Thread by @MotherJones

Last year, Wilson Truong posted this message to Nextdoor warning about a local policy change in CA that would limit natural gas in new buildings. It ignited a debate among neighbors.

But what the residents didn’t know was that Truong wasn’t their neighbor at all. (Thread.)

Truong was writing in his role as an account manager for the public relations firm Imprenta Communications Group. Imprenta’s client was Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, a front group for SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas utility.

The Nextdoor incident is just one of many examples of the newest front in the industry’s war to garner public support for gas. As more cities move toward electrification, gas companies have launched a stealth campaign of direct-to-consumer marketing. bit.ly/3a9Q1nc

Take a look at these Instagram posts. Each of these influencers was paid by fossil fuel companies to endorse gas stoves.

Since at least 2018, social media and wellness personalities have been hired to post more than 100 posts extolling the virtues of their stoves in sponsored posts, @rebleber reported in June: bit.ly/3d2JpsK

What these influencers don’t mention is that gas stoves release pollutants like particulate matter, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide into our homes, sometimes at levels that would be considered illegal outdoors.

Pollution from gas stoves can cause respiratory and cardiovascular health problems, and can exacerbate flu and asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in children. Without ventilation, one expert told @rebleber, “you’re basically living in this toxic soup.”

.@rebleber also reported in December that the pro-industry website Women for Natural Gas was using stock photos alongside their “testimonials” and had been cycling through various combinations of testimonials with fake headshots for months. bit.ly/3rF86iQ

The group behind the website, Texans for Natural Gas, also has a jokey, cringey meme feed with its own website and an Instagram account:

This sort of stealth marketing is new—but the industry’s campaign to convince Americans to love gas is decades in the making. Over the last century, the gas industry has worked wonders to build up the myth that gas stoves are better for cooking.

Have you ever heard the phrase “cooking with gas”? It turns out, the industry made the slogan up in the 1930s.

By the 1950s, it was targeting housewives with star-studded commercials of matinee idols scheming how to get their husbands to renovate their kitchens.

In 1988 the gas industry produced a rap called “Cookin' With Gas” about gas stoves being low cost and “clean.” It is really, really terrible.

So far, the gas industry’s decades-long campaign has worked: More Americans than ever live in a home with a gas stove. But the popularity of gas may soon begin to wane.

Americans are waking up to the fact that natural gas is a powerful contributor to climate change and source of air pollution—and that’s not even counting gas pipelines’ tendency to leak and explode.

Already at least 42 municipalities across the United States have strengthened building codes to discourage expanding gas hookups in new construction, and the pace is picking up. As a result, the industry’s tactics have only gotten more aggressive.

The gas industry is fighting back against science. In one internal email, a gas exec wrote: “If we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done.”

As for the Nextdoor post, Truong’s firm assured us that it was an isolated incident. He made the post “without direction or approval,” Imprenta’s vice president said.

Yet, the comment is still featured on their client’s website.

In summary, we’ve all been gaslit. Read more in @rebleber’s feature story on how the fossil fuel industry convinced Americans to love gas stoves: bit.ly/3d403YE