The methane or “natural” gas industry has known for a century that its product isn't safe. Thankfully, though, journalist Rebecca Leber has done a great job of exposing the industry's extensive propaganda, from making "cooking with gas" a thing to producing cringy raps and sponsoring Instagram posts.
Now Leber's back with the latest, and it's a bummer, if enlightening. Even beloved TV chef Julia Child was co-opted by the American Gas Association's (AGA) propaganda efforts.
On the upside, "Child herself never endorsed products on her shows (regulations around public programming forbade it) and there’s no evidence to suggest that she was a willing shill of the AGA." However, the AGA paid for a new kitchen for her to film in, "complete with a four-burner commercial range and a gas oven rotisserie." In exchange, when Julia Child & Company started running in 1978, a special slide during the theme song gave "special thanks to The American Gas Association."
So she may not have been a gas spokesperson by any measure. But "Julia Child was [still] a weapon wielded by the fossil fuel lobby," Leber writes, because "from the industry’s point of view, Child was potent product placement that could help establish the dominance of gas in the American home.” In the words of the AGA's monthly trade magazine, “millions of viewers week after week will be able to watch Julia Child as she stirs food simmering over a gas flame."
Co-opting Julia Child's image was the work of the AGA's "Hollywood Bureau," which was “staffed with agents whose job was 'obtaining publicity favorable to the natural gas industry within the national media of television and motion pictures.'"
Apparently, the Bureau was pretty successful, Leber reports, taking credit "for gas appliances appearing regularly in 25 primetime television series, periodically in another 12, in eight television movies, and nine feature films."
They even went beyond mere product placement. "According to an article in its trade magazine, AGA’s influence went so far as to alter scripts that made gas look dangerous," cutting scripts where gas explodes or chokes someone. The Hollywood Bureau also worked to "land more pro-gas scripts, working with studios so 'an environmentally conscious producer or director' might plug the 'non-polluting' aspects of 'natural' gas in scripts."
As a result, “an estimated eight out of 10 Americans saw AGA commercials on major network television in which we appeared as the sponsor of TV spectaculars, major documentaries or sports events,” the AGA claimed in 1977.
Cooking, sports, documentaries… They’ve all been corrupted and co-opted by polluters. Is nothing sacred?