The unnatural use of the phrase ‘natural gas’
A look at how language shapes climate action
Over the last 40 years, Janet Domenitz has earned a reputation as a hard-nosed advocate on environmental, public health, voter and consumer issues. As the executive director of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG), her toughness and perseverance has led to innumerable improvements in the lives of Bay Staters. But if you want to see her get really worked up, bring up natural gas.
“To call this a pet peeve is like calling Kilimanjaro a hill,” she told me. “I’m obsessed.”
Her beef? Two words: natural gas.
“The term has been so successfully integrated into our vocabulary that reporters and journalists use it with no quotes, as if it was a matter of fact, like saying ‘front lawn’ or ‘log cabin’ or ‘parking lot,’” she explained. “There is no ‘natural gas.’ If gas is natural, so is arsenic. Or venom. But there is no industry that’s hyping ‘natural venom.’”
Janet’s long-standing frustration is a reminder of the power of language in the climate action space. For instance, back in the early 2000s, prominent pollster Frank Luntz recommended that the George W. Bush administration ditch the phrase “global warming” and go with “climate change.” The recommendation was part of a strategy “to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
Years later, Luntz acknowledged that his rhetoric, which likely helped slow-play action on global warming in some circles, was a mistake. “I was wrong in 2001,” he said at a 2019 climate panel. “I don’t want credit. I don’t want blame. Just stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago because it’s not accurate today.”
For similar reasons, now is the time to rebrand natural gas.
Earlier this month, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released a study on how the modifier “natural” impacts people’s perceptions of this form of fossil fuel. Although it’s a greenhouse gas that researchers say has a huge impact on global warming, natural gas is thought of “much more favorably” — 76 percent favorably — compared to oil (51 percent) and coal (36 percent), according to the Yale program’s polling of nearly 2,000 Americans.
Digging deeper, the study concluded that this fossil fuel’s’ reputation comes largely from its name. While natural gas is made up of 70 percent to 90 percent methane, that connection is lost on most people.
“This experiment found that the American public has very different feelings about and associations to ‘natural gas’ than they do to ‘methane’ even though natural gas is composed primarily of methane,” the Yale researchers said. “’Methane’ and ‘methane gas’ generate much stronger negative feelings and associations to pollution than does ‘natural gas’ and this effect is consistent across political parties. These findings indicate that the terms used to communicate about this fossil fuel can have dramatically different effects.”
This has certainly helped the fossil fuel industry.
“The use of ‘natural gas’ has been a big victory for the gas industry,” Janet pointed out.
In part because of its name’s relatively positive connotations, natural gas has been touted by some as a “bridge fuel” away from other forms of dirty energy. But that certainly isn’t the case today.
“It’s now clear that if the world is to meet the climate targets it promised in Paris, natural gas, like coal, must be deliberately and rapidly phased out,” climate writer David Roberts wrote in a Vox column last year. “There’s no time for a bridge. And clean alternatives are ready.”
With that in mind, changing this language should be on any environmentalist’s checklist. For Janet, that may be as simple as dropping the “natural” modifier, though she also offers up other accurate terms such as “fracked gas” or, simply, “methane” as options.
Whatever the case, for Janet’s sanity — and the fate of the world — we should make it unnatural to say natural gas.
