"Freedom Gas" Trump Administration's Ridiculous New Plan To Rebrand & Export Fossil Fuels
Last edited Fri May 31, 2019, 04:27 PM - Edit history (1)
His Energy Department wants to sell it to the world. May 30, 2019 (Mother Jones, originally published by Grist).
The Trump administration has rebranded natural gas with a new, patriotic-sounding name: “freedom gas.” In a Department of Energy press release on Tuesday, Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes talked about exporting US natural gas as “spreading freedom gas throughout the world.”
Keep reading the release, and you’ll find another official calling natural gas “molecules of US freedom.” No, you’re not reading the Onion. All this in a Department of Energy announcement that it’s approving exports from a new liquefied natural gas plant south of Houston. It’s just the latest effort to stick “freedom” in front of words to make them sound patriotic. Who could forget “freedom fries?” Angered that France opposed the war in Iraq back in 2003, House Republicans led by Representative Robert Ney from Ohio and Walter Jones Jr. from North Carolina forced the cafeteria to change the name on its menu. It dropped the term in 2006.
Turns out that “freedom gas” was coined by a European reporter earlier this month, as Jordan Weissmann, a writer at Slate, pointed out. At a briefing in Brussels, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry explained that his decision to double US liquefied natural gas shipments to Europe by 2020 would decrease the region’s reliance on Russia, a big supplier of gas.
“The United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent,” Perry said. “And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.” When an astute reporter from EURACTIV, a European media site, asked if “freedom gas” would be a good name for these exports, Perry agreed. Lo and behold, a few weeks later, freedom gas is now a Department of Energy talking point. This, too, is part of a sporadic effort to give fossil fuels a pleasant-sounding makeover.
..That’s the product of a successful industry campaign marketing natural gas as environmentally friendly, as environmental law expert Tarika Powell wrote for the Sightline Institute earlier this year. Under certain circumstances, though, natural gas could be worse for the climate than coal. Powell points out that methane traps more heat per pound than carbon dioxide over the short term. Calling methane “freedom gas,” in other words, rhetorically gives the fossil fuel industry more liberty to pollute...
More, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/05/freedom-gas-the-trump-administrations-ridiculous-new-plan-to-rebrand-fossil-fuels/
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