Natural Gas Industry’s Smear of Coal Is False and Self-Defeating

By Gregory Wrightstone

Smearing coal has become a marketing strategy of a natural gas industry that embraces pseudoscientific views of coal combustion as being hazardous.

In so doing, gas supporters give credence to a fallacious regulatory regime of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which erroneously classifies carbon dioxide as a pollutant and assigns health effects to low-level pollution without scientific proof. To boot, a false representation of coal, oil and natural gas as environmental bogeymen is perpetuated.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic user of this foolish ploy is Toby Rice, CEO of Pittsburgh-based EQT Corp., who introduced two years ago a global plan to replace coal with liquefied natural gas. Promoting his product as a “decarbonizing force” in June at a RealClearEnergy conference, the head of the country’s largest gas producer (check the video link above to see his part), said:

“What we would like to do at EQT … is focus people on a really practical solution that will allow us to provide energy security for the world and address people’s concerns over global emissions. And that path is very simple: transition the world from coal to gas.”

Although natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than coal when burned, the underlying premise of Rice’s pitch rests on the popular myth that CO₂ emissions will overheat the planet. The organization we lead, the CO₂ Coalition, has overwhelming evidence from top scientists showing that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide not only poses no danger but is beneficial to plant growth and crop production.

We need more CO₂ not less. Coal miners could say that replacing their product with gas is a threat to greenery.

Now, the gas industry’s Marcellus Shale Coalition has further demonized coal in claiming that Pennsylvanians have realized up to $1 trillion in health benefits by reducing emissions of nitrogen and sulfur compounds through the replacement coal-fired electricity generation with gas-fueled power plants.

We have no quarrel with the emissions data. However, the link to improved health is based on methodologies of an EPA that has refused for decades to provide evidence for such a connection.

EPA has long trafficked in data manipulation and falsehood about the supposed health effects of particulate matter, which would be the carrier of chemical compounds into people’s lungs, according to Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of “Scare Pollution: Why and how to fix the EPA.”

“The bottom line is that the claim that particulate matter causes death is the most demonstrable science fraud of our time,” says Milloy, a lawyer with a master’s degree in health sciences and biostatistics. “Despite fearmongering for 30 years about millions of deaths, EPA — and nobody else — has ever presented a single dead body.”

Since the 1990s, Milloy has sparred with the EPA over its assertion that particulate matter measuring 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5) is life threatening. PM2.5 was identified as a dangerous pollutant by EPA’s environmental extremists to shut down the coal industry, he says.

While insisting that PM2.5 kills 8 million people annually, says Milloy, EPA has ignored a contradictory epidemiological study by California researchers as well as the results of its own experiments, which failed to produce symptoms in human subjects intentionally exposed to high levels of particulates.

In 1995, the agency’s own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council rejected EPA findings of health effects from PM2.5 and was denied raw data to examine the claims. EPA also refused to give the data to congressional investigators.

The absence of support for EPA’s regulation of PM2.5 should not be a surprise. In a 2023 study, Dr. Indur Goklany found that mortality and disease rates improved over a 27-year period even as industrialization and particulate emissions increased in five Asian countries:  India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and China.

The gas industry jumps on the bandwagon of demonizing coal to gain the acceptance of the “green” lobby and the politicians who pander to it. However, gas producers are only feeding coal miners to the crocodile that they hope to escape. It’s a fool’s game, as should be evident by the environmental extremists’ regular targeting of gas operations.

A better approach would be for gas and coal interests to stand together for their industries and the immense good that hydrocarbons have done for the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when coal first fueled steam engines. An alliance of drillers and miners could help defeat a vicious anti-science ideology that seeks to destroy their livelihoods and the civilization they have made possible.

This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy on July 22, 2024.

Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist; executive director of the CO₂ Coalition, Arlington, Va.; author of Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know and A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity.