Excerpt: Northeast Pennsylvania is home to the state’s largest landfill, almost three square kilometres of household and industrial waste, a grey moonscape of trash almost the size of Stanley Park. On the dump’s western corner, not far from the town of Scranton, a column of silver compressors works away, turning the landfill’s methane into “renewable natural gas” by a company owned by BP, formerly British Petroleum.

Despite Fortis’s climate-friendly branding, renewable natural gas emissions impacts can vary. In some cases, Emily Grubert, associate professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, found it can be more polluting than fossil gas. “RNG is not the solution,” she said. “There’s not nearly enough of it. It’s not possible to get to zero emissions using it, and we actually have better alternatives.”