Last summer, Rebecca Leber at Mother Jones exposed how the gas industry is using social media influencers to advertise. Now Leber’s back with a new feature exposing another social campaign, and tying it back to decades of the industry’s propaganda.
It starts simply enough, with a comment on NextDoor, a social media platform for getting in touch with neighbors about local issues. Wilson Truong posted to a Culver City California group, “as if he were a resident of the Fox Hills Neighborhood,” Leber writes, to talk about a potential ban on gas stoves that Culver City was considering. “I used an electric stove,” Truong said, “but it never cooked as well as a gas stove so I ended up switching back.”
Well you can probably see where this is going, but the users engaging and debating the various pros and cons of gas stoves vs. electric induction probably didn’t. Wilson Truong wasn’t a concerned citizen of Fox Hills, he was a public relations employee at Imprenta Communications Group, working on behalf of Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions (C4BES), itself a front for SoCalGas.
When questioned about it, Imprenta told Leber that the post was an isolated incident, yet, she writes, “the C4BES website displays Truong’s comment next to two other anonymous NextDoor comments as evidence of their advocacy work in action.”
But this is hardly new behavior for the notoriously PR-heavy gas industry. As early as 1934, it was hyping gas as “nature’s perfect fuel.” But of course, it’s not. Even when it’s not leaking or exploding (which is often) and warming the planet (which is always) using gas stoves puts a lot of pollution into your home. There’s formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, oh and particulate matter — you know, that special sort of pollution that research just linked to millions of deaths a year.
To excerpt from Leber, because there’s no way to say this any more concisely: “Children are especially at risk, according to a study by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health commissioned by Sierra Club: Epidemiological research suggests that kids in homes with gas stoves are 42 percent more likely to have asthma than children in homes with electric stoves. Running a stove and oven for just 45 minutes can produce pollution levels that would be illegal outdoors.”
Shelly Miller, an indoor air quality expert at UC-Boulder, said it more viscerally, telling Leber that if you don’t have your stove fully vented with a big external exhaust fan, “you’re basically living in this toxic soup.” Apparently there is a way to be more concise!
Now, a "toxic soup" is not what the gas industry wants you to think about when you think about their product. They want you to think of their “cooking with gas” catchphrase — coined during an ad blitz in the 1930’s that's remained part of our lexicon (for now.) Heck, they’d even rather that you make fun of the rap video they did in the 80’s, which is — and we cannot stress this enough — every bit as terrible as you would expect. They're fine with that, as long as you're not thinking about the fact that anything you make on a gas stove might as well be toxic soup.
Just ask utility executive Sue Kristjansson. In emails obtained by the Climate Investigations Center, Kristjansson rejected the idea that an ad campaign featuring social media influencers be paused after Leber’s coverage generated backlash, to give them time to shore up the science behind the claims they were making about gas being clean. They shouldn’t wait to see what additional studies show, Kristjansson wrote, because “if we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done.” She’s confident, though, that critics “have zero proof.”
That was on June 17, 2020, exactly 237 days before the publication of the aforementioned study attributing millions of early deaths to excessive levels of fossil fuel pollution outdoors. And we’re talking about pollution indoors, where there’s often little-to-no ventilation, and where “running a stove and oven for just 45 minutes can produce pollution levels that would be illegal outdoors.”
Just something to think about, next time you’re simmering up a batch of toxic soup.