i agree, but i also dislike the term "natural gas" sure its natural just like everything in the universe is -- just a bit of greenwashing to go with our CO2 emissions
Greenwashing is an intentional effort to portray greenhouse gas emissions as safe by relativizing their contribution to the climate change. Calling natural gas natural according to an old tradition is not the same.
Anyway, if you would do it today, it is really hard to justify, not least because there exist new meanings of the words now and there exist already sufficiently good classifications. Context does matter.
Education does not change how these sorts of tricks affect our brains. Research has shown that using the term "Natural Gas" creates false impressions of the its environmental impact.
Assumption about my personality doesn’t make your statement right or make sense. Of course it was intentional, just not the way you suggest here. The name “natural gas” exists in many languages, literally means “coming from nature” and is being used for centuries. Major suppliers outside USA use this name in contracts etc. Nobody is going to rename it just because American education system is so bad that people are getting confused.
>Education does not change how these sorts of tricks affect our brains. Research has shown that using the term "Natural Gas" creates false impressions of the its environmental impact.
Proof link? What factors were controlled in that research?
Not exactly hard to find, but here you go. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/should-it...
Do you have proof that this association or this type of association is correlated with education?
It is not a label, it is scientifically established and accurate name that nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.
The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it, ergo the only proof needed is logical. If you know what it is, you describe it exactly as it really is — clean when burning if compared to coal, producing even stronger greenhouse effect when directly released to atmosphere.
Not all all. To someone who only understands the meanings of the individual words, the term is extremely ambigous. "Natural gas" could simply mean "air" or could refer to any gas that is naturally occuring in our atmosphere.
The reason why "natural gas" has the meaning that it does is purely convention and has no scientific basis or justification.
> The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it
Education is not how we learn language. We learn language primarily contextually based on experience. While learning additional languages can be assisted by education, contextual experiencea are required for mastery.
> ergo the only proof needed is logical.
That's not how logic works...at all
> nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.
Scientists at Yale are "poorly educated"...? Throwing that accusation out pair with the word 'woke' exposes you as a partisan who has no intrest in learning or constructive discussion
That's not how logic works. Go learn about how logic and science are used together.
This person probably has a communication disability if they are not able to use language properly. We are not speaking in individual words, we use sentences and grammar, metaphors and homonyms, we have a lot of context even in low-context cultures. All of this can be learned and this is what education is for.
> Scientists at Yale are "poorly educated"...?
Maybe. Ivy League university or scientific degree is not a seal of quality. When you design such research only to control for political affiliation, that’s a bad science.
Alright, so it goes by several names but it's sold to consumers as "Natural Gas". I'm not sure if it was green washing, but obviously the marketers were going for the most palatable name for consumers.
Predicated upon what?
Natural gas was merely a name to differentiate between 'gasoline', short form 'gas' for many english speaking countries. And the name is valid, it's mostly in its natural form, compared to 'gasoline aka gas', which required loads of processing to create it from oil.
And the name comes from a time before most of the population had even heard of global warming, at a time before people cared about using fossil fuels. There was in no way any attempt to greenwash, because absolutely no one cared one iota back then!
And the same is true for being palatable. It was just fuel. There was no reason to make it sound better. This was the age when most homes were heated by heating oil, or wood, or coal even!
People didn't get "triggered" back then, not in the 1950s or whatever. No one really cared except in the most extreme of cases. The earliest marketing concern over a name I know of, is "canola" oil, created by Canadian research programs, first on market I believe in the 70s, which is rapeseed oil.
(Rapeseed oil was added to cattle feed before this, but was considered too bitter for people until processing improvements were developed.)
It was thought that women would associate rapeseed with rape, and not buy it. This was in North America, the rest of the world generally, at the time, just called it rapeseed oil.
also toxic
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with gasoline. Other languages, e.g. Russian, which don’t use the word gasoline also call it natural gas (coming from nature). This extra confusion is a late American thing.
I tend to agree with this - there is a dichotomy here, but it is "natural" vs. "supernatural" - not "natural" vs "synthetic". I think it would be fine if for most cases we simply said "man-made" vs "not man-made" as it succinctly describes the dichotomy we're aiming for.
The "greenwashing" here is that you _could_ call anything that's not a ghost or a god "natural" by a certain definition...
Sure, if you completely disregard the context. “Natural” when talking in the context of humans is “nature vs man”.
A beaver dam is nature. The Hoover dam is man-made. If you want to red herring you could say “but man is part of nature” - there’s no point to doing so other than to argue semantics, but you could.
"Naturally occurring gas" does not magically transform itself into energy. The process along the way from being a resource to being usable as energy is usually anything other than "natural" and "green."
It would be far better if we called it methane, but that's not really accurate either. It might contain ethane, propane, butane pentane and hexane. A lot of that stuff is condensed out before use, but not all.
Having a few terms like “natural gas” as a way to counteract people’s perceptions of the niceness of “natural” isn’t so bad.
Gas can be created by many other means (combustion, chemistry, etc). Natural gas means it's gas that is found "as is" without any kind of synthesis.