Natural gas doesn't deserve the health halo

Dear Editor,

It's time to call a spade a spade, and ditch the healthy halo surrounding the term 'natural gas'. When we use the term 'natural', that evokes thoughts of sunny pastures, green forests, the blue ocean - anything but the reality of 'natural gas', which is a colorless, odorless substance that has the primary characteristic of being flammable.

A better term would be 'fossil gas' or even just embracing reality, calling it methane, which comprises about 95% of natural gas. And while it may be colorless and odorless, it is anything but benign: methane carries over 28x the planet-warming potential of the villain of our time, CO2; and it is apt to leak freely from places of production and transport, with estimates of up to 9% of methane stocks lost during production and transport, per MIT (https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-does-natural-gas-contribute-climate-change-through-co2-emissions-when-fuel-burned).

On December 16, the Biden administration released a long-awaited report, confirming the reality many of us already know - the rampant production and export of natural gas will further savage our environment, and increased export will only drive up costs for American consumers. It's time to call out 'natural gas' as anything but natural, and stop our country's fossil gas binge.

Sincerely,

Nathan Dombeck

Janesville, WI