The Netherlands state advertising standards board will censure oil companies Shell and Exxon Tuesday for claiming gas is “the cleanest of all fossil fuels” in a “misleading” ad, The Guardian reports.
The Dutch agency has decided against any further penalties because the companies changed the ad weeks earlier. The new ad calls gas “the least polluting fossil fuel” instead.
“This clear ruling by the advertisement standards board is of great importance. Time after time we see how oil and gas companies are misleading citizens and politicians,” the environmental group Friends of Earth Europe’s Paul de Clerk said according to The Guardian. “To prevent catastrophic climate change we need to end the dependency on all fossil fuels – including gas.”
Both of the companies’ claims, the original and the new, are technically correct. Natural gas releases less than half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned and 20 to 30 percent less than oil, according to the International Gas Union.
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