Food & Drink
Food retailers and methane
New report reveals global food retailers are ignoring a major methane problem in the meat and dairy aisles.
16 March 2025
The oil and gas industry knew about the climate harms of methane decades earlier than previously reported, manufactured and promoted the falsehood that natural gas is ‘clean’ from the 1970s and purposefully deceived the public about the safety and risks ever since.
In reality, methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has accelerated climate pollution worldwide. As a result of the oil and gas industry’s fraud, natural gas use and infrastructure has expanded dramatically in recent decades.
These are the top-line findings of a new investigation from the Center for Climate Integrity, released as officials across the globe debate expanding natural gas extraction and use.
‘The Fraud of ‘Clean’ Natural Gas: How Big Oil and Gas Created the Myth that Natural Gas is a Climate Solution’ is based on newly discovered documents, public records requests, internal industry communications, confidential reports, scientific papers and interviews with climate scientists, industry consultants and representatives from environmental groups.
While numerous reports and investigations have demonstrated the way in which the oil and gas industry responded to public concerns about carbon dioxide pollution with delay and denial, this is the first to trace the history of the gas industry’s response to its methane pollution problem and place it in the context of decades of deception.
‘Big Oil and the gas industry knew decades ago that methane was a harmful climate pollutant, but they manufactured the myth of ‘clean’ natural gas in order to protect and expand their business, with no regard for public health or the climate impacts that they knew would result.
‘Officials who continue to justify expanding natural gas reliance by still claiming it’s clean or safe for the climate are using the same script and manipulated science that gas executives and their PR teams concocted decades ago. It’s time that these profoundly dangerous lies are finally put to rest. By exposing the gas industry’s deception, we can get one step closer to accountability.’
RICHARD WILES
President of the Center for Climate Integrity
Among the new pieces of evidence unearthed in the report by the Center for Climate Integrity, the oil and gas industry was first warned of methane pollution issues as early as 1968 through a review commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute. The review connected methane in the atmosphere to ‘oil fields’ and ‘[gas] distribution system leakage’, noting that natural environmental sinks could be ‘overburdened by excessive emissions’.
Confidential internal communications reveal that public relations strategists created a ‘clean energy’ natural gas campaign in 1971, recognising ‘with the growing importance of environmental considerations in all purchase decisions, the need for gas to identify itself as a ‘clean’ energy and to communicate its ecology story is strongly indicated.’
The advertising executives internally acknowledged ‘the lack of clear, simple substantiating facts on the pollution aspects of natural gas’ supporting this ‘clean’ campaign: ‘GAS, CLEAN ENERGY FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW.’
The American Gas Association misrepresented the dangers of methane to the public and minimised the industry’s role in the problem through a series of newly discovered press releases, speeches and articles, selectively quoting scientists in a 1990 article that declared ‘Studies Suggest Methane Is Not a Major Greenhouse Gas’.
The gas industry co-funded and steered the outcome of a precedent-setting 1996 study on methane from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study was used by the gas industry to downplay concerns about methane emissions. EPA officials wrote at the time that ‘We simply do not have the expertise’ to independently review the data and they were ‘unlikely to find problems even if they exist’.
‘[M]ethane: no drawback’, claimed an industry magazine from the Gas Research Institute in 1996 in its promotion of the same study, declaring that increased gas use could actually reduce greenhouse gases.
According to the report’s introduction: ‘The fraud of clean natural gas has been essential to the industry’s success in the marketplace, and the idea that gas is climate-friendly has been at the heart of the rapid expansion of gas infrastructure over the last two decades, including the explosion in fracking, the build-out of interstate pipelines and gas export terminals, and the absurd codification of gas as renewable energy in several states, locking the US into decades of additional fossil fuel use and climate-damaging emissions.’
A new poll from Data for Progress and the Center for Climate Integrity found that nearly three in four US voters would support legal action to hold oil and gas corporations accountable for misleading them about the harms of natural gas.
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