Natural gas is a vague term. What’s a better one?

By Sarah Lazarovic , Head of Communications, Creative, and Consumer Engagement, Rewiring America

In 2016, we renovated our falling-apart kitchen. Our stove was older than a grandmother’s longest memory, and though I loved staring at its glowing spiral coils, it needed replacing. My Bon Appetit-reading friends said gas was the way to go, and since I was a less than discerning renovator, that’s what I got. What’s incongruous about this is that I was already a climate-engaged person, reading deeply about the crisis and even working in the field—it’s just that at the time that work involved being extremely well-versed in sustainable fashion and unversed in the other pieces of the carbon emissions pie. Natural gas sounded, well, natural to me. I mean, I like bamboo and kale. If I was going to buy gas, I wanted it to be the natural, artisanal, spring-fed kind.

A few years later, I began to broaden my climate work, and I learned that natural gas was actually 80% methane. What’s methane? A gas that is many times a more potent contributor to global warming than CO2 (80x on a 20-25-year time frame).?

What’s worse, at a personal level, burning gas inside the home is increasingly known to be a contributing factor to asthma in children. My son has asthma.?

When I read one of the many studies about this, I ripped my gas stove out. I was fortunate to have been able to afford to do so.?

But I’m not the only person seduced by “natural.” How did we all come to believe we should be burning gas inside our home?

Trish Stewart, Senior Science Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explained it to me thus: You start getting manufactured gas, which came from coal, in 1817. But in 1821, you get the first natural gas well dug in New York. The first usage of the term to mean gas coming out of the earth for lighting was 1825. This gas was piped from the earth to the buildings in Fredonia, New York.

Harmless enough, especially given that we didn’t know about climate change at the time.?

Fast forward a hundred years, and the industry extracting these fuels from the ground not only knows that gas is bad, but starts spending millions of dollars advancing the term "natural gas" expressly for its positive connotations. For much more on this, read the excellent Rebecca Leber in Mother Jones:?

Over the last hundred years, gas companies have engaged in an all-out campaign to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat. At the same time, they’ve urged us not to think too hard—if at all—about what it means to combust a fossil fuel in our homes.

In the 1930s, the industry embraced the term “natural gas,” which gave the impression that its product was cleaner than any other fossil fuel: “The discovery of Natural Gas brought to man the greater and most efficient heating fuel which the world has ever known,” bragged one 1934 ad. “Justly is it called—nature’s perfect fuel.”

The reason they’ve done this is obvious. My natural gullibility is mirrored millions of times over in households everywhere. From a 2020 Yale study:?

We found that the term “natural gas” evokes much more positive feelings than do any of the three methane terms. Conversely, the terms “methane” and “methane gas” evoke much more negative feelings than does “natural gas.”?

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. “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.

The word cloud in that study shows terms like energy, clean, and cooking. But I’m inclined to agree with climate communicator Sage Welch, who, after a January study came out linking gas to a specific percentage of childhood asthma, said on the podcast Volts: “After this week I think it's going to be like: asthma, harmful, health…” Once you hear about the dangers, it’s like there's an oven timer you can’t turn off in your brain.

A key suggestion to improve clarity would be to simply start calling natural gas what it is: methane gas. Just last week the great newsletter Heated announced they’d begin doing so. This is neat, of course, but we need big, established publications to set this as precedent. We need the Associated Press to reword its style guide, public editors at major news outlets to agree to make changes, and journalists to champion this gassy rebrand internally. But media outlets don’t love being told by advocates that their choices might actually create bias.

But the popularity of "natural gas" and lack of "methane gas" also supports the switch: Natural gas is still the most common term for methane. News organizations could very easily lead the charge to use methane gas, as it’s ripe for being imbued with meaning and elevated in the discourse to help clarify.

In a 2022 interview in the nonprofit climate news site Canary Media, Rebecca Leber said of this labeling challenge, “there really is no way to just opt out of it. You can’t find a place where language is truly neutral. Every aspect of how we talk about climate change, from the very name “climate change,” has been a messaging battle.”

Maybe. But one could easily argue that natural gas is more of a misnomer than methane gas, given public perception and understanding of the word natural. The brilliant climate marketer John Marshall likes adjectivizing. “I think dirty gas or bad gas is better. You can try methane, but I don’t know if people get that.”?

While bad may seem like a value judgment that journalists won’t buy, dirty is essentially as fair as natural. A gas that pollutes our homes and planet is, effectively, dirty. And if we’re going to get pedantic, natural gas is technically on the vague side, as it includes more gasses than just methane.

At Rewiring America, we call it methane gas. But mostly we don’t call it at all. Because we focus on the increasingly incredible electric solutions in front of us. My electric stove is so easy to clean, I wonder why anyone would ever bother with grates and gas.

But then I remember the decades and dollars spent on obfuscation. And it reminds me to tell everyone I know that natural gas is methane is bad. Perhaps you can do the same?

From the (Re)wire

• Want to understand induction and why it’s so much better than gas? Read this excellent explainer by Alison F. Takemura, featuring the one and only Mr. Heat Pump.
• Testing New York Apartments: How Dirty Is That Gas Stove, Really? (Answer: pretty dirty!). Great New York Times piece by Hiroko Tabuchi.
• The IRA is working. And of course, we must still do more. Brian Deese opines in The New York Times.

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