{"id":3081,"date":"2020-12-20T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-12-20T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=141461"},"modified":"2020-12-20T11:00:05","modified_gmt":"2020-12-20T11:00:05","slug":"these-ladies-love-natural-gas-too-bad-they-arent-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/20\/these-ladies-love-natural-gas-too-bad-they-arent-real\/","title":{"rendered":"These ladies love natural gas! Too bad they aren\u2019t real."},"content":{"rendered":"
This<\/em> story<\/em><\/a> was originally published by Mother Jones<\/a><\/em> and is reproduced here as part of the<\/em> Climate Desk<\/em><\/a> collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n The website Women for Natural Gas<\/a> is a pink-tinged, fancy-cursive-drenched love letter to the oil and gas industry. A prominently featured promo video shows women in hard hats and on rig sites. \u201cWho\u2019s powering the world? We are!\u201d enthuses the narrator. Viewers can click through to a \u201cHerstory<\/a>\u201d timeline of women working in the oil sector. Another page<\/a>, about the group\u2019s grassroots network of supporters, announces, \u201cWe are women for natural gas,\u201d and shows three professionally dressed ladies alongside their testimonials. There\u2019s a Carey White gushing, \u201cThe abundance of oil and gas in Texas helps keep prices at the pump lower.\u201d One Rebecca Washington raves, \u201cNatural gas is a safe, reliable source of energy that provides countless numbers of jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a catch: The women don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n A few months ago, I received a tip to look into the website\u2019s testimonials \u2014 my tipster suggested that the group was using stock photos to represent the women who had supposedly contributed testimonials about natural gas. A reverse image search revealed that two of the images were indeed stock photos. The third, supposedly of a woman named Carey White, was the professional headshot of Jessi Hempel, a senior editor at-large at LinkedIn. The photo had been published in a brochure when she appeared at a 2020 Tupelo, Mississippi conference for landscape architects.<\/p>\n