to stop saying X” and “Y perfectly comprehensible term is problematic” already? Can’t we just debate the (literal) substance?
