Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green but Still Sells as Much Fossil Fuel

Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green but Still Sells as Much Fossil Fuel
propublica.org

> NW Natural has more retail gas customers than ever. It supplies them little, if any, renewable natural gas. It sells them as much fossil natural gas in an average year as it did before. And it wages steady battles in the courts and in local city halls to keep the gas flowing.

If I have more customers I would be selling more natural gas, not the same amount. I read a lot more of this article than I wanted to and at no point that I saw did they say how much recovered methane they are selling to customers. That should have been in this paragraph, if they weren’t so busy grandstanding. How “little, if any”? Numbers. Not rhetoric.

I am so tired of people misrepresenting numbers in general, and politically motivated is the worst. If you can’t win without lying then it’s not really winning.

And, here is something I wish all articles posted: "as reporters, we also tried to look at other utilities, and only 37% of them reported data."

I think these news articles are often skewed by what data is available. And, so many agencies just don't report, so they are exempted from this kind of reporting.

> After years of fanfare about renewable natural gas, what’s its share of NW Natural’s gas supply today?

> Less than 1%.

The article, indeed, cites precious few actual statistics to lie with at all, but this suggests that the phrase "as much" means the same proportion, not the same absolute amount. So in your words, yes, they're selling "more natural gas" from fossil sources.