Can We Help Biden to Help Himself by Ending This LNG Buildout?

We are, I think, edging towards a win on LNG exports, which would be a very good thing: a pause on the biggest fossil fuel expansion plan on earth. The question, I think, is if it will be the kind of win that makes it easier to boost the beleaguered presidential campaign of Joe Biden—which has got to be a central focus for anyone worried about the planet’s (and our democracy’s) future. And that is largely up to the White House.

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When I say I think we’ll win, it’s not because of any inside information; it’s because the logic of this campaign—waged for lonely years by wonderful frontline leaders along the Gulf of Mexico—has unfolded so powerfully in the last few months.

If the administration does announce a pause on new export licenses, it will be a mighty win. But how they do it will be crucial, because this also represents a chance to reposition the president going into an election year.

First, campaigners managed to finally comprehend and publicize the lunatic scale of this buildout. People living nearby these enormous facilities have always known they were enormous, but in recent months the rest of us have gotten a much better idea of the scale. So much fracked gas is now pouring out through the Gulf that it wipes out the gains under the president’s IRA clean energy plans; indeed, it wipes out all the emission reductions made since the turn of the century. As hundreds of top climate scientists pointed out this week, if the buildout keeps going as industry intends—and so far the Trump and Biden administrations have granted them every permit they’ve asked far—U.S. LNG exports will eventually account for more greenhouse gas emissions than every car and home and factory in Europe.

Second, new data has given that sense of scale extra heft: above all, Bob Howarth, the Cornell professor who is the planetary authority on methane, pubished new research demonstrating that huge amounts of LNG leak out to the atmosphere during shipping, making it far far worse for the climate even than coal.

Third, new data has demonstrated that these exports raise the price of natural gas for those Americans who still depend on it for cooking and heating—which probably also explains the remarkable polling data showing just how opposed Americans are to fracking the country and then sending the resulting gas off to Asia.

Fourth, more new data has demonstrated that we’re already supplying more than enough to make Europe whole against the cutoff of Russian supplies in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

And fifth—newest and most important of all—America joined 200 other nations earlier this month in Dubai in signing an accord promising that we would “transition away from fossil fuels.”

There is no possible way to read those words and conclude that we should further expand the already world-leading American export machine for fossil fuels. So I would bet that sometime soon—probably before planned civil disobedience outside the Department of Energy in early February—the administration will announce that it’s time to review the process for granting those export licenses. The DOE, to its shame, is still using a 2014 formula to decide if those export licenses are in “the public interest.” Since 2014 the price of renewable energy has dropped 90 percent and the planet’s temperature has spiked; it’s indefensible intellectually or morally to pretend we should just carry on as before.

If the administration does announce a pause on new export licenses, it will be a mighty win. But how they do it will be crucial, because this also represents a chance to reposition the president going into an election year.

Too often, Democratic White Houses try to minimize this sort of thing. Think Friday afternoon press release from the DOE with hard-to-parse language, coupled with some concessions to the fossil fuel industry on something else, and some guidance to reporters that it’s not that big a deal. (GOP White Houses never do this—they happily reward their loyal base). When the Obama administration finally decided to block the Keystone Pipeline, for instance, it came with a short and condescending speech from the president saying that this victory, which hundreds of thousands had spent years fighting for, was not that big a deal. We took the win and didn’t complain—but by then, of course, Obama was in his second term.

Biden still has to win that second term, and we have to help him; if we don’t, then victory on this and anything else will evaporate when Trump (or for that matter Nikki Haley) take over in a year. And that second term is far from guaranteed—Biden is tied or worse in the polls, and a big reason is discouragement among people who voted for him last time, especially young people.

If I were the administration, here’s how I’d do it.

Some of that is perhaps unfair; Biden’s gotten less credit than he should for the IRA, which is the most important boost for clean energy that any president—probably any world leader—has ever provided. But to get it (basically to woo Joe Manchin) Biden abandoned his clear campaign promises around dirty energy. And even after Manchin had signed off, Biden made one of the big political mistakes of his term, permitting the Willow oil complex in Alaska. Because the president and many of his advisors are, well, old, they missed the massive campaign that had developed on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and hence failed to anticipate just how much they would disappoint young voters.

But now they’ve been given another chance. TikTok has been afire again, this time around LNG exports. The emails and petitions have flowed in again—hundreds of thousands of people pleading with him to do the right thing. This time even tv is noticing—I’ve been on the cable shows a bunch the past few weeks, but not as often as frontline leaders like Roishetta Ozane, who can make the case in the clearest and most powerful terms.

If the president does the right thing in the right spirit on LNG exports, he’ll be able to say he’s done more than president before him not just on clean energy but also on the dirty stuff.

So if I were the administration, here’s how I’d do it. I’d have Biden—or, at the very least, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who did point out last week that she wouldn’t want to live next to a refinery—make the announcement publicly and proudly, joined on the stage by Ozane, and James Hiatt, and Travis Dardar, and other heroes from the Gulf. I’d say, to them, :

“We can’t, by law, reject particular proposals that aren’t yet before us—the enormous CP2 terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, for instance. But we can halt this whole process in its tracks, and go back to the drawing board to figure out what ‘the public interest’ actually means on this overheating planet. That will take us a few years; in the meantime, we won’t be approving yet more of this infrastructure.”

and then, were I the president or the energy secretary (and thank heaven I’m not), I would turn to the cameras and say:

“In December in Dubai we signed a solemn promise to transition off fossil fuels. We can’t do that immediately—we know that many Americans will rely on oil and gas for years to come. Indeed, one reason for our action today is to end the price gouging that comes with these exports. But we can, and today we are, sending a signal to the rest of the world that we take seriously this transition. We won’t be growing our exports; as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas we will instead start to rein in that endless growth. After the hottest year in human history it’s what we must do for the people who will inherit this earth.”

That would, of course, anger the oil industry, and it would probably annoy the small slice of the labor movement that works on building these monstrosities. But it would be all-in on climate, in the same way that Biden went all-in for labor when he walked that UAW picket line in Michigan this fall. And by going all-in, it would galvanize the environmental movement. That movement is going to support the president anyway—the big groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters have already announced their endorsements, and for what it’s worth so have I.

But that’s very different from charging people up, especially young people; politicians realize that, especially ones who are closer to the ground, which is why dozens signed on to a letter this week demanding action. Here’s Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, who won reelection on the backs of energized young climate voters, writing in the Boston Globe this week, and modeling the kind of language we need to hear from the president: “American fossil fuel companies continue to choose profits over people. They want to inject these fossil fuel exports into the international market for their own benefit, while treating investors, national security, American customers, community health, and our climate as collateral damage.”

If the president does the right thing in the right spirit on LNG exports, he’ll be able to say he’s done more than president before him not just on clean energy but also on the dirty stuff. He’ll be the leader he promised to be.