Report Details How America’s Natural Gas Industry Channeled Big Tobacco Tactics – CleanTechnica

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A report released this week by the Climate Investigation Center details the ways America’s natural gas industry has employed the tactics developed by the tobacco companies to avoid, evade, and obfuscate the damning evidence that cooking with methane gas — for that is what so-called natural gas is — poses serious health risks for humans.

If the capitalist system has one overarching flaw, it is that it has no ethical component. As long as you are making money, you need not concern yourself with how many deaths you cause or how much damage you do to the environment.

This is nothing new. The granite walls of the Blackstone Canal are still stained with the dyes the mills dumped into it 200 years ago. No one ever uttered a peep of protest over using our rivers and canals as community toilets for industry. So it should not be surprising that America’s natural gas industry ignored the health risks and social harm caused by using its products. As the saying goes, “It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

Natural Gas & Health Risks

The report says that for more than 50 years, the natural gas industry has leveraged the tactics of delay, denial, and disinformation crafted by the tobacco companies and their legal representatives to push the narrative that smoking cigarettes was actually a healthy thing to do. The industry actually used many of the same charlatans employed by Big Tobacco to create their plan of lies, denial, and deceit about links between gas stove emissions and respiratory illness, while obscuring science and undermining public health.

CleanTechnica readers know that many of the same tactics have been employed by the oil industry for decades to belittle, humiliate, harass, and intimidate climate scientists like Michael Mann and James Hansen for having the temerity to speak the truth.

The Climate Investigation Center claims the natural gas industry funded its own studies in the 1970s and 1980s using the same laboratories, management consultants, and statisticians as the tobacco counterparts. Furthermore, it was advised by Hill & Knowlton, the same public relations company that masterminded the Big Tobacco strategy. Those tactics influence decision makers at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. They continue to the present day.

The natural gas industry has launched a barrage of attacks on scientific findings that find cooking with natural gas carries health risks to individuals. The objective is to cast doubt on those findings by making spurious complaints against academic studies, framing discussion of the issue as “reckless,” and hiring influencers to push back against the latest evidence.

Fighting The Truth Since 1970

The CIC report says the natural gas industry was aware of its “NOx problem” at least as early as 1970, according to the minutes of a government advisory panel composed entirely of high level gas and utility company executives. That same year, EPA researchers launched the first epidemiological studies into the health effects of indoor nitrogen dioxide (NO2) exposure from gas stoves. These studies, which indicated that people who lived in homes with gas stoves were more susceptible to respiratory ailments, would soon attract national attention, threatening to create a potential health scandal for the gas industry.

The American Gas Association decided to follow the trail blazed by the tobacco industry. It funded its own health effects research program. In 1972, it began sponsoring epidemiological studies into the health effects of gas stove emissions at Battelle Laboratories — a private lab which had a history of working for individual cigarette manufacturers as well as the Council for Tobacco Research. Battelle also had a proven track record of publishing information “consistent with the Sponsor’s interests and wishes.” In other words, the results of the research were predetermined before it began.

Those studies found no association between gas stoves and respiratory illness, despite a growing body of independent, non-industry affiliated research which identified a positive association between nitrogen dioxide emissions from gas stoves and respiratory problems. The AGA-funded studies were used by industry to push back against escalating calls for regulatory action on indoor air pollution. The AGA was careful not to disclose its involvement with those studies when they were published in independent journals like Environmental Research.

The natural gas industry hired the same Hill & Knowlton executives who had been responsible for managing the firm’s tobacco account. These executives told the gas industry that it needed to stay ahead of its “critics” by mounting “massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs” to cope with its problems, and recommended tactics similar to those the PR firm had deployed on behalf of the tobacco industry. “Continuing research … must be part of your daily activities,” advised Hill & Knowlton.

In the 1980s the gas industry funded attacks on existing science through the Gas Research Institute (GRI), hiring paid-for consultants to criticize the scientific literature, and using these critiques to influence public opinion and advocate against regulatory action. The GRI also funded further epidemiological studies.

Questions For The Natural Gas Industry

The Climate Investigations Center sent detailed questions (see below) to the American Gas Association about its sponsored epidemiological research into the health effects of gas stove emissions, the disclosure of funding the studies, contracts with Battelle, and the relationship between Hill & Knowlton. A synopsis of those questions follows:

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It is our understanding that in 1972 AGA sponsored its own epidemiological research into the health effects of gas stove emissions. A 1981 AGA paper, “Putting Gas Range Emissions in Perspective” presented at the International Symposium on Indoor Air Pollution, Health and Energy Conservation at the University of Massachusetts (printed in the February 1982 edition of AGA Monthly. We understand that these studies were conducted by two researchers from Battelle Columbus Laboratories (R.I. Mitchell and R.W. Cote) and two researchers from Ohio State University College of Medicine (M.D. Keller and R.R. Lanese).

Can you tell us why AGA’s funding of these studies was not disclosed in Environmental Research, 1979; or in the Proceedings of the Air Pollution Control Association, 1974; or in the Proceedings of the Third Conference on Natural Gas Research and Technology, 1974?

Did AGA disclose that it sponsored these studies in any public forum in the 1970s or 1980s apart from in the 1981 AGA paper “Putting Gas Range Emissions in Perspective”?

Regarding this research, is AGA still in possession of these contracts between AGA and Battelle; and between AGA and the Ohio State researchers? If so, are you able to provide us with these contracts or details of these contracts?

Could you clarify the nature of the relationship between Hill & Knowlton and AGA during the 1970s?

Did AGA pay Hill & Knowlton for services during the 1970s? If so, are you able to provide us with these contracts or details of these contracts?

Our research found that during the 1970s AGA pursued actions to manufacture and magnify uncertainty about the links between gas stove emissions and respiratory illness, aimed at influencing and avoiding regulation. Do you have any comment on that?

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Why, yes indeed, the AGA did have a comment, and here it is from President and CEO Karen Harbert:

“If there is one thing that is clear about the natural gas industry, we do not stand in place. The natural gas industry has collaborated with subject matter experts and research to develop analysis and scientific studies to inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances and ways to help reduce cooking process emissions, regardless of heating source, from impacting indoor air quality. Our focus is on the facts and independent analysis. The available body of scientific research, including high-quality research and consensus health reviews conducted independently of industry, does not provide sufficient or consistent evidence demonstrating chronic health hazards from natural gas ranges.”

The CIC report says, Richard Darrow of Hill & Knowlton advised the gas industry in 1972 to counter the challenges it faced by mounting “massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs.” The evidence laid out in the report shows how the industry heeded Darrow’s advice by pursuing exactly such a program in the decades since the 1970s — a program that continues to this day.

The natural gas industry’s deployment of tobacco-style tactics to defeat “proposals for regulation and restrictions” have played a fundamental role in ensuring a lack of effective action in the U.S. against the “menace” of indoor air pollution. However, as new scientific research again puts gas stove emissions in the spotlight, a new opportunity exists for policymakers and regulators to take action — this time without the misinformation the industry promotes, the Climate Investigation Center says.

The Takeaway

The smartest thing the natural gas industry has done recently is to enlist the aid of the Red Team to scream bloody murder about how pinhead climate activists are trying to “cancel” the gas stove. Just another example of government overreach that must be resisted at all costs. Freedom means being able to breath in noxious fumes if you want to, right? It’s right there in the Constitution…somewhere. As long as there’s a buck to be made, business should be free to say anything and do anything to succeed.

Many people choose to believe some crackpot on social media than a bona fide scientist. Suspicion about scientists is part of the Hill & Knowlton playbook, too. People are only too willing to be led astray by charlatans and snake oil salesmen, and no one understands that better than the natural gas industry.

By the way, I want to introduce Rebecca John, one of the people at the Climate Investigation Center, to our CleanTechnica readers. She was kind enough to offer some insight into the work her organization is doing and told me in an email, “The Climate Investigations Center (CIC) was established in 2014 to monitor the individuals, corporations, trade associations, political organizations, and front groups who work to delay the implementation of sound energy and environmental policies that are necessary in the face of ongoing climate crisis.”

Some of the issues the team monitors include:

• Efforts to stall the climate policy process by the fossil fuel industry and its allies
• Climate science denial campaigns spawned by industrial interests and their front groups
• The latest climate science impacts assessments and backlash against them.

More specifically, she said her focus is on archival work, such as investigating the history of corporate interference in pollution regulation. That’s a huge task and one that is vital to exposing the gamut of dirty tricks industries will use to try to preserve their economic power even as the environment tilts toward being unsuitable for human habitation. “In recent years, CIC has published exposés on carbon capture, corporate climate denial and the PR industry,” she wrote. We look forward to working with Rebecca and the Climate Investigation Center frequently in the future.