Corporate Knights’ research division produces global sustainability rankings, research reports and financial product ratings based on corporate sustainability performance. Our flagship ranking is the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, released each year during the World Economic Forum.
In 2012, Corporate Knights spearheaded the Council for Clean Capitalism, a multi-industry group of leading Canadian companies dedicated to advocating for economic and social-policy changes that reward responsible corporate behaviour.
Those two paragraphs are yet another reminder of how ESG/stakeholder capitalism has metastasized through the financial ecosystem. Shareholders of any public companies involved in the Council for Clean Capitalism should ask their managements what they think they are doing.
Corporate Knights’ Alex Robinson reports that Vancouver’s city council “has repealed a prohibition on ‘natural’ gas to heat new buildings, a move environmentalists say will hobble the city’s climate goals.” Note the scare quotes around “natural,” another characteristic of the burgeoning language of climate fundamentalism. Thus, drivers are “addicted” to their cars, and so on.
Climate warriors, like other environmentalists, are often infatuated with Nature (capital N, please), and the (supposedly) natural. It’s an infatuation that typically owes more to aesthetics and emotion than #science, but as the peddlers of “organic” food know, it shouldn’t be underestimated. And well beyond the ranks of the committed, the word “natural” plays well.
As a result, climatists regard the name “natural gas” as dangerously misleading. It makes this evil fossil fuel sound too, well, nice.
Rebecca Leber, wrote about this in Vox in 2022. Here’s an extract:
The word “natural” tends to bias Americans to view whatever it is affixed to as healthy, clean, and environmentally friendly. Natural foods, natural immunity, and natural births are among the many buzzwords of the moment . . .
Some climate advocates have . . . dropped the “natural” moniker in their legal filings, advertising, and communications, when talking about methane. They favor calling it “fossil gas” or “methane gas” — anything that’s more descriptive for a dangerous and explosive substance.
“I want my language to communicate the harms that are inherent in methane, in this climate-forcing substance. I want to be clear this is a threat to climate and public health,” said Matt Vespa, an attorney for the environmental legal nonprofit Earthjustice . . .
Researchers at Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication had a hunch about gas that they had a chance to test in a peer-reviewed paper published last fall. They knew from previous public opinion polls that Americans are more likely to view natural gas far more favorably than other fossil fuels and see it as a solution for climate change, rather than a driver.
Spoiler: It (sort of) is, but fundamentalists don’t do trade-offs.
Leber:
Anthony Leiserowitz, one of the researchers and co-author of the paper, wanted to isolate the effect the word “natural” had on these views.
They found a big effect, in line with the large body of social science research showing how food products labeled “natural” lead people to consider them more eco-friendly and healthy. The paper, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, examined how 3,000 respondents viewed different synonyms for gas. More than half of participants had a positive view of natural gas, but the advantage shrank immediately when you called it “natural methane gas” or “methane gas,” as well as for “fossil gas” and “fracked gas.” . . .
But back to Vancouver. Conservative councilors (reprobates!) had, writes Corporate Knights’ Anderson, tried to turn the natural-gas issue into a debate over affordability, but “climate advocates have, however, questioned whether the move will improve affordability, given that electrified buildings can be built cost-effectively.” Well, if they can be built more cost-effectively, they will be. No prohibitions will be necessary.
Betsy Agar of the Pembina Institute (“leading Canada’s transition to clean energy”) warns that “by reverting to natural gas, [Vancouver] risks locking itself into a high-carbon infrastructure at a time when urgent climate action is needed.”
Climate action is, of course, always “urgent.”
And the effect of the Vancouver council’s decision on the climate?
None.