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lng export terminals
Gulf Coast Advocates: 2024 Election Is 'Inflection Point' for Climate Justice
One campaigner called November "a fork in the road for what type of political economy and climate future and racial justice future and public health future we want our federal government to create."
Aug 16, 2024
A second Trump presidency would be a "complete disaster" for the global climate and for Gulf Coast communities bearing the brunt of the buildout of liquefied natural gas terminals, frontline advocates and their allies warned.
The comments came during a press briefing on Thursday organized by Gas Exports Today, during which Vessel Project founder Roishetta Ozane, Better Brazoria director Melanie Oldham, and senior energy transition policy lead at Evergreen Action Mattea Mrkusic bore witness to the harm that the LNG export boom had already done to Texas and Louisiana, and called for a permanent ban.
"We are at this inflection point, and the election in November is a fork in the road for what type of political economy and climate future and racial justice future and public health future we want our federal government to create," Mrkusic told reporters.
'We Are Not a Sacrifice Zone'
The advocates began the briefing by detailing the harm that fossil fuels—in particular the recent ramping up of LNG export facilities—have already done to Gulf Coast communities. Currently, there are around 15 LNG terminals in operation or construction in Texas and Louisiana, and six more being reviewed.
Ozane, who was born in Louisiana and lost two homes to hurricanes Laura, Rita, and Delta, explained how oil and gas emissions polluted local air, water, and soil, threatening the health of residents including her own children. She recounted how her son, while driving down the aptly-named Sulphur Avenue in Louisiana, suddenly had a seizure for the first time in his life. He totaled the car and ended up in the hospital on life support, where he had several more seizures.
"The United States can no longer approve these projects in our community for the sake of the almighty dollar for oil and gas."
Looking for answers, Ozane spoke to several doctors before one in California told her that her son's seizure was due to "long-term industrial exposure." On the day of her son's fateful drive, there were major flares at the nearby Phillips 66 refinery and Bio-Lab. A few days earlier, there had also been an explosion at Calcasieu refinery.
"We are fighting on every front here, and we just want people to listen to us and to understand that we are dying. Our children are dying," Ozane said. "They are getting sick."
She continued: "This is not made up. This is not some type of scheme. This is not fake. We are real people. We are not a sacrifice zone. The United States can no longer approve these projects in our community for the sake of the almighty dollar for oil and gas."
Oldham, who lives in Freeport, Texas, discussed research she and Better Brazoria had done into a major 2022 explosion at Freeport LNG, a facility three to four miles from her home. One of the things they discovered was that, on the day of the explosion, the plant was operating 94 employees short. The excuse that Freeport LNG gave to regulators was that they could not find enough well-trained operators.
"That's frightening," Oldham said, noting that there are currently six LNG plants along the Texas coast. If those six plants "cannot find well-trained LNG operators, then why in the heck are they building and proposing more LNGs?" she asked.
When it comes to fossil fuel emissions, what happens in Texas and Louisiana does not stay there. Mrkusic focused on two recent world records "that never should have been broken."
The first is that July 2024 saw the hottest day on record; the second is that the U.S. has become in recent years the world's leading exporter of LNG.
That LNG expansion, the Sierra Club found in 2022, "thwarted" the stated U.S. climate goal of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
"In what world does it make sense to double down on this dirty buildout?" Mrkusic asked.
'We Have an Alternative'
Whether or not the U.S. will choose to double down is one major issue at stake in the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the panelists said. That's because the election would likely determine the fate of the Biden administration's pause on the approval of new LNG exports.
The pause was put in place while the Department of Energy (DOE) updates the studies it uses to determine whether a given natural gas export request serves the public interest, as the last studies it relied on were conducted in 2018 and 2019 during the Trump administration. While a Louisiana-based, Trump-appointed judge blocked that pause in July, Mrkusic explained that no court order can stop the DOE from revising its public interest determination, something she expects it to finalize by the first quarter of 2025.
"We believe that if DOE fully accounts for... the cost of the LNG buildout in their studies, using the best available science, listening to frontline communities, measuring the cumulative public health impacts to those who live nearby, it'll be crystal clear that new export authorizations are not in the public interest," Mrkusic said.
"Under Trump, we could double down on even more dirty fossil fuel infrastructure that'll lock us into harmful pollution for decades to come."
However, the DOE deadline anticipated by Mrkusic and others falls after the election, and Trump has already pledged to approve pending LNG export terminals on day one of his administration. He also has a record of rolling back environmental protections and favoring the fossil fuel industry over climate concerns, and has promised fossil fuel CEOs to slash Biden administration climate regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign funds.
Oldham said that the "Trump administration set us back a decade or two when he was president regarding public health, environmental issues," and pointed to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is widely understood to be the blueprint for a second Trump administration.
"It's pretty scary what they want to do as far as the environmental issues," Oldham said.
Oldham, Ozane, and Mrkusic spoke the same week that a number of studies were released warning of the climate and public health risks of extending the LNG buildout and implementing other Project 25 agenda points.
A Greenpeace USA and Sierra Club report found that permitting more LNG would claim an extra 707 to 1,110 lives and cost an added $9.88 billion to $15.1 billion in health costs through 2050.
Another report from Energy Innovation calculated that Project 2025, if put in place, would cause more than 2,000 early air pollution deaths by 2030 and spew an extra 4,920 metric megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Finally, a third study from Evergreen Action outlined the impacts of an LNG buildout under a second Trump administration, concluding that if every pending project were approved, as is likely, this would quadruple U.S. LNG export capacity compared with 2023 levels and emit 3.9 gigatons of climate pollution annually, or 63% of the nation's total climate pollution in 2021.
"But," Mrkusic said, "we do have an alternative."
She continued: "Under Trump, we could double down on even more dirty fossil fuel infrastructure that'll lock us into harmful pollution for decades to come. Or under a potential Harris administration, we would have a much better shot of building a thriving clean energy economy. And, as one part of that, we could land the Department of Energy's updated studies so that they fully account for the cost of LNG exports."
'Climate Champions'
Beyond its potential to block Trump and Project 2025, the Gulf Coast advocates spoke with genuine enthusiasm of what a Harris-Walz administration could do for the climate and frontline communities.
Ozane pointed to Harris' record of holding fossil fuel and other polluting companies to account as attorney general of California, as well as actions she had taken in the Biden administration, such as casting the deciding vote for the infrastructure bill.
"We know that she is a leader in herself, and she has shown that even aside from the current administration, that she is not afraid of taking on oil and gas," Ozane said.
"I feel strongly that Harris will be the better candidate for our cause."
She added that Harris' choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who also has a strong climate record, as running mate signals that she is listening to the climate movement in making her decisions.
"Walz and Harris are both climate champions," Ozane said. "We know that this ticket is what would be best when it relates to environmental justice, climate justice, us meeting our climate target, and not only will that be beneficial for the United States, but it will be beneficial for the entire world."
Oldham said that she would vote for Harris, who she thought might be better than U.S. President Joe Biden on some climate issues.
"I feel strongly that Harris will be the better candidate for our cause," Oldham said, comparing her to Trump. She added, "I think she'll speak up even more than Biden."
Harris does have her own weaknesses on environmental issues. When asked about her retraction of a 2020 primary campaign promise to ban fracking, Ozane acknowledged, "We know that none of these candidates are absolutely perfect."
"But," she added, "that doesn't mean that this isn't the best ticket, that there isn't still avenues for communication for us to get to what we're trying to get for our community."
Ozane herself is working on communicating those needs. She and others have asked Harris to travel to Louisiana and see the impacts of the LNG buildout firsthand. Ozane herself is speaking at the Louisiana Breakfast at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week, and hopes to meet with Harris and Walz to articulate several asks from frontline Gulf advocates.
These include a commitment to make polluters pay for the damage they have already done in the region, a centering of frontline perspectives and solutions, continuing to fund initiatives like Justice40, revisiting the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that subsidize fossil fuels, reconsidering tax breaks for polluting companies operating in Louisiana, and not trialing experimental climate solutions like carbon capture and storage in already pollution-burdened communities.
"We no longer want to be sacrifices," Ozane said. "We no longer want things to be tried and tested in our communities."
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Senate Dems: Don’t Let Manchin Do Big Oil One Last Favor
Manchin’s latest attempt at permitting reform would try and force the approval of huge new LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast, which are both environmental justice nightmares and major carbon bombs.
Jul 26, 2024
A story. In December of 2015, everyone who worked on climate issues was in Paris for the white-knuckled final negotiations of the historic accords. While that was going on, Big Oil’s friends in Congress passed—almost without debate—an end to the longstanding ban on oil exports from the U.S. I cobbled together—with the help of the Sierra Club’s Mike Brune—what may have been the only op-ed opposing the measure, in a Paris cafe fueled by pain au chocolat. But the Democratic Senators I reached out to back home laughed—it wasn’t a big deal, they said, and anyway they were getting a production tax credit for wind energy in return. They were wrong: America in a decade has gone from not exporting oil and gas to becoming the world’s biggest producer. Bigger than Russia and the Saudis.
The moral of the story is: Big Oil is sneaky, and they will use moments when attention is diverted (say, by the advent of a truly powerful new presidential candidate) to advance their agenda. And the point of the story is: They’re trying it again.
A couple of days ago—while all of us were paying attention to Brat Summer, heterosectionality, and the general splendor of Kamala Harris’ first week (huge thanks to the members of the climate community who came together online last night to raise huge money for the campaign)—Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) announced he had cobbled together a new proposal for “permitting reform.” On the face of it, some of the new proposal makes real sense: Among other things, it would ease the process of approving the badly needed transmission lines for moving solar and wind power back and forth across the continent.
This week saw the hottest temperatures on our planet in at least the last 125,000 years. Get real.
But remember: Joe Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in D.C. (Which is saying something—he’s the Simone Biles of corruption). And so it’s not surprising that there’s a huge cost for this sane policy change: The bill will also try and force the approval of huge new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals along the Gulf Coast. This is not only disgusting on environmental justice grounds (watch Roishetta Ozane explain the cost to her community) but it is also the single biggest greenhouse gas bomb on planet Earth.
Jeremy Symons, the veteran climate analyst who has supplied the most relevant climate analyses throughout the LNG fight, came up with these numbers last night. If enacted, he said, the LNG portion of the Manchin bill would “lock in new greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 165 coal-fired power plants or more” and “erase the climate benefits of building 50 major renewable electricity transmission lines.” It is exactly, to the letter, what Project 2025 has called for.
And yet it has some actual chance of passing. Martin Heinrichs, the Democratic senator from New Mexico, endorsed it on Wednesday—which makes a certain amount of local sense, since the state derives an outsized share of its government revenues from taxes on gas production. But Heinrichs is selling out the planet to help his state. The question is, how many of his fellow Democrats will go along? Enough to allow this legislation to move through the upper chamber?
Because remember: The ultimate goal of climate policy is not to rewire America so it can use more renewable energy. That is a good goal, and it will make money for solar and wind developers which is why many of them will support this bill. But the goal of climate policy is to prevent the planet from overheating. And if you make renewable energy easier in America at the cost of addicting developing Asian economies to exported American LNG, you have taken an enormous step backward. (You’ve also screwed over the American consumers who still depend on natural gas and will now pay more, which is one reason senators like Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have taken a dim view of this proposed law).
The big green groups have come out strongly against it. Here’s the position of the League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and EarthJustice, and the Sierra Club, and Oil Change International. And here’s mine: This week saw the hottest temperatures on our planet in at least the last 125,000 years. Get real.
This week saw the explosion of joy that comes when politicians stand up to business as usual. Don’t undermine all of it with a “deal” whose main beneficiary is Big Oil. Don’t give Joe Manchin a gift on his way out the door. Don’t do what you did in 2015, when you opened the door to the oil and gas export boom. Don’t turn off the same young voters that U.S. President Joe Biden turned off by approving the Willow oil complex. Don’t get in the way of the momentum we’re trying to build as November approaches.
And on top of all that political reality, there’s reality reality as well. Physics doesn’t get a vote in Congress, but it gets the only vote that matters in the real world. Pay attention to it for once!
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'Environmental Justice Nightmare': FERC Approves Major LNG Export Terminal Despite Biden Pause
"Even with FERC's reckless decision to approve CP2, the project cannot move forward without all federal permits, including those currently paused by the Department of Energy," one climate advocate said.
Jun 27, 2024
In what the Sunrise Movementcalled a "disastrous decision," the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted 2-1 on Thursday to approve a certification for Venture Global's controversial Calcasieu Pass 2 liquefied natural gas terminal. The approval comes despite the fact that the company's first Calcasieu Pass terminal violated its air pollution permits more than 2,000 times during its first year in operation.
While expected, FERC's decision was widely condemned by climate justice advocates and frontline community groups. At the same time, CP2's opponents emphasized that the plant is unlikely to be built while the Department of Energy has paused the approval of LNG exports while it considers their impacts on the climate, consumers, and local communities.
"A rubber stamp from FERC is business-as-usual for fossil fuel projects," Lukas Ross, climate and energy justice deputy director at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Thankfully CP2 has a long way to go and we intend to fight it every step of the way. No amount of lobbying will make this project anything other than a climate and environmental justice nightmare."
"We refuse to sink. We are going to fight them here. We are going to fight them at home. This is far from over."
Environmental groups say that CP2 is a "carbon bomb" that would emit 20 times more climate pollution over its lifetime than the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.
"CP2 is a climate catastrophe," the Sunrise Movement wrote on social media. "It would produce more emissions than 46 coal-fired power plants and spew air pollution into marginalized communities."
It is also a key test case for a massive LNG buildout that threatens to raise domestic energy prices and shatter national climate goals.
As 350.org and Third Act co-founder Bill McKibbenpointed out in a Thursday column following the approval:
There's a huge pool of frackable gas sitting in the Permian Basin of Texas. The only way to monetize most of it is to ship it to Asia, persuading the fast-growing economies there to use it instead of wind and sun to make electricity. This scramble has been underway for about eight years, and LNG exports are already a giant industry; if Big Gas gets its way, within a few years American LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico will be doing more climate damage than everything that happens in Europe.
Indeed, while the Virginia-based Venture Global has advertised its project as a boost to European energy security, around 65% of CP2's long-term Supply and Purchase Agreements are with Asia-Pacific oil companies, commodity speculators, or users.
The company also has a history of running roughshod over domestic environmental regulations and dismissing the needs and concerns of impacted communities. Its Calcasieu Pass plant, which is "technologically identical" in design to the proposed CP2, began operating in January 2022. Since then, residents of Cameron Parish, Louisiana, have reported frequent flaring, noise pollution, an uptick in cancer and other ailments, and fishing grounds polluted with dredging material.
"Make no mistake: CP2 is a carbon bomb threatening frontline communities with increased pollution and exacerbating the climate crisis," Allie Rosenbluth, United States program manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement. "Expanding LNG infrastructure jeopardizes the health and safety of nearby communities, undermines efforts to reduce fossil fuel dependency, and drives the climate crisis, economic instability, and conflict."
The one dissenting vote on FERC, outgoing Democratic Commissioner Allison Clements, justified her decision in part due to the project's potential to harm its neighbors.
"The commission has not adequately addressed the project's environmental and socioeconomic impacts, including adverse impacts on environmental justice communities," Clements said.
Following the vote, frontline leaders vowed to keep fighting the plant's construction.
"We refuse to sink. We are going to fight them here. We are going to fight them at home. This is far from over," said Travis Dardar, an Indigenous Cameron Parish fisherman who founded Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (F.I.S.H.) to protest the LNG boom's impact on Gulf fishing.
However, activists also expressed an understanding that FERC was not the most favorable terrain in the fight.
Speaking outside FERC headquarters, Vessel Project of Louisiana founder Roishetta Ozane said it was time to "write off" the agency, according to E&E News.
"We're going to say that FERC is a rogue agency that does not care about communities," she said. "But who can do something while we are here is this administration. We need to continue to put pressure on the Department of Energy."
The DOE announced a pause on LNG export approvals in January while it revises the agency's criteria for what constitutes an export decision in the public interest. Since then, environmental advocates have called for the pause to be made permanent.
FERC's CP2 approval, they say, has clarified the stakes.
"Even with FERC's reckless decision to approve CP2, the project cannot move forward without all federal permits, including those currently paused by the Department of Energy," Rosenbluth said. "This illustrates just how critical the Department of Energy's pause and process to redefine 'public interest' are. President [Joe] Biden and the Department of Energy must listen to frontline communities and do all they can to permanently stop CP2 and all new LNG export terminals."
"If Trump and the GOP triumph, get ready for government of Big Oil by Big Oil for Big Oil until the Earth shall perish, which shouldn't take long."
Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media agreed.
"FERC has always been a rubber stamp for new gas export facilities—that's why we zeroed in on getting the Department of Energy to pause new export licenses and do a proper assessment," Henn wrote on social media. "With today's shameful decision, pressure is on POTUS and DOE to do the right thing."
Kelsey Crane, senior policy advocate at Earthworks, said: "FERC has once again threatened the Biden administration's own climate and environmental justice policies by advancing what could be the third largest fracked gas export project in Southwest Louisiana. If CP2 is constructed, Louisianans will be forced to breathe dirtier air, pay higher energy bills, and lose important livelihoods in the fishing industry. The United States will emit more greenhouse gas pollution and continue delaying the impending, just transition to clean energy."
"President Biden cannot allow this decision to stand and has to stop letting his agencies approve new fossil fuel projects in the Gulf South," Crane concluded.
McKibben wrote, "The only thing standing between CP2 and construction (and the only thing that can prevent the construction of a dozen more of these death stars in the nest few years) is the Department of Energy, aka the president of the United States."
While McKibben said that Venture Global could build CP2 without the export approval, he argued it was unlikely to do so until either the Biden DOE lifts the pause or former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has promised to do so, is elected president.
Because of Trump's pro-fossil fuel stance, McKibben argued that FERC's CP2 decision also underscores the stakes of the 2024 election.
"If Trump and the GOP triumph, get ready for government of Big Oil by Big Oil for Big Oil until the Earth shall perish, which shouldn't take long," he wrote.
While Biden is not guaranteed to extend the LNG export pause if reelected, "at least there will be a fight, and it will be one of the climactic battles of the fossil fuel era," McKibben said.
Speaking outside the FERC hearing, Ozane said the numbers on the climate justice side were growing.
"It was just two to three of us… and now it's hundreds," she told the crowd. "We are building power. We are building people power. We make the difference."
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