Yale and Harvard graduate Fareed Zakaria is a trusted journalist on CNN, columnist at the Washington Post and editor at the Atlantic. If you wanted to sway the public, he’d be a great person to have in your corner.
Unfortunately, he appears to be squarely in the gas industry’s corner, with multiple Washington Post columns about how “we will need gas to replace coal in developing countries,” and how we need gas here in the U.S. too, while last year he wrote that that Bernie Sanders was wrong to oppose, you guessed it, natural gas. And while this sort of “bridge fuel” rhetoric was widespread a decade ago, Zakaria’s embrace of it nowadays raises a bunch of big red flags.
And indeed, if it seems like Zakaria’s efforts to promote a fossil fuel as a way to solve the climate problem caused by fossil fuels is something coming straight out of the fossil fuel industry, sure enough an excerpt of his recent Washington Post column calling for gas exports can be found on the website of “Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future.”
Who are these “natural allies” of renewables that are enamored with Zakaria? No, it’s not batteries, improved efficiency, or transmission lines, or anything that actually helps make a clean energy future happen.
“Natural gas is accelerating America’s transition to a clean energy future” says the home page, “by partnering renewable resources with natural gas, we can reach our climate goals faster without sacrificing reliability and affordability.”
Wow! Sounds too good to be true! And, of course, it is. Natural gas is getting in the way of renewables, and as Texas showed this winter it’s hardly reliable, and as the current energy price spike shows, fossil fuels are hardly affordable.
So who’s behind this obvious front group? That’s not quite so obvious.
Like most shady groups who don’t want you to know the industry they’re championing is paying them to do so, Natural Allies For A Clean Energy Future doesn’t actually list who those allies might be. No “staff” or “about us” page to speak of, but instead a few pages of “news,” “policies,” “resources,” and a “media library” with links to some (not actually publicly posted) YouTube videos that are basically indistinguishable from the oil industry’s greenwash and woke-wash, like this one featuring a Black woman in a white labcoat talking about how great the switch from coal to gas has been, or this one with a little white girl pushing a little Black girl on a skateboard and a voiceover about what great partners natural gas and renewables are. Aww! So sweet!
Oddly, though, these allies aren’t too eager to let the public know who, exactly, they are.
But we’ve found some clues! It turns out the group’s executive director is Susan Waller, who prior to joining Natural Allies For A Clean Energy Future in 2020 was the VP of “Stakeholder Engagement & Enterprise Public Awareness Programs” at the gas pipeline company Enbridge, and before her three years there, she spent 9 years as a VP for natural gas company, Spectra Energy, and before that she had a bunch of different jobs at various natural gas-related companies.
Waller is also the 2021 chair of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, so suffice to say that the group promising that natural gas is a climate solution is being led by someone who’s spent her career advocating for natural gas, not policies to address the climate crisis
We also happened to notice that Energy in Depth, the PR-group-run oil and gas front, recently posted a link to the Natural Allies For Clean Energy website about how it’s “protecting families from higher costs,” which would certainly suggest that the group’s deeply enmeshed in the organized denial and professional disinformation space.
And sure enough, at least one of their funders is a natural gas company, as Cheneire energy lists a $250,000 annual membership fee in a 2020 disclosure.
So while there’s no proof that Zakaria’s getting any money for producing content perfectly matching the gas-backed-group’s messaging and placing it in the Washington Post, he probably should be. C'mon Fareed, you don't need to work 'for exposure' anymore. Stand up for yourself! After all, the group’s clearly got the cash!