The Devious Plan to Keep Us Hooked on Gas
A Matter of Degrees
Dr. Leah Stokes, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
4.8 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2021
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Advocates are turning their attention to a new front in the climate war: the fossil-gas hookups in our homes that fuel burners, boilers, and other household appliances.
If we want to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to electrify the hundreds of millions of machines inside our homes and buildings as fast as possible. But the gas industry won't go down without a fight.
Gas industry front groups are infiltrating neighborhood groups, hiring social media influencers, and barraging citizens with messages in order to stir up controversy around local bans on new fossil gas connections. That's exactly what happened to the residents of Santa Barbara, California last year.
This week, we'll hear from activists, reporters, and industry professionals who are following the gas industry's battle to keep fossil fuels in our homes.
How far will gas companies go to stop electrification? And where does the electrification movement stand?
Leah Stokes speaks with Sierra Club's Santa Barbara Chapter Chair Katie Davis; EarthJustice Senior Attorney Matt Vespa; Earther Staff Writer Dharna Noor; and Former BlocPower Senior Strategist Associate Rose Stephens-Booker.
Resources:
- RMI research on the dangers of gas stoves
- Dharna Noor on why gas is so problematic in our homes
- Saul Griffith on electrifying everything, starting now
Follow our co-hosts and production team:
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio. For more episodes and transcripts, visit our website.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Americans get hit with a lot of robocalls and spam text messages, warning of an impounded car or expiring insurance, or that you've just won a cruise trip. |
| 0:10.0 | If you could just hand over your credit card, your social security number, and maybe the keys to your house. |
| 0:15.3 | At the end of 2020, the residents of Santa Barbara, California, the city where I live, got a different kind of spam text. |
| 0:23.5 | So it's like December, the end of December. |
| 0:27.0 | Everybody's on holiday. |
| 0:29.2 | All of a sudden, we start getting notices that people are getting texts. |
| 0:33.7 | These texts weren't selling a product. |
| 0:35.7 | They were selling lies about our energy system. |
| 0:38.5 | Some of my friends in town who know that I work on energy policy |
| 0:41.6 | reached out to me asking, what were these text messages all about? |
| 0:45.9 | And quickly, I got linked up with Katie Davis, |
| 0:48.6 | the chairwoman of my local Sierra Club, |
| 0:50.8 | and we started to work together to figure out what was going on. |
| 0:54.3 | These just spam texts out of nowhere that say, you know, urgent, alert, Santa Barbara City |
| 1:01.8 | is going to ban gas and destroy the grid and drive up energy prices. |
| 1:07.2 | Contact them immediately. |
| 1:08.9 | One thing Katie and I both noticed is that the first round of text |
| 1:12.4 | messages were totally anonymous. There was nothing saying this is from such and such group. |
| 1:17.7 | It was really sketchy. It's illegal to just randomly text people who have not opted in to your |
| 1:23.8 | lists. You can do one by one for political purposes, but this seemed everybody got |
| 1:29.6 | them at the same time. |
| 1:30.7 | Katie pointed out to me that these texts were timed just a few weeks ahead of a local |
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