The Australian Gas Infrastructure Group breached the Greenwashing Code with a social media post claiming electric cooktops are vastly more expensive and more emissions intensive than cooking with gas, Australia’s advertising regulator has ruled.
Renew Economy reported in January the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG), which owns two of Victoria’s three gas networks and several in other states, had shared the post to professional networking website LinkedIn, raising questions about whether it was “potentially misleading”.
The AGIG post did not make statements directly about induction cooktops, but makes repeated comparisons between gas cooktops and other competing products such as mixed gas and induction cooktops, and old-style electric coil and plate cooktops.
In a 5 March decision published online this week, the Ad Standards Community Panel found the advertisement broke three sections of the Environmental Claims Code, saying the advertisement was misleading or deceptive, overstated its claims and could not be verified or substantiated by an average viewer.
“The Panel considered that the Environmental Claims in the advertisement were not substantiated and verifiable and did not include sufficient detail to allow evaluation of the claim,” it said.
The decision follows a detailed complaint filed by the Environment Defenders Office on behalf of climate advocacy group CommsDeclare alleging AGIG had omitted renewable energy in its calculations, ignored methane emissions and failed to disclose a relationship between burning gas and health concerns.
As a greenhouse gas, methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide when averaged over 20 years.
Belinda Noble, founder of Comms Declare described the ad itself as not “a compelling piece of content” but said the ruling was important as it would “hopefully put an end to tricky claims using tricky information”.
“What Ad Standards found is that AGIG couldn’t sufficiently back up the claim that gas had less climate pollution than electric stovetops. They also acknowledged the average person wouldn’t have enough information to check the truth of the claims,” Noble said.
“It shows advertisers must be clearer and not use technical jargon and not use creative emissions accounting.”
Noble said the advert should be understood in the context of a broader industry campaign to stop the Victorian government’s efforts to phaseout gas in the home.
“This is all about keeping gas in the home and giving people an excuse to keep gas despite the overwhelming evidence that it’s bad for the climate,” she said.
Australian Gas Networks (AGN), which is owned by AGIG, provided a similarly detailed response to the complaint that offered several calculations to justify its figures, but did not appear to replicate those contained in the ad.
The company also denied there was any relationship between burning gas in the home and a negative impact on health.
It said the studies referred to by CommsDeclare were performed in the US where different regulations are in force, meaning the “potential health risks of gas cooktops in Australia are not proven and it was not necessary or appropriate to refer to such claims”.
“We do not consider there is proven evidence of such health risks in Australia and it was not considered relevant or appropriate to refer to such potential risks in the circumstances,” they said.
Following the decision, AGN said it stood by its advert but agreed to take the post down.
“As identified in our response to the complaint, we do not consider the post to be misleading or deceiving and stand by the accuracy of the information provided,” they said.
“We note that figures relating to appliances, emissions and costs need to take into account a variety of factors that unfortunately are not available in a single source and often require analysis to provide customers with easily understandable information.”
The Ad Standards panel declined to make a decision about the health effects of burning gas and focussed instead on the environmental claims made.
Australia’s gas industry first acknowledged that burning gas in the home could affect human health in 1972.
The Australian Gas Association’s Chief Technical Officer, Hanns Hartmann, published an article that year in the Australian Gas Journal, acknowledging that “nitric oxide (NO) is not very toxic, but in air it gradually turns into nitrogen dioxide (No) which is far more objectionable”.
“General air quality standards are much lower and have tended to be further reduced as evidence has recently come to light which shows that low levels of nitrogen oxides have deleterious effects on the physical performance of healthy individuals,” Hartmann wrote.
The journal was distributed widely across the Australian gas industry.
