The Natural Gas Detour

“Now you’re cooking with gas.”

It sounds like folk wisdom, something your grandfather said. It was a sales line. In the 1930s, with electric ranges starting to compete for American kitchens, an executive at the American Gas Association came up with the phrase. By most accounts it was planted with the writers for Bob Hope, who worked it into his routines in the 1940s, and from there into the language.

Ninety years later the industry was still at it. In 2020, Mother Jones reported that gas trade groups had been paying Instagram influencers since at least 2018 to post about how much they loved cooking on gas, part of a campaign aimed at millennials called “Natural Gas Genius.”

Gas has the best marketing in American energy. To understand why that matters, start with the fuel it replaced.

Nobody’s Building Coal

The coal part of the story is simple. Coal is a dirty solid fuel that needs mines, trains, giant piles, dust control, ash ponds, lots of water, and plants that ramp up and down slowly. It was a fantastic tool for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Keeping some existing plants running a while longer can make sense; coal’s share of generation even ticked up in 2025 when gas got pricier. But almost nobody is building new ones. Coal barely registers in what developers plan to add in 2026, even in coal country.

And here’s the part a lot of clean-energy advocates don’t like to say out loud: natural gas is a big reason coal lost. The fracking boom made gas cheap, and utilities switched. In 2005, coal made half of America’s electricity. By 2019 it was down to 23 percent, and gas had doubled from 19 to 38 percent. Over the same period, carbon dioxide from the power sector fell 32 percent, and the EIA attributes about two-thirds of that drop to the switch from coal to gas.

That’s a real accomplishment. Gas plants also do something solar can’t do on its own: turn on when they’re told to. Any serious plan for the grid has a role for that, at least for a while.

So the question isn’t whether gas did anything useful. It did. The question is whether the “bridge” ever ends.

The Word “Natural”

Start with the name, because it’s doing a lot of work.

“Natural gas” wasn’t invented by a PR firm. In the 1800s, American cities were lit by gas manufactured from coal; “natural” gas was the stuff that came out of the ground already made. But a name that started as a description now works as a sales pitch. It makes a fossil fuel sound like it wandered gently out of a meadow.

The gas is mostly methane. Researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication tested what Americans think when they hear different names for the same fuel. “Natural gas” brought to mind words like clean, energy, and cooking, and got the warmest reaction of any name tested. “Methane gas” brought to mind cows, greenhouse gases, and climate change, and got among the coldest. Same molecule.

That matters because the climate case for gas depends almost entirely on keeping the methane inside the pipes.

The Leak Problem

Burned in a power plant, gas puts out roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal for the same electricity. That’s the whole basis for calling it a bridge. But unburned methane that escapes into the air is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide: about 80 times stronger over its first 20 years, and about 30 times over a century, according to the UN’s climate science panel.

Gas systems leak. Wells, processing plants, compressor stations, pipelines, and the meters on the side of buildings all lose some. A 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences worked out that new gas plants beat new coal plants on climate from day one as long as total leakage stays below about 3.2 percent of production.

So how much leaks? For years, the EPA’s official inventory implied something around 1.4 percent. Then researchers started measuring. A 2018 study in Science, built on direct measurements across the supply chain, put U.S. leakage at 2.3 percent, about 60 percent higher than the EPA’s figure. A 2024 study in Nature, based on nearly a million aerial measurements over six major oil and gas regions, found an average of about 2.4 percent in the regions it covered, well above the official estimates, with some regions higher still.

That doesn’t mean gas is as bad as coal on average. It means the advantage is a lot smaller than the brochure said, it depends on leak rates nobody was measuring well, and in the leakiest places it can come close to disappearing. The bridge was sold with a very convenient blind spot.

The Bridge That Stayed

The bigger problem is economic, not chemical.

When you build a gas plant, a pipeline, or an export terminal, the spreadsheet doesn’t say “thank you for using this temporary bridge, please retire me early.” It says: run me for 40 years, expand me, find more demand, and defend me in the legislature. A billion-dollar asset is a lobbyist made of concrete.

Look at exports. In 2023 the United States became the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and in 2025 its LNG exports grew another 26 percent, to about 15 billion cubic feet a day. That turns “cheap domestic gas” from a household story into a global commodity business, and global commodity businesses import global prices. When the Biden administration’s Department of Energy studied the question in 2024, it found that unlimited LNG exports could raise wholesale U.S. gas prices by more than 30 percent by 2050 and cost the average household more than $100 a year. (The next administration’s DOE disputes that analysis, and export approvals resumed.) The gas is American. The price is increasingly tied to what buyers in Europe and Asia will pay for it.

That’s also why gas is so politically flexible. To conservatives, it’s domestic energy and jobs. To moderate Democrats, it was the bridge fuel. To utilities, it’s dispatchable capacity. To exporters, it’s a growth market. It gets to sound like pragmatism in every accent.

Not Even Fast Anymore

The bridge-fuel story didn’t see this coming: gas isn’t even quick to build anymore.

With data centers and factories asking for huge amounts of new power, the world’s gas-turbine makers are sold out. By mid-2026, GE Vernova, the largest, had a gas backlog and reservations of 116 gigawatts and was taking reservations for turbines to be delivered in 2031. NextEra, one of the country’s biggest power companies, said in 2025 that the cost of building a new gas plant had roughly tripled since 2022, to about $2,400 per kilowatt, and that new gas wouldn’t arrive at scale until 2030 or later. (NextEra also builds more wind and solar than anyone, so weigh the source. But a separate 2025 analysis by the research group GridLab found recent combined-cycle projects routinely reporting costs of $2,000 per kilowatt or more.)

It’s part of why only about 7 percent of the capacity planned for 2026 is gas, while solar and batteries are almost 80 percent. When a utility needs power within two years, panels and batteries are what it can actually get.

What Gas Is Actually For

None of this makes gas evil. It makes it a tool. Properly winterized, it’s useful backup on cold, still nights. It kept the lights on while coal retired. It will be part of the grid for a long time.

But “useful for a while” doesn’t mean “build as much as possible forever.” When an incumbent fuel calls itself the practical compromise, ask what it’s compromising you into. Are you solving a grid problem, or building an asset that will lobby against the solution later?

Once you’ve seen how much work one friendly adjective can do, the panic over solar and land starts to look very selective. If Americans are suddenly worried about how land gets used, great. Let’s talk about land.