Big Oil knew climate impacts from fossil gas, but promoted it as “clean”

However, DeSmog points out, the major oil and gas companies that promoted this message had long known that fossil gas was a major source of air pollution and that the fuel contributed to climate change. This is what a report from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) released on Monday (20/7) reveals.

The report “The fraud of ‘clean’ natural gas: how Big Oil and Gas created the myth that natural gas is a climate solution” shows a decades-long public relations campaign, led by oil companies, to reformulate the image of fossil gas as “clean energy”. However, since the 1960s, these companies have known that methane emissions from gas pose climate risks.

The report includes evidence that the gas industry was alerted to methane pollution problems as early as 1968, much earlier than previously reported, the CCI highlights. Through a review commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), Shell and other oil companies were informed that methane in the atmosphere was linked to “oil fields” and “leaks in the gas distribution system,” and that natural environmental sinks could be “overwhelmed by excessive emissions,” the CCI reports.

Fearing losing customers in a period of growing environmental awareness, the gas industry adopted a public relations campaign in 1971 titled “Gas, clean energy for today and tomorrow,” the CCI shows. To reinforce the idea of ??“clean” gas, industry media outlets misrepresented and minimized the risks of methane.

It was just the beginning of the massive propaganda promoted by Big Oil, which hid the climate impacts of fossil gas. The American Gas Association (AGA) presented distorted information about the dangers of methane to the public and downplayed the industry's role in the problem through a series of recently discovered press releases, speeches and articles, selectively citing scientists in a 1990 article that stated: “Studies suggest that methane is not an important greenhouse gas.”

In 1996, the gas industry co-funded and influenced the results of an unprecedented methane study conducted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study was used by the gas industry to mitigate concerns about methane emissions.

At the time, EPA officials wrote that “we simply do not have the expertise” to independently review the data and that it was “unlikely to find problems even if they existed.” “[M]ethane: no downside,” said an industry magazine published by the Gas Research Institute in 1996, promoting the same study, declaring that increased gas use could actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“This investigation pushes back the timeline of what the industry knew by decades,” said report co-author Rebecca Leber. For her, the survey fills in gaps about how the industry “distorted the risks and impacts of methane from its operations over the years”.

The industry's tricks to hide the climate and environmental damage caused by fossil fuels are extensive. In May 2024, a report by Democratic Party lawmakers in the US Congress revealed that the country's main fossil fuel companies privately acknowledged that they were aware of the dangers posed by consuming their products to the Earth's climate.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron provided congressmen with documents and internal communications that covered a period of more than 50 years, between the late 1960s and 2020. The documents show how these companies were aware of the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and changes in global climate patterns long before the issue became a public concern.

Recently, an investigation by ProPublica and Drilled revealed that fossil fuel companies have been funding climate research at prestigious US universities for more than 30 years in support of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, an industry bid to continue burning oil and gas.

BP, for example, sponsored an elite research center at Princeton University, hand-selecting scientists aligned with its interests who, 22 years ago, published a climate paper known as “Wedges.” These scientists coordinated with oil company executives and showed them various versions of the document. And they described CCS as proven and in use on an industrial scale – a characterization that distorted the facts.