Climate Cultists at The Guardian: This Time, It’s Evil Propane
By Tilak Doshi
February 08, 2024
Reporters at The Guardian never tire of demonizing fossil fuels. In its latest salvo, the newspaper – funded in part by the green-billionaire Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – published a January 25 hit piece on the Propane Education and Research Council. PERC, funded by the U.S. propane industry, is a nonprofit that provides propane safety and training programs and invests in research and development of new propane-powered technologies. PERC, its critics charge, is “greenwashing” by downplaying “the full climate impacts of propane” and marketing it as “clean” energy. The Guardian article claims that PERC “has invested millions in a multiyear strategy to rebrand propane from what it’s called a ‘dirty fossil fuel’ to a so-called clean energy source.”
“Greenwashing”
The Guardian article’s accusation of PERC’s “greenwashing” cites Charlie Spatz, a research manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, who attended PERC’s 2022 board meeting. Spatz says that the fossil fuel industry has long tried to brand its products as renewable: “And so we’ve seen PERC, in some respects, catch up with the oil industry and natural gas industry to present their product as renewable.”
EPI self-describes as a “watchdog organization working to expose attacks on renewable energy and counter misinformation by fossil fuel and utility interests.” Oddly enough, for an organization that purports to reveal the hidden influence of fossil fuel and utility companies, the EPI is opaque about its own funders, and it is hardly disinterested itself. Its executive director, David Pomerantz, “spent eight years working with Greenpeace to move the electric sector away from fossil fuel and towards renewable energy.”
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/02/08/climate_cultists_at_the_guardian_this_time_its_evil_propane_1010629.html
