Support strong Canadian climate journalism for 2025
Gas·light·ing: The practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one's own advantage. — Merriam-Webster dictionary, 2022 word of the year.
Do you love your cozy gas fireplace and uber-sexy gas stove, but are tired of feeling guilty about all that climate pollution frying your kid's future?
Well, we've got great news for you. Introducing our hottest new product — Renewable Natural Gaslighting. It's not just natural, it's renewable too.(TM) And it is available now!
Thanks to our foresight and deep caring for you and Mama Earth, we are proud to say there is now a record amount of made-in-Canada renewable natural gas available.
In fact, there is so much available that we measure it in “petajoules.” A single petajoule is a big, impressive amount. Way more than you will ever need for your own home or business. And we’ve got six!
This renewable stuff burns just like our fossil gas, except it doesn't trash our climate or acidify our oceans for millennia to come. What's not to like?
So very good.(TM)
And so much of it, too.(TM)
OK, sure … some party poopers point out there isn't enough renewable natural gas right now to cover even one per cent of gas demand in Canada. But worry not, because the amount being produced is growing super fast.
Huge progress in recent years
We've really started cranking up the production of renewable natural gas in Canada.
Just look at the progress we've made.
In only the last five years, we've increased the supply of renewable natural gas by two petajoules!
Two!
More than one!(TM)
With that kind of explosive growth, you can rest assured that locking yourself into natural gas burning today won't lock you out of happily burning your way to a net-zero future.
Renewable Natural Gaslighting is our commitment to you, dearest customer, that you can rely on us to deliver the climate-safe products you need, exactly when we think you'll need them.
Massive untapped potential
And if you worry that maybe six petajoules isn't enough to supply all our gas customers like yourself with 100 per cent climate-neutral gas by 2050, you are wildly underestimating our ability to talk big numbers.
Under Canada's world-leading(TM) climate policies, our industry is on track to produce 50 petajoules by 2050.
Fifty by 50. That's nearly 10 times today's supply!
And if we pull out all the stops — while also grabbing a bunch of Canadian crop silage away from other less important uses — we have the potential to generate up to 230 petajoules of renewable natural gas in Canada.
Eventually.
(Some restrictions apply…)
Teaming up with Mother Nature
Sure, it's true that the amount of renewable natural gas humanity can produce on our own is far too little for our big plans — but we're also enlisting Mother Nature herself to save the day.
Thanks to the trillions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions our fossil fuel products have emitted, we are gently encouraging Mother Nature to start producing her own methane … er … renewable natural gas.
Just look how much she's making already.
From tropical wetlands to exploding permamelt, nature's own production of renewable natural gas is absolutely surging worldwide.
And we plan to harvest that bounty using our soon-to-be-invented-and-extremely-cheap-to-run nano-bot doohickies. We're pairing these with the latest chatbot AI super-dupers. Plus some Really Big Umbrellas(TM). Lots.
You can count on us to turn nature's surging methane into the natural gas burning in millions of buildings across the country.
Or is it the other way around…?
Sign up today!
While there might not be enough renewable natural gas for all our loyal customers to get to net zero using it, there will be "Plenty for You"(TM).
You only need gigajoules. We've got petajoules.
So, jump on the bandwagon! We’re out there every day working hard to pull as many new folks onto our natural gas party wagon as possible, from new homes and buildings to long-haul trucking and maritime shipping — like those adorable new ferries out in British Columbia they are busily building to run on our liquid natural gas.
Seeing such a rapidly expanding customer base get in line for our most premium and most limited product just confirms to us the incredible potential of our Renewable Natural Gaslighting!
Operators are standing by…
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The fine print — All future-looking statements in this advertorial are strictly aspirational. The word “you,” such as in our friendly, market-tested tagline “Plenty for You”(TM), is meant to be generic and should not be construed to mean any particular individual, especially … um … you. The data for the charts showing Canadians are burning thousands of petajoules of fossil natural gas (which we hope you will ignore) come from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy. The data for current renewable natural gas production and limited future potential in Canada come from the Canadian Gas Association and Canada Biogas Association. Data showing the surge in climate-destabilizing methane that's flooding into our planet’s atmosphere come from the alarmists at the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A final note to any of our customers feeling misled because the renewable natural gas you thought you were paying for is actually being burned in some other nation and we are only delivering fracked fossil methane to you instead, are encouraged to call our 24-hour customer hotline at 1-800-WAH-WAH.
Comments
Excellent humour, it goes right up there with George W Bush and his "Clean Coal" greenwashing :)
It's amazing how much greenwashing the oil & gas sector does, yet our Federal Government does nothing to challenge the disinformation.
Yes. Also goes along with scanning the ocean bottom to build giant wind turbines while dead whales float up on the beach!
Pentajoules? The humour was a little too obscure for me to guess whether you mis-spelled petajoules, or thought inventing a slightly-off version of the word was another joke. Since a spell checker would have flagged "pentajoules", I'm guessing the latter, and the joke didn't land. On the other hand, the spell checker here in comments just flagged "petajoules" even though it IS a word, so maybe you just made a spelling mistake.
The productive, constructive criticism the CNO could take a swing at would be to add up the project of shutting down all gas in BC - which towns first, which pressure zones of the gas network are furthest-out, most-expensive to run, longest pipes to get to the customer - those are the ones where you hit the whole town with heat pumps, then turn off the town valve. What does that project look like? How big is it? How many heat pumps can we install per year? What's the timeline for doing it all at that rate?
Instead of bitching that Fortis isn't facing up to the need to shut down, plan it for them.
Thanks for catching the spelling error, Roy. Maybe I should have used "plentajoules"? I also agree that there should be an orderly plan for winding down natural gas network like you describe, with focused heat pump rollout to match. That's what strong climate action from government would look like. My guess is that government would have to drive that.
Excellent sarcasm Barry. I had several good hoots over this article. When well done, it is an excellent way to lampoon someone -- actually, in this case, a whole industry. Mind you, for it to work, one has to be informed enough to "get it."
Thanks for your comment, Thomas. Glad it worked for you. I agree that it might work for everyone but hopefully there are a lot of readers like you that get it. I'll put it on my list to write a straight version on this later.