A reviewer of Gaslight said, “Mingle tells a very big story by way of a small, precise one.” Why did you choose this particular story and what are its broader implications?
The very big story is that of natural gas. I was drawn to it for two reasons.
One: We’ve been building a huge amount of gas infrastructure in recent decades, but the associated climate, economic and health risks have been woefully under-examined.
Two: Most people don’t know that natural gas is a fossil fuel. And it’s the only fossil fuel that is itself a greenhouse gas. Natural gas is mostly methane, which is responsible for about a third of all global warming to date.
Very few people understand these basic facts. That is not an accident. The gas industry has waged a decades-long campaign to generate positive associations with “natural gas” and sow confusion about its climate impacts. I wanted to bring some clarity to this PR-clouded subject.
The smaller story was that of the rural Virginians who relentlessly fought one fossil gas pipeline — and won. When I began reporting on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in 2019, I was amazed by the tenacity of these people. Some had already spent five years fighting the project. They had upended their lives, left their jobs, put retirement plans on hold. And they had no intention of slowing down. What explained that drive and commitment? I wanted to find out.
Eventually, they won against overwhelming odds. It was the first ever case of a grassroots coalition successfully stopping a large interstate fossil gas pipeline. That is an exceedingly rare event. And a powerful reminder of our collective agency in the face of the climate crisis.
The myth that natural gas is a “bridge fuel” or a clean energy solution is at the heart of this book. Why do you think that idea took hold and has been so seductive to politicians on both sides of the aisle?
Gas is indeed politicians’ favorite fossil fuel, for several reasons. The fracking boom made gas cheap and abundant, and created much-needed jobs in places like Pennsylvania after the recession. But the main selling point is that it produces less carbon dioxide than burning coal to generate electricity. Politicians could point to this and claim that they were prioritizing both the environment and the economy by promoting more gas drilling and gas consumption. Gas let them have their cake and eat it, too.
This “bridge fuel” narrative took hold despite consistent warnings from scientists that building more fossil gas infrastructure could lock in decades of climate-warming pollution. In the late 1980s, just as climate change was entering public consciousness, the gas industry saw an opportunity. They promoted their product as a “bridge fuel” to a low-carbon economy. The idea was that we could just swap gas for coal and keep everyone’s business model intact.
But natural gas only looks cleaner than coal if you ignore all the climate-warming methane that leaks from wells and pipelines and storage facilities. And if you ignore the fact that there are now plenty of other low-cost, truly clean energy technologies like wind, solar, and batteries.
Now we’re seeing that the industry never really intended for gas to be a “temporary” or “bridge” solution. They now use words like “destination fuel” or “forever fuel.” There’s no pretending anymore that they plan to ever get us off the fossil gas “bridge.”
What weaknesses in our government and regulatory system did you uncover while writing Gaslight?
The phrase “asleep at the switch” comes to mind. In most states, gas and power utilities engineer their own incentive structures. They finance the campaigns of lawmakers. Their lobbyists draft bills that are passed by those same lawmakers, which determine how much they can charge for electricity and gas. They use fees paid by their captive customers to run misleading advertising campaigns through industry trade associations overstating the benefits of fossil gas and the risks of renewable energy.
Most Americans would be astonished by just how much political power their gas and electric companies wield.
At the federal level, it’s not much better. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) oversees gas pipelines. Over the past 20 years, FERC has approved 99.5% of all the gas pipeline projects it has considered. FERC is basically a rubber-stamp for the industry.
Tighter regulation of utilities like Dominion offers one of the biggest opportunities to accelerate clean energy progress and climate action. That’s one of the big lessons of this story. The people ultimately took it on themselves to do regulators’ jobs for them: holding powerful companies accountable.
Why do you think that the coalition that fought the pipeline was so broad and diverse? (It wasn’t just environmentalists!) Was this simply a case of NIMBY-ism or was something else going on?
The NIMBY types exited early, after the project route moved away from them. The people who fought longest and hardest were not directly threatened themselves. They kept fighting because they concluded the pipeline didn’t belong in anyone’s backyard. That it simply wasn’t in the public interest. (And now many continue fighting fossil gas projects much further away, such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline).
The anti-ACP coalition eventually became a big tent, bringing together people with widely varying motivations and backgrounds. The ACP struck many rural Virginians as a blatant land grab by a for-profit company, with little benefit for the wider public. Some people’s views evolved over the course of the ACP fight. Not everyone was motivated by climate concerns or fears about locking in fossil fuel development. Plenty were, but plenty weren’t. Maybe they came into the tent for one narrow reason — say, property rights, or fears about local water quality. Over time, and with exposure to their neighbors’ concerns, many discovered lots of other reasons to oppose it. They all somehow found common ground.
There are profound lessons in this story for anyone building a movement, anyone trying to build diverse coalitions in support of clean energy and climate action. In the process of reaching out to your neighbors, you might be surprised. You might find allies where you didn’t think you had any.
What do you hope readers understand after reading Gaslight?
That they have more agency than they realize. That none of this is inevitable. People in the path of the ACP were told over and over again: ‘This is gonna get built. Don’t fight it. You’re wasting your time.’ But it did not get built. Instead, Dominion sold off its gas assets and went all-in on building a huge offshore wind project.
We live in an alternate universe — one that many grassroots groups who fought ACP helped to create.
Finally, I’d like readers to understand the extreme lengths to which some of these powerful companies will go to lock in the status quo. The transition to clean energy won’t happen on its own. It will only happen if ordinary people loudly and persistently demand it.
That’s why I quote Frederick Douglas in the epigraph: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
