S6, Ep7 | The New Climate Villains

Drilled S6, Part2 Ep2

Speaker 1 [00:00:00] Last time on Drilled.

Speaker 2 [00:00:02] All of a sudden they are public enemy number one. They're now big coal. They are passing preemption legislation throughout the United States. They are a climate villain. And this is a new experience for many of those lobbyists.

Speaker 1 [00:00:22] That was Charlie Spatz, a researcher with the Energy Policy Institute, talking about the gas industry grappling with its new role as a climate villain. If you're somewhat new to the climate issue, or even if you're not, it might be surprising to hear that the gas industry has historically thought of itself as a climate hero. I myself remember falling for it way back when. 15 years ago or so, I was living in San Francisco and would see busses touting themselves as clean emissions vehicles running on natural gas. And I remember thinking, Oh, that's good. The early marketing of gas as green really worked for a long time. How is that possible when gas is a fossil fuel? I know. Well, a whole lot of people who were concerned about climate change 15 or 20 years ago were very much on board with the idea of fossil gas as a quote unquote, bridge fuel.

Speaker 3 [00:01:15] But natural gas should be a bridge to renewables, and that's healthy and that's good. That's clean energy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But natural gas also can play a prominent clean role. The fact that we're transitioning from coal to natural gas means less greenhouse gases. If you're concerned about pollution, if you're concerned about CO2 emissions, if you're concerned that this country imports two thirds of its oil, then at the end of the day, you have to say, I need an alternative to a worse environment and I need an alternative to imported oil. And the only scalable answer to that is natural gas.

Speaker 1 [00:01:56] The prevailing wisdom, even as recently as 2010, was that cheap, abundant gas would get us off of coal quicker than any other alternative energy source that would deliver rapid carbon emissions reductions and improve air quality and bonus Fossil gas or natural gas could bolster the stability of solar and wind kicking in when needed to keep energy flowing consistently. When fracking started to really boom in the mid to late 2000, the situation got a little trickier. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, which supported the bridge fuel idea nationally, had to contend with its own member groups in heavily fracked states like Pennsylvania, Colorado and Texas, who were seeing firsthand what this bargain meant. Sierra Club Executive director at the time, Carl Pope, had to defend his policy of supporting fracking.

Speaker 4 [00:02:49] Well, it has.

Speaker 2 [00:02:50] Caused friction and it's going to cause friction. There are people who don't agree with the policy because they think the Sierra Club's role should just be to oppose anything that has any environmental consequences. They don't think our role should be to say, okay, here's where we think we should get our energy.

Speaker 1 [00:03:05] That's Ham. Talking to NPR in 2010 about his group's support for natural gas.

Speaker 2 [00:03:11] We see it as the cleanest of the fossil fuels. What's happening with the new discoveries of natural gas is that parts of the country that historically didn't pay any environmental bill for energy production because they didn't produce energy are going to start paying a bigger share of the bill.

Speaker 4 [00:03:27] And people don't like that.

Speaker 1 [00:03:29] Two years after that interview came out, an exclusive report in Time magazine rocked environmentalist with the news that the Sierra Club had accepted $25 million in funding from Chesapeake Energy, the leading fracking company in the country. Although it stopped working with Chesapeake after 2010 and told TIME that it had turned down an additional 10 million from the company. The news did serious damage to the credibility of the bridge fuel narrative and then the stories about fracking. Environmental impacts started to really pile up.

Speaker 4 [00:04:03] Neighbors in that Colorado town are feeling the heat as well. The groundwater there is apparently contaminated by natural gas. A Colorado homeowner is living in fear because their tap water is flammable. Does anybody have any idea what the cumulative effects of that much fracking material and radioactive material is?

Speaker 1 [00:04:25] More recently, the idea of gas as more climate friendly has taken a hit, as scientists have learned more about the fact that drilling, processing, transporting and burning gas all release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, because methane is more short lived in the atmosphere than CO2 gas. Advocates have tended to downplay its impact on climate change, but what it lacks in longevity, it makes up for in intensity, causing around 80 times more warming in the short term than CO2. So it's heating things up faster. And then on top of that, researchers have discovered in the past decade that there's a whole lot more of it being ripped into the atmosphere than the oil and gas industry has ever admitted to or reported.

Speaker 5 [00:05:14] So I'm Sharon Wilson and I'm senior field advocate for Earthworks.

Speaker 1 [00:05:20] Sharon Wilson goes by the Methane Hunter or sometimes Texas Sharon. She spends most of her days going around Texas's pipelines and oil fields with an optical imaging camera that uses thermal imagery technology to make otherwise invisible methane emissions visible. Wilson's relationship with fracking is personal.

Speaker 5 [00:05:40] I worked for the oil and gas industry. I was uncomfortable with the ethics. Of the industry as a whole. And that was before I knew about any of the environmental impacts.

Speaker 1 [00:05:58] That discomfort eventually led Wilson to leave the industry and move out to why is County a rural area north of Fort Worth, Texas?

Speaker 5 [00:06:08] I bought 42 acres next to the LBJ National Grassland, and I didn't know that that's where George Mitchell, the father of fracking, was experimenting with how to economically frack oil and gas from shale. And so I had a ringside seat to that adventure and my air turned brown and my well water turned black. So, yeah, that made me mad.

Speaker 1 [00:06:47] Wilson had a young son at the time and felt she couldn't subject him to all that pollution. So they moved from the country to the Dallas Fort Worth area to a town called Denton. There, Wilson started working with the local government on a fracking ban. Then she went to work for earthworks to work on fracking across the state. In the course of that work, she made an open records request to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and got back videos of optical gas imaging that had been done at well sites and oil and gas facilities.

Speaker 5 [00:07:18] That made visible the invisible pollution coming from these facilities. So when you look at it without an optical gas imaging instrument, you just see tanks and pipes. But when you look at it with the optical gas imaging camera that I use, you see big clouds of pollution coming from these sites.

Speaker 1 [00:07:45] Wilson was hooked. She realized these images could expose the true costs of fracking that the gas industry was hoping to hide.

Speaker 5 [00:07:53] I felt like it would be a great tool to use to help people prove that they were being impacted, because what industry does is they will blame the odors that you're smelling and your health impacts on cleaning products in your home or the candles you are burning or the dog. They will blame anything but the elephant of the oil and gas facility that is plopped down next to your home. So I saw it as a way to help advocate for people who were impacted.

Speaker 1 [00:08:30] More and more. Advocates like Wilson started to point out the enormous amount of methane being released into the atmosphere from pipelines and wells sites and frontline communities began to push back on the impacts the industry was having on their water and air. Suddenly, gas went from being part of the solution to part of the problem, and that's something the industry is having a hard time adjusting to.

Speaker 3 [00:08:55] Good morning, everybody. If folks are ready, I suggest we go ahead and start the next panel, which is entitled. What Do the Election Results Mean for One Future?

Speaker 1 [00:09:07] This is Pete Sheffield, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Enbridge Energy. There are large Canadian pipeline company that's been involved with both the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and Line three in Minnesota. He's talking here to the One Future Coalition, a group of more than 50 gas companies that have pledged to work together voluntarily to reduce methane emissions. This was the group's post-election call in 2021. Audio of this and a few other industry meetings was leaked to the Energy and Policy Institute and shared with Drilled. The audio cuts out here for a second as Sheffield is introducing this panel about the 2020 election.

Speaker 3 [00:09:51] As we look at what happened last week, do we think natural gas is positioned well? Part of the problem or a bit of both?

Speaker 1 [00:10:00] It's hard to hear. But he was posing a key question Is natural gas positioned well as a solution or as part of the problem? Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy WESTERVELT. This season, we're digging into how the gas industry from oil and gas companies to pipeline companies to utilities is grappling with its new role in the climate conversation. Today, the battle plan, how the industry is strategizing to fight the climate movement. Stay with us.

Speaker 4 [00:10:44] What exactly would be the stance of a Biden-Harris administration toward the Green New Deal? You have 2 minutes uninterrupted. All right.

Speaker 5 [00:10:52] So first of all, I will repeat and the American people know that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact.

Speaker 1 [00:11:03] You might remember the question of a fracking ban coming up a lot during the 2020 presidential election. That question was driven in part by all the city and county gas bans announced that same year. By mid 2021, cities and counties in 19 states had passed local gas bans in California alone. There are now 50 local bans, and New York is considering passing the country's first statewide gas ban. The fossil fuel industry doesn't often get caught off guard, but gas bans seem to have actually managed it. We get a rare glimpse into how the American Gas Association reacted to the flurry of local gas bans because they discussed it in detail at their 2020 conference. And the audio of that was leaked to the Energy Policy Institute and then shared with Drilled. Here you can hear the association's vice president of advocacy and outreach, Sue Forrester, explaining the climate movement's strategy to her gas colleagues. The American Gas Association is the trade group for gas utilities.

Speaker 4 [00:12:08] This isn't about lowering, and it's actually about the use of fossil fuels. What kind of a coordinated, cohesive plan of attack from the NGOs? They have a lot of big funders, and if they get one or two studies that are being used by the grassroots folks to use in states and at local city council meetings, and then they have pre-written code.

Speaker 1 [00:12:32] Okay. So this is pretty amusing because what she's talking about as though it's really nefarious NGOs coordinating an attack on the industry by funding studies that are then used by grassroots folks at the state level and in local city council meetings, having pre-written codes that they can just hand off to lawmakers. Everything she's describing there, that's the industry's playbook, and particularly the right wing playbook, funding universities and particular studies check. Getting those studies into the hands of local advocates, check writing codes and laws, and supplying them directly to lawmakers. That is the entire purpose of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business group set up by the Koch brothers years ago. I'm not sure why it took environmentalists so long to follow the same blueprint or why industry would be caught off guard when they finally did. But here we are. Back to Forester.

Speaker 4 [00:13:30] What I really want to impress upon everybody here is don't think this is just a coastal elite issue. We're seeing activity in Columbus, Ohio, Lawrence, Kansas, Detroit and even Austin, Texas. That's right. Texas and Rome. Oil and gas. Which is quite surprising.

Speaker 1 [00:13:47] Again, it's highly unusual to see any part of the fossil fuel industry caught off guard by the climate movement. So it's strange to hear an industry lobbyist scrambling to react to an effective climate strategy. But of course, it has not taken the industry long to figure out a counter strategy. Part of that is a push to pass preemptive laws that prevent states or any cities or towns within them from ever passing a gas ban. So essentially bans on bans. But of course, the word ban is never anywhere near these laws. They're all about so-called freedom of choice. Here's Forester again.

Speaker 4 [00:14:24] So the idea behind choice is to really get ahead of the localities, the big cities in counties, and say we are allowing our customers the right to be hooked up to any kind of energy they would like. So, again, preserving energy choice because we're trying to beat counties and localities from passing bans that then force the hand of governors and state legislators to pass something nationwide.

Speaker 1 [00:14:50] It's interesting that they call these choice bills because they're effectively removing a choice from voters before they've even thought about it.

Speaker 4 [00:14:58] We now see the environmental sides talking about indoor air quality, telling you that your stove is dangerous because it emits things and it's causing asthma in it. And so that's one of the big solutions that we're working on right now is trying to tell you that's not through any kind of cooking in this thing.

Speaker 1 [00:15:16] While it's technically true that any type of cooking emits things as forest or puts it, cooking with gas emits at least twice as much particulate matter. That's the type of air pollution that's linked to everything from asthma to shorten life span as electric cooking with gas as opposed to electric also produces nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. This is just one small example of how the gas industry is working overtime to run. So back control of the narrative on gas and in this case the gas industry. And again, that includes oil and gas companies like Chevron or ExxonMobil, as well as smaller companies like Pioneer Fuels, but also pipeline companies like Enbridge and Energy Transfer Partners and utilities like SoCal Gas in California or Eversource in Massachusetts. They're trying everything they can to make the bridge fuel narrative stick just one more time. Forrester explains here what her organization, the American Gas Association, is doing on that front.

Speaker 4 [00:16:16] Folks understand that the climate is changing, but they don't necessarily know what to do. And so that void is where AIGA is really going to step in to really change the narrative and say that we are part of America's clean energy future and we are here to make sure that we can support our customers having choices and options that are cost effective and reliable.

Speaker 1 [00:16:41] You can hear similar language in a recent TV ad from the American Petroleum Institute.

Speaker 4 [00:16:47] Renewables are great, but we need.

Speaker 5 [00:16:48] Natural gas too. That's what we use now. So when the sun is down, you have a backup.

Speaker 4 [00:16:55] You sound just like your granddad.

Speaker 5 [00:16:57] Plus, emissions have gone down because natural gas is the number one source of electricity. Grandma, American energy is leading the world.

Speaker 4 [00:17:07] Natural gas equals a cleaner future.

Speaker 1 [00:17:16] It's a fine line for the gas industry because they want to be part of the clean energy future, but they also don't want wind and solar gaining too much ground because that means selling less gas. It also means being stuck with a bunch of gas infrastructure they can't use. So they've come up with the solution, which we talked about a bit in our last episode Renewable Natural Gas or our energy, essentially methane captured from industrial dairy or meat operations, sewage treatment facilities or landfills. On the surface, it's an okay idea, except that it kind of helps greenwash, industrial ag But the gas industry is using it to keep gas in the mix, despite the fact that according to global consulting firm ICF, the most R&D could ever hope to provide is around 16% of the gas supply. And critics say that's a wildly optimistic number. Here's Forester again on the role of our energy in the industry's plans.

Speaker 4 [00:18:15] We also have positive legislation in Minnesota and Colorado on our energy, trying to make it part of the fuel mix and to keep electrons moving through our infrastructure, which is great news on that front.

Speaker 1 [00:18:29] So the industry's positioning now hammers on three key points. First, freedom of choice. Then gas as part of a clean energy future. And finally, affordability. Again, here's Forrester.

Speaker 4 [00:18:41] For our financially challenged communities. We want to make sure things do affordable for them.

Speaker 1 [00:18:47] This is something that's showing up over and over again in industry advertising and PR. The green transition is going to be expensive. The environmentalists don't care about you, but we do. And it's not just the messaging itself. It's important who the messenger is, too. That's why Forester explains the importance of recruiting influencers in key sectors to sing the praises of gas.

Speaker 4 [00:19:11] We've convened a national group of end users and consumers to help carry our message. Again, we keep hearing from our message testing that industry. Talking about industry isn't effective. We really need our end users like AARP, the restaurants, home builders, laborers and agriculture. Farmers specifically are the are the more effective voices for us out there. So we talk twice monthly with our coalition partners. We have used them to testify in cases in front of the legislatures as well as at city councils. We are also increasing our outreach to include local mayors, legislators, African-American groups and all kinds of different folks so that we have more friends on our side willing to talk about how great natural gas is.

Speaker 1 [00:20:01] And just like those pesky environmental INGOs Forrester was complaining about before their meeting with local officials and bringing studies and sample legislation to them as well. There are currently 19 states with preemptive laws banning gas bans. They all have similar language in them drafted by the gas industry, often by utilities in particular, who have really been leading the charge against electrification. Here's Charlie Spatz from the Energy Policy Institute again.

Speaker 2 [00:20:31] I've spent a long time researching the electric utility industry. You know, they have a pathway to decarbonize their electric generation. But when you're looking at the gas utility industry, they are essentially a fossil fuel company. They're selling and distributing a product that is not easily decarbonized and worse for them. There's solutions on the table that can more or less replace the need for their services.

Speaker 1 [00:21:00] That gives gas, utilities, in particular, a real motive to fight against an energy transition. And it's nothing new for utilities to be climate obstructionists. Dr. Leah Stokes, a political science researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote a whole book about how corrupt many U.S. utilities are and about their role in blocking climate policy for the past several decades. It's called short circuiting policy.

Speaker 6 [00:21:30] Way back in the early 20th century, there was a person named Samuel Insel. And he's actually the guy who came up with the way our utility system works. He invented the idea of a monopoly utility that had a public utility commission that would oversee it at the state level. And, you know, there are quotes from that time that say for, you know, a decade he was the most powerful business operator in the United States. And that really is how it is state by state. These companies are often the most powerful company in a given state.

Speaker 1 [00:22:03] And Stokes points out all that power can make them pretty dangerous.

Speaker 6 [00:22:07] If you take Arizona public service, for example. You know, they are extremely corrupt. They have spent over $50 million on elections for their own regulator fighting against a clean energy ballot initiative. And, you know, it's hard to get clear on how terrible they are because they are funding the campaigns of a lot of politicians in that state and a lot of community groups. You know, soccer clubs, probably United Way campaigns, you know, social welfare organizations. These groups take money from utilities. And so they end up being a kind of octopus that has its tentacles in all different parts of the state.

Speaker 1 [00:22:50] But at the same time, a lot of utilities are able to avoid rigorous scrutiny.

Speaker 6 [00:22:54] So I think it's hard for people in a given state to get clear on how corrupt and problematic these monopoly utilities are. And then across the whole country, because there's so many different utilities and different states, it's hard for people to get the same sort of big picture as they would for a company like Exxon that operates across the whole country and the world, or Chevron. You know, these companies like Southern Company are in a couple states or first Entergy. Right. And they're also changing their names all the time. Right. Or they have subsidiaries. So you've got Southern Company as the parent corporation, but then they've got Georgia Power, for example, or Alabama Power. And so it's a really complicated area that makes it hard for people to pay attention.

Speaker 1 [00:23:41] That's certainly been the case with utilities fighting gas bans, but people are starting to pay a bit more attention as some particularly egregious tactics have been coming to light. So Cal Gas, the utility that fought the gas measure in San Luis Obispo, for example, has been at the center of a few other scandals for its aggressive tactics against gas bans. It's currently facing a potential $10 million fine from California's Public Utilities Commission for, among other things, using its customers utility payments to fund a front group.

Speaker 6 [00:24:16] These just spam texts out of nowhere that say, you know, urgent alert, Santa Barbara City is going to ban gas and destroy the grid and drive up energy prices. Contact them immediately.

Speaker 1 [00:24:31] Come back next week for that story.

Unidentified [00:24:40] Drilled is an.

Speaker 1 [00:24:41] Original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is Jules Bradley, our editor. This season is Jude JOFFE-BLOCK. Sound design, mixing, mastering and original music throughout this episode, including our new theme song. By Peter Duff, Fact Checking by Wood Indian. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton, a First Amendment project. Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. And of course, the show is reported and written by me. Amy WESTERVELT. If you'd like to support our work and get access to ad free episodes and exclusive merchandise, check out our Patriot and Patriot CNN.com slash Drilled. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes bonus episodes via Drilled podcast icon. And you can follow us on Twitter at Drilled or me at Amy WESTERVELT. Please also leave us a reading or review wherever you're listening. It really helps us find new listeners. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.