In a landmark opinion in the 2000s, Judge Gladys Kessler said the following of the tobacco industry’s strategy for denying the health harms linked to smoking: “In short, (the companies) have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.”

The same could be said about the gas industry today. Big Tobacco may have invented the playbook, but the fossil fuel industry has adopted it with gusto – down to turning to the same doctors-for-hire employed by Big Tobacco to manufacture doubt around the settled science on health impacts from gas stoves.

Nowhere is this playbook on better display than right here in Oregon. As profiled in a New York Times expose this weekend, our state’s largest gas utility, NW Natural, hired Julie Goodman, a toxicologist with a long career defending polluters, to testify at a November 2022 hearing on gas stove pollution. In her testimony, Goodman downplayed the health risks, without identifying her affiliation to NW Natural.

Around the same time, Goodman’s employer, Gradient Corporation, submitted a letter with misleading claims about gas appliance pollution to the city of Milwaukie. The same letter went out to the city of Eugene and the state Legislature – all with the intent of stymying efforts at the local and the state level to protect communities from the health harms from gas by transitioning new...

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