TV faces play key role in propane industry’s fight
For do-it-yourself enthusiasts, Matt Blashaw is a familiar face, judging bathroom remodels or planning surprise home makeovers on popular cable television shows.
Blashaw also has an unusually strong opinion about how Americans should heat their homes: by burning propane, or liquid petroleum gas.
“When I think of winter, I think of being inside. I think of cooking with the family, of being by a roaring fire — and with propane, that is all possible,” he said on a segment of the CBS affiliate WCIA, calling in from his bright kitchen. “That’s why we call it an energy source for everyone.”
Less well known is the fact that Blashaw is paid by a fossil fuel industry group that has been running a furtive campaign against government efforts to move heating away from oil and gas toward electricity made from wind, solar and other cleaner sources.
The Propane Education and Research Council, or PERC, which is funded by propane providers across the country, has spent millions of dollars on “provocative anti-electrification messaging” for TV, print and social media, using influencers like Blashaw, according to the group’s internal documents viewed by The New York Times.
As a federally sanctioned trade association, PERC is allowed to collect fees on propane sales, which helps fund its marketing campaigns. But according to the law that created this system, that money is supposed to be used for things like research and safety.
In 2023, the organization plans to spend $13 million on its anti-electrification campaign, including $600,000 on “influencers” like Blashaw, according to the documents, which were obtained from PERC’s website as well as a public records request by the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-renewables group.
The overwhelming majority of scientists around the globe agree that the burning of coal, gas and oil produces greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet. Scientists commissioned by the United Nations have warned that nations must deeply and quickly cut those emissions to avoid a catastrophic escalation of deadly flooding, heat waves, drought and species extinction.
The propane industry sees things differently. It needs to “combat the growing narrative that fossil fuel combustion is the main cause of climate change, and that propane is a dirty fossil fuel,” Stuart Weidie, chair and chief executive of North Carolina propane company Blossman Gas, told the propane council at a February 2021 meeting.
“The movement to electrify everything is rapidly gaining momentum, and poses a substantial threat to the sustainability of our industry,” he said, according to meeting minutes.
Erin Hatcher, who heads communications at PERC, said its campaign “asserts propane’s role in a clean energy future” and “promotes the advantages of a wide path to decarbonization.” Influencers like Blashaw, she said, “use and specify propane in their construction projects and are very familiar with propane’s advantages.” Hatcher would not say how much her group has paid Blashaw.
Weidie said his fundamental belief in the importance of a low-carbon future had been “lost in out-of-context conversation.” He said he believed electrification was set to “play a big role but is not the only answer,” and that propane was “a great energy for generations to come.”
Blashaw referred questions to PERC.
Most American homes are heated by natural gas or oil. But in states where the energy grid is increasingly powered by wind, solar and other renewables, electric heat pumps are fast becoming a lower-carbon alternative to gas and oil. They heat as well as cool.
Researchers at Princeton University found that for the United States to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050, nearly one-quarter of American homes would need to switch to heat pumps. That’s double the number today.
Congress has approved billions of dollars to help Americans electrify buildings, including tax credits for heat pumps, as part of the major climate law passed last summer.
But such a shift would reduce demand for propane, which is used in 50 million American homes, in furnaces, stoves, fireplaces and a range of appliances, according to the National Propane Gas Association. Propane, like natural gas, doesn’t emit as much planet-warming greenhouse gases as coal, gasoline or diesel. But it’s still derived from fossil fuels.
“If you’re burning gas to heat your house anywhere in a northern climate, it’s a huge amount of emissions, probably the largest part of your emissions,” said Forrest
Meggers, an associate professor at Princeton.
The propane industry’s anti-electrification campaign has been particularly well funded because of PERC’s status as a federally sanctioned trade association.
A 1996 law authorized the creation of PERC and allowed it to collect a halfcent fee on every gallon of propane it sells, an example of what is known as a federal “checkoff program” designed to support specific industry sectors, typically agricultural commodities. Those fees are supposed to be used for safety and consumer education, training, or research and development projects.
But ambiguous language in the original bill, together with limited oversight by the Department of Energy, has meant the group has diverted millions of dollars from the fee toward marketing, including its anti-electrification campaigns. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has repeatedly raised concerns that PERC has been misusing the funds it raises from the fee, which comes to more than $40 million a year, and criticized lax government oversight.
PERC has also funded groups working on campaigns in response to federal and state climate policies, possibly violating a provision in the 1996 law that bans the organization from lobbying, the GAO has warned.
In 2022, for example, PERC committed nearly $900,000 to a New York propane industry group to address the “massive challenge from well-funded efforts to electrify the entire state” — namely, to fight policies stemming from New York’s 2019 climate law which, among other goals, aims to ensure that buildings and vehicles stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2040.
New York had passed “the most radical climate change legislation in the country” and propane was “marked for extinction, along with natural gas, heating oil and gasoline,” Rich Goldberg, whose public relations firm led the effort, warned last year in a blog post. The propane industry needed to run an “aggressive, fuel-neutral campaign aimed at slowing down the CLCPA electrification freight train,” he said, referring to New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
On social media and an opposition website, the local New York Propane Gas Association panned heat pumps as cripplingly expensive and unreliable, especially in cold climates, urging residents to oppose the state’s climate plans. The group also lobbied against a state carbon tax, which failed to advance.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., a strong advocate for climate action, said he would be “requesting that the Department of Energy exercise its statutory oversight to ensure that PERC complies with the law and spends its funds appropriately.”
The Energy Department “takes seriously any allegations that an entity associated with the department may be conducting activities outside the scope of its congressional authorization,” spokesperson Charisma Troiano said in a statement. She said DOE would “work with our congressional partners to examine these allegations.”
She added that the department was requesting additional information after PERC submitted a budget in December 2022 which only provided “basic information on the council’s activities.”
The New York Propane Gas Association did not provide comment.