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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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For those that don't know natural gas is a think tank tested way to brand methane. Natural gas is methane. They are the same thing. When you hear natural gas think "methane" because that is what natural gas is. For some reason "natural" makes you think it's a perfectly fine and good thing, but that's just good ol' propaganda that you believed because you didn't know any better.
Petroleum is also "natural". It forms naturally, in nature, all by itself, and it combusts if you light it on fire. It's so natural we can't make it ourselves that's why we drill wells several miles down and then inject compressed fluids at insane pressure to fracture the rock formations that natural petroleum is trapped in.
The problem is that methane is significantly worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and if you burn methane, it breaks down into CO2. So when you hear "Clean burning natural gas" you are being spoon fed bullshit. It's not clean burning, it's lighting methane on fire to produce the same greenhouse gas they want you to think they're cutting down on.
While I don’t doubt that it helps with branding in the modern day, the name natural gas entered the public vocabulary centuries ago to differentiate it from synthetic gas/coal gas/town gas, not as a think tank branding exercise.
Created as a byproduct of the coking process, the aforementioned syngas was used primarily for its bright white light, and indeed in the US much of the network was built out after the invention of the lightbulb but before they got bright enough to be competitive.
Natural gas by contrast is produced by drilling into naturally occurring deposits of methane and other flammable gases as compared to being a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced by coal gasification. As electric lights got better and fewer factories needed to turn coal into coke, most cities decommissioned their syngas systems. A few decades later cites rebuilt gas distribution systems using natural gas to provide for a far more efficient form of heating, and people needed to easily tell the difference since syngas lighting and appliances arn’t practically useful with natural gas and so used the common name for it in much the same way most people don’t go to a restaurant and ask for a glass of high concentration dihydrogen monoxide, they just ask for water.
If you think that "Clean Burning Natural Gas" hadn't deliberately been kept in the advertising vernacular intentionally to avoid negative connotations, I have a bridge to sell you.
I mean, clean burning is an perfectly accurate description of natural gas flames, that’s why it’s so terrible for lighting but good for heating, there’s extremely little soot and ash that need to be cleaned out of a flue of off the walls above a lamp.
I don’t doubt that gas companies really like or have indeed have helped feed the common misconception that “clean burning” has anything at all to do with climate effects, but that wasn’t my point, which was that natural gas is the common name for the mix, and it has been since long before companies had to form think tanks to pretend to care about climate impacts.
Cool so your point was to give a history lesson on the origins of the original naming convention behind the mining and burning of methane, and disparage my point that it still being called natural gas in intentionally misleading, while also not actually disagreeing with it or bringing any sort of evidence to the contrary?
So you just wanted to...look pompous? Gaslight? Distract from the fact that burning methane is just as bad if not worse than drilling for and burning crude oil based fossil fuels for the environment? Point out that it's all fine because it was originally used for lighting?
Okay then. Thanks for your contribution to society I guess. Go tell the bees in your safe space how you did your good deed for the day by defending the fossil fuel industry!
My point is that your staring comment on which the majority of your argument rests, “Natural gas is a think tank tested way to brand methane.” is clearly false. I figured this was an honest mistake, as its something someone who is not well informed on the topic might think, but it’s something which a lot of people do know, and so I politely added more information you or others could use for a jumping off point if you didn’t know that syngas even existed.
Calling something by the name it has always been known by is not “intentionally misleading”, but basic communication.
There are enough enough true criticisms of useing natural gas for power and heat, such as the parent’s post that gas leaks are more damaging to the environment than the coal it replaced, without making wild claims about the name itself being a hundred year old PR spin.
When most climate activists are dismissed as having no idea what their taking about, making claims like yours that people know wrong because they live down the hill from the old synthetic gasworks is how you convince people that the parent claims are just as poorly researched and easily dismissed as some wild comment.
It is kind of important to be accurate is your criticism least it be used to diminish far more well researched and damming criticism.
You said something incorrect, were pretty gently corrected, and then rather than simply move on and learn, you decided to crawl all the way up your own ass into a deeply entrenched position. You are not the one being useful or coming off worth listening to here.
Upvotes say otherwise, sunshine. Keep fighting the good astroturfing fight tho!