A few weeks ago we talked about the new advertisements the American Petroleum Institute is running that claim natural gas is a climate solution, and how the ads show fossil fuel companies are shifting away from outright denial. While you don’t need us to tell you that API is full of hot air, considering this keeps coming up, and Trump is speaking at a natural gas event next week, we thought we’d dive into the substance of the issue.
Or, well, we’d dive into a great fact-check of the ads by Justin Mikulka published this week at DeSmog. First, API claims that the US is reducing emissions thanks to natural gas. We know this isn’t true because the US isn’t reducing emissions at all--we saw a 3.4 percent rise in 2018. Mikulka points out that API is likely referencing power sector emission specifically, but even so, while emissions from that sector are down from their high in 2005, they rose nearly 2 percent in 2018.
Plus, it's not fair for natural gas to claim full responsibility for this decline in emissions, considering wind and solar have also been replacing coal. As we pointed out back in February of 2018, research showed that renewables and gas were responsible for equal amounts of emission reductions up through 2013. Since then, renewables have only continued to fall in price and rise in installations. It’s misleading, at best, for the gas industry to claim sole responsibility for the decrease in energy industry emissions.
Not that we should be surprised. While we would like to spend time celebrating that API has been forced to accept the reality of climate change, as Mikulka put it, API “looks to be employing the same misinformation playbook that it used to sow doubt about the well-supported science of climate change and the resulting action science demands.”
Key to that effort is glossing over or distracting from the methane emissions from fracking, which Mikulka quotes the International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol as calling the industry’s “Achilles heel.”
This was something Bill McKibben addressed at length recently in his New Yorker piece about the “literal gaslighting” from the industry. Obviously, the industry wasn’t going to just allow McKibben’s punch to go unchallenged: a gas analyst responded on Twitter with a whole thread of links to studies about methane emissions from natural gas.
But the disagreement about just how much of this powerful (but short-lived) climate pollutant is leaking out of natural gas facilities is a distraction. What’s important is that it’s undoubtedly far more than is coming out of solar panels or wind turbines!
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