The Rockefeller playbook is becoming all too predictable. The Center for Climate Integrity just released another sprawling report accusing the energy industry of decades of deception, this time claiming that the environmental benefits of natural gas amount to a 50 year “fraud.”
The report makes the bogus – and eerily familiar – allegation that natural gas companies knowingly manufactured the fuel’s environmental reputation while concealing information about methane emissions.
That premise is easily debunked. More importantly, the report follows a well-established strategy from CCI.
As we have documented extensively on EID, the Rockefeller-backed group exists solely to convince public officials to bring climate cases, all of which have failed to deliver in court.
Similarly, activists have attempted the “[insert industry] knew” argument many times – natural gas is just their next moving target.
Against that backdrop, this report looks less like an objective history of methane science and more like another blueprint to generate headlines, recruit plaintiffs and lay the groundwork for the next round of frivolous lawsuits.
CCI Leaves Readers Without the Full Methane Picture
Any serious conversation about methane should begin with context, which CCI’s report largely neglects.
CCI briefly acknowledges historical research that states natural sources were responsible for the largest share of methane detected in the atmosphere, but never gives readers a complete picture of the global methane budget. Instead, it generally introduces wetlands, agriculture and other methane sources only when criticizing the industry for discussing them.
That is a major omission.
EPA estimates that human activity accounts for approximately 50 to 65 percent of total global methane emissions, meaning natural sources account for roughly 35 to 50 percent. Wetlands are the largest natural methane source, while termites, oceans, sediments, wildfires and other naturally occurring processes also contribute methane to the atmosphere.
EPA’s 2023 inventory identifies natural gas and petroleum systems as accounting for about 28 percent of methane emissions, not the entire atmospheric methane burden as CCI’s “fraud” report continuously implies.
Those distinctions matter because CCI repeatedly blurs total atmospheric methane concentrations, annual methane emissions from all sources, and emissions specifically associated with natural gas infrastructure. By failing to quantify how these measures relate, or how much natural gas actually contributes, CCI leaves readers with a misleading impression.
The report also gives little attention to the progress that has occurred alongside rising natural gas production. Total U.S. methane emissions declined approximately 20 percent between 1990 and 2023. Methane emissions from natural gas systems fell 26 percent over that period, according to EPA, largely because of reductions from distribution, transmission and storage.
Meanwhile, annual natural gas production increased from roughly 17.8 trillion cubic feet in 1990 to approximately 37.7 trillion cubic feet in 2024.
In other words, production more than doubled while national methane emissions declined. That inconvenient fact doesn’t fit CCI’s one-dimensional narrative.
Natural Gas’s Environmental Benefits Are Clear
CCI treats the description of natural gas as “clean” or “cleaner” almost entirely as a public-relations invention, despite extensive evidence to the contrary.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) describes natural gas as an efficient, relatively clean-burning and economical energy source. EIA also notes that its use produces fewer emissions of nearly all conventional air pollutants and less carbon dioxide per unit of energy than other major combustible fuels.
Between 2005 and 2019, U.S. power sector carbon dioxide emissions declined 32 percent. EIA attributed approximately 65 percent of that decline to the increased use of natural gas generation.
Natural gas also provides the flexibility needed for renewables, which CCI also neglects to fully explain. Wind and solar generation vary with weather and time of day, while natural gas facilities can increase or decrease output quickly as electricity demand and renewable production change. EIA themselves say natural gas is increasingly used to balance intermittent wind and solar generation.
That role will become even more important as electricity demand rises in the era of AI. The Department of Energy estimates that AI data centers could consume between 6.7 and 12 percent of U.S. electricity by 2028 and notes that these facilities require firm, continuous power, many of which will require natural gas.
Those benefits do not require claiming that natural gas is emissions free – nothing is. The relevant question is whether natural gas provides measurable environmental, reliability, affordability and security benefits. The evidence overwhelmingly says yes.
CCI’s nonsensical “fraud” narrative depends on conveniently erasing that distinction.
The Same Activist Playbook
The rollout of the report – along with a poll from Data for Progress that ironically showed broad bipartisan support for natural gas – is all too familiar:
CCI has used this playbook before. Its 2024 plastics recycling report was followed by lawsuits in California that echoed many of the same themes and allegations advanced by CCI just several months prior.
Given the Rockefeller Family Fund ultimately took credit for the state’s plastics case in California, a more interesting question is whether CCI’s latest report is laying the groundwork for the next round of climate lawsuits.
BOTTOM LINE: CCI’s report is the latest chapter in a long-running Rockefeller-backed campaign to build legal and political cases against American energy producers. Like earlier activist reports, it relies on selective history, missing context and the omission of inconvenient facts that undermine its litigation narrative.
