details the ways America’s natural gas industry has employed the tactics developed by the tobacco companies to avoid, evade, and obfuscate the damning evidence that cooking with methane gas — for that is what so-called natural gas is — poses
The American Gas Association decided to follow the trail blazed by the tobacco industry. It funded its own health effects research program. In 1972, it began sponsoring epidemiological studies into the health effects of gas stove emissions at Battelle Laboratories — a private lab which had a history of working for individual cigarette manufacturers as well as the Council for Tobacco Research.
In the 1980s the gas industry funded attacks on existing science through the Gas Research Institute , hiring paid-for consultants to criticize the scientific literature, and using these critiques to influence public opinion and advocate against regulatory action. The GRI also funded further epidemiological studies.
Did AGA disclose that it sponsored these studies in any public forum in the 1970s or 1980s apart from in the 1981 AGA paper “Putting Gas Range Emissions in Perspective”? The CIC report says, Richard Darrow of Hill & Knowlton advised the gas industry in 1972 to counter the challenges it faced by mounting “massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs.” The evidence laid out in the report shows how the industry heeded Darrow’s advice by pursuing exactly such a program in the decades since the 1970s — a program that continues to this day.