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"Every dollar invested in unnecessary, harmful, and expensive LNG infrastructure costs us double—first, by our failure to invest instead in secure, abundant, and cheap renewable energies, and second, by locking in higher greenhouse gas emissions."
With Climate Week underway in New York City, 106 lawmakers from the United States and around the world on Monday urged the Biden administration to reject new liquefied natural gas export permits, stressing that they "are not in the U.S. public interest or necessary for the national or energy security of our allies."
Rejecting new permits, they wrote, "will help protect communities from the environmental harm that fossil gas causes; promote global energy security and encourage investment and trade in clean energy technologies; and help our nations satisfy both national and global climate commitments, including those made at the 2023 U.N. climate change conference COP28 in Dubai."
The letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was led by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Congresswoman Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), and Lisa Badum, a Greens member of Germany's Bundestag. Along with other American and German lawmakers, it's signed by members of the European Parliament and legislatures in over a dozen other countries.
"Curtailing U.S. LNG export activity will send a strong global signal in favor of new investments in renewable energy."
They explained that in January, the Biden administration paused new export authorizations for liquefied natural gas (LNG) to countries that don't have free trade agreements with the United States, and although a recent federal court ruling blocked the policy, "that misguided decision does not force any immediate export project approvals, prevent the Department of Energy (DOE) from updating its environmental and economic analyses, or impact the factors that DOE already considers in its application review process."
"Far from being a clean 'bridge' fuel, LNG causes significant environmental harm," the lawmakers declared, highlighting the impacts of gas on not only the global climate but also the health of people exposed to nearby hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations and infrastructure such as processing plants, import facilities, export terminals, and pipelines.
"In addition to the environmental and health benefits, limiting U.S. LNG exports will actually support global energy security, not jeopardize it," they wrote. "Curtailing U.S. LNG export activity will send a strong global signal in favor of new investments in renewable energy, discouraging overinvestment in a volatile and high-priced fossil fuel."
The letter notes that the United States is "the world's largest exporter of LNG" and warns that such exports "affect the world's regions in various ways, but uniformly, they are negative," with sections on Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
"Every dollar invested in unnecessary, harmful, and expensive LNG infrastructure costs us double—first, by our failure to invest instead in secure, abundant, and cheap renewable energies, and second, by locking in higher greenhouse gas emissions, with attendant future climate damage," the letter emphasizes. "Continued reliance on LNG means more harm to frontline communities and the environment from extracting, transporting, and shipping fossil gas around the world."
The lawmakers' letter follows one that a coalition of more than 250 climate, environmental, and frontline groups sent to Biden and Granholm earlier this month—during the warmest summer on record and what is on track to be the hottest year on record.
"We are on the verge of seeing global average temperatures exceed 1.5°C warming above preindustrial temperatures, failing the internationally agreed upon goal of the Paris agreement and crossing the threshold upon which ever more catastrophic effects of climate change begin," the green groups wrote. "The only way world leaders can avoid this moral and political failure is to work together to end fossil fuel production."
"The science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals," said one campaigner.
More than 125 climate, environmental, and health scientists and researchers on Thursday implored the Biden administration to "follow legitimate science and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs," pointing to a new study showing liquefied natural gas has a 33% greater greenhouse gas footprint than coal.
"As U.S. scientists and researchers we are closely following efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Treasury to develop greenhouse gas analyses of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and hydrogen, and implore you to use the best available science when conducting this analysis," the scientists wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
"The stakes could not be higher," the letter asserts. "The choices that you make relating to modeling assumptions for the heat-trapping potential of natural gas will determine if the federal government will make decisions based on climate science or wishful thinking."
The scientists continued:
The main constituent in natural gas is methane, a powerful climate-disrupting pollutant that traps more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years, the relevant timeframe in which we must act. We agree with President [Joe] Biden's declaration to world leaders that this is the decisive decade. As the climate crisis becomes more urgent, we are rapidly approaching planetary thresholds that, once breached, cannot be reversed.
The fossil fuel industry wants you to distort the scientific evidence and asserts, falsely, that decisions to expand natural gas production and consumption are consistent with U.S. and global climate goals. They are advocating for flawed modeling assumptions that would hide the true climate impact of gas. It is imperative that the Departments of Energy and Treasury reject these efforts.
The letter's signers cite a study published this month by Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth which—when properly accounting for LNG's full life cycle, including extraction, liquefaction, transportation, and end-source combustion—found that the fracked gas has a 33% greater greenhouse emissions impact than coal.
"An abundance of scientific evidence now shows that natural gas is at least as damaging to the climate as coal and may be worse due to inevitable leaks and disproves the claim that natural gas can serve as a 'bridge fuel' while renewable energy sources ramp up," the scientists wrote.
Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that "the science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals."
"This administration must ignore industry propaganda, follow legitimate science, and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs like LNG exports and gas-sourced hydrogen," Walsh added.
Noting that "over 20 years, methane is a far more powerful climate villain than ever previously appreciated," Science & Environmental Health Network senior scientist Sandra Steingraber said that "methane is the Houdini of greenhouse gasses, escaping into the atmosphere from all parts of the natural gas system at a pace that far exceeds earlier estimates."
"Taken together, these findings mean that the stakes for the modeling assumptions chosen for estimating the climate impacts of LNG and hydrogen fuels could not be higher," Steingraber stressed. "It's imperative that our Departments of Energy and Treasury base their climate modeling assumptions on the abundance of scientific evidence and not the distorted claims and wishful thinking of the fossil fuel industry."
Despite campaign pledges to center climate action—including by banning new fossil fuel drilling on public lands—Biden oversaw the approval of more new permits for drilling on public land during his first two years in office than former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, did in 2017 and 2018.
The Biden administration has also held fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and has approved the highly controversial Willow project and Mountain Valley Pipeline. Biden also increased liquefied natural gas production and export before pausing LNG exports earlier this year.
Despite the pause—which activists are calling on the Biden administration to make permanent—the president has also overseen what climate defenders have called a "staggering" LNG expansion, including Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and more than a dozen other projects that, if all completed, would make U.S. exported LNG emissions higher than the European Union's combined greenhouse gas footprint.
"We deserve a future that protects our families and our planet, not one that fuels further destruction," one frontline advocate said.
A coalition of more than 250 climate, environmental, and frontline community organizations on Monday urged U.S. President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to reject all requests for approval to export liquefied natural gas to non-fair trade agreement countries.
The demand came in the form of a letter following a recent ruling by Trump-appointed District Judge James D. Cain Jr. to lift a pause that Biden's Department of Energy had placed on new LNG export approvals while it updates the criteria it uses to determine whether these exports are in the public interest. It also comes a week after the DOE signed off on the export of LNG from an offshore New Fortress Energy plant near Altamira, Mexico.
"After the hottest summer on record, on track to be the hottest year, it's clear that expanding climate-heating gas exports is not in the public interest," Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said in a statement. "There's no reason on Earth to approve more LNG exports that lock in decades of damage to the climate, human communities, and imperiled species like Rice's whales. The Department of Energy must reject every single one."
"With climate-induced disasters becoming a regular part of our lives, it's hard to understand how anyone can prioritize fossil gas exports over our health and safety."
The Center for Biological Diversity is one of the many signatories of Monday's letter, backed by dozens of large national groups as well as scores of smaller, more local organizations. Other groups include Earthworks, Food and Water Watch, Oil Change International, the Sunrise Movement, Public Citizen, several branches of 350.org and Extinction Rebellion, Port Arthur Community Action Network, and the Vessel Project of Louisiana.
In the letter, the groups applauded the administration for instituting the pause on approvals in the first place and for acknowledging that the data it used to determine whether exports were in the public interest was "outdated and insufficient."
Since the court ruling leaves the department without a deadline for updating its data, the groups urged the DOE "to continue seeking the best available information on the impact of LNG exports on the public, the environment, and economy."
"When the department completes its analyses, the weight of evidence will make it clear that new LNG exports are not in the public interest and that all pending applications to export LNG must be rejected," the groups wrote.
With the world "on the verge" of exceeding the 1.5°C limit enshrined in the 2015 Paris agreement, the coalition warned against new infrastructure and export policies that will only exacerbate the global emissions crisis at a critical moment in history.
"The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next year, and then steeply decline, for our planet to have the best chance of avoiding this fate," the letter reads. "The only way world leaders can avoid this moral and political failure is to work together to end fossil fuel production."
This goal has been hampered by the record rise in U.S. gas production facilitated by the fracking boom. Whereas global gas production had been predicted to be on the wane, it is now expanding instead. At the same time, new research has shown that, due to methane leaks, gas is not a "bridge fuel" to cleaner energy but in fact just as detrimental to the climate as coal.
Another major concern raised by LNG opponents is the local pollution generated by export facilities. Many of these new facilities are located in, under construction in, or slated for the Gulf South, which is already overburdened by toxic emissions from oil, gas, and petrochemical production.
"As a mom living in a community surrounded by industry, I feel the weight of every decision made about our environment," Vessel Project founder and director Roishetta Ozane said in a statement. "With climate-induced disasters becoming a regular part of our lives, it's hard to understand how anyone can prioritize fossil gas exports over our health and safety. The Department of Energy has the power to reject these LNG export permits, and it's crucial they do so. We deserve a future that protects our families and our planet, not one that fuels further destruction."
The letter suggests the broad environmental movement, both at the local level and nationally, is united behind the demand to halt the LNG buildout as the groups applauded Biden's efforts to curb exports thus far but also asked him to go further.
"We initially urged you to pause approvals of LNG exports," they wrote to Biden and Granholm, "we fiercely celebrated and defended your decision to do so in January, and now we write to let you know we continue to stand behind you as we insist that you take the next step of stopping new LNG exports."