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Death and Destruction From Helene Show Climate Crisis Isn't in a Bargaining Mood
We’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals.
Sep 30, 2024
If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:
Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.
But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain).
I know how this works, because my home state of Vermont is mostly steep mountains and narrow valleys. Once the rain drops, it’s funneled very quickly down the saturated hillsides; placid streams become raging torrents that fill up those bottomlands, covering farm fields with soil; when the water starts to drain, everything is coated with mud. These towns are going to be cut off for a while—our mountain hamlet in Vermont was effectively isolated for a couple of weeks last summer. And these are places where cellphones don’t work in the best of times. Things get pre-modern very fast.
Were it happening just in one place, a compassionate world could figure out how to offer effective relief. But it’s happening in so many places. The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are deadare dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.
But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).
Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning
“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”
In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.
All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).
This means that our political leaders are finally going to have to make hard choices (or not, which is its own way of choosing). Brazil, for instance, is hoping to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon—which at least, given Brazil’s relative poverty, is somewhat understandable, if still insane. America’s politicians, under much less economic pressure, are facing similar choices, some of them as soon as the lame duck session after the November elections. Expect, for instance, a renewed push to open up new permits for LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. Pausing those permits was the most important step the Biden administration took to rein in Big Oil, and Houston’s been outraged ever since; it’s why they’re pouring money into the Trump campaign. And it’s why they have their errand boys in the Congress—outgoing Senator Joe Manchin, Wyoming’s John Barrasso—proposing a trade: permitting reform that would make it easier to build renewable energy in America, in exchange for ramping up LNG exports that would undercut renewable energy in Asia.
The numbers on whether this trade “makes sense” are complicated and contentious. Here’s a report from Third Way arguing yes, here’s a set of charts from the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons arguing that it will dramatically raise gas prices for those American consumers still tied to propane. New peer-reviewed numbers from the gold-standard methane scientist Bob Howarth at Cornell make it clear that these LNG exports are worse than coal; that prompted 125 climate scientists to write to the administration asking them to “follow the science.”
In the end, this decision will likely come down to politics. It’s not just Big Oil that’s willing to make such a trade—New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, in line to be Democratic leader on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when Manchin yachts back to West Virginia, has come out for the trade, assuredly because New Mexico gets a large share of its government revenues from taxing the natural gas under its part of the Permian basin. Northeastern Democrats will vote against, fearing not just climate destruction but the rise in gas prices as we send the commodity abroad. Meanwhile, the good people of the Gulf suffer from the grievous local environmental impacts of these giant plants, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere keeps rocketing up.
If Trump wins, there’s no need for a deal—the LNG projects will be approved, and permitting reform for renewables will be dead. If Harris wins and the Dems hold the Senate, at least there’s a chance that environmentalists can make it easier to build solar and wind without yielding on the massive carbon bomb and EJ disaster that is LNG export. That’s why I’m in Montana today, trying in my small way to help Jon Tester in his uphill fight to retain a Senate seat. And it’s why I’m in the swing states most of the time between now and November 5. Thousands of Third Act volunteers are deploying themselves far and wide to win this contest—you can join us on the Silver Wave tour in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. (Please join us, even if you haven’t reached sixty yet—we don’t check IDs and we love working with young people).
The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now.
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Despite Lofty Rhetoric at COP28, US Approves LNG Pipeline to Mexico
The U.S. State Department, said Public Citizen, "abdicated its authority" when it approved the Saguaro LNG pipeline without securing an emissions review.
Dec 06, 2023
Days after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken addressed the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference and warned that food insecurity "is made worse by our warming climate," government watchdog Public Citizen wrote to the top diplomat Wednesday, demanding to know why—if he is concerned about planetary heating—his agency recently approved the construction of a fracked gas pipeline.
The group was particularly perplexed by the fact that the State Department approved Oneok's Saguaro pipeline even though two weeks earlier, the Bureau of Energy Resources had ignored a request for a federally mandated emissions review for the project.
"Today Public Citizen requests that the U.S. Department of State explain why it abdicated its authority to grant a favorable recommendation for a natural gas export pipeline without first obtaining a lifecycle analysis of the project's impact on greenhouse gas emissions," wrote Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's energy program. "We request a meeting with the appropriate representative to discuss."
Oneok wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in December 2022, requesting a presidential permit to build and operate the proposed 155-mile pipeline, which would connect the Permian Basin in West Texas to liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals in Mexico.
"Why did the government backtrack on a modest demand for a greenhouse gas emissions analysis for a pipeline and instead rubber-stamp a major fossil fuel project?"
FERC is required to obtain a "favorable recommendation" from the State Department before granting a permit for the construction of a pipeline that would cross a U.S. border.
But in an executive action announced in September, President Joe Biden directed agencies to consider the greenhouse gas impacts of new projects, "in environmental reviews conducted pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)."
As such, Public Citizen noted in its letter, Hagen Maroney, deputy director of the State Department's Office of Global Change wrote to FERC on November 8 requesting "a greenhouse gas emissions analysis for the Saguaro pipeline project that covers lifecycle upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions."
Both FERC and Oneok refused to cooperate with the request, saying it was "beyond the scope" of the agency's analysis—but nevertheless, on November 13, the company and the commission were granted a favorable recommendation for the presidential permit.
As Reuters reported in June, U.S. companies were on track to approve three LNG export projects capable of processing 5.1 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd)—a record annual volume for LNG projects.
The U.S. became the largest producer of LNG in 2022, with exports expected to reach 12.1 bcfd this year and 12.7 bcfd in 2024.
"The Biden administration must explain why it is allowing a major fossil fuel export pipeline to be built, at the very moment it is traveling to global climate talks to call for ambitious climate action," said Slocum. "Why did the government backtrack on a modest demand for a greenhouse gas emissions analysis for a pipeline and instead rubber-stamp a major fossil fuel project?"
"The green light for the Saguaro pipeline project," he added, "shows yet again that the Biden administration's support for unfettered fossil fuel exports compromises its position to address the climate crisis."
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Fossil Fuel Firms 'Building Bridge to Climate Chaos'
An updated database shows that more than 1,000 oil and gas companies around the world are planning to expand their planet-wrecking infrastructure.
Nov 15, 2023
More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.
That's according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.
The updated database shows that 1,023 are plotting expansions of fossil fuel infrastructure, threatening to lock in years of planet-warming emissions as extreme weather
fueled by the climate crisis wreaks havoc worldwide. The World Meteorological Organization said Wednesday that global greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new high once again last year.
"The magnitude of the industry's expansion plans is truly frightening," said Nils Bartsch, Urgewald's head of oil and gas research. "To keep 1.5°C alive, a speedy, managed decline in both oil and gas production is vital. Instead, oil and gas companies are building a bridge to climate chaos."
According to the 2023 GOGEL, 96% of the 700 upstream oil and gas companies in the database are exploring or actively developing new oil and gas fields, projects that Urgewald said "severely jeopardize efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C."
Nearly 540 companies in the database are collectively planning to produce 230 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) over the short term, the database shows.
"The seven companies with the largest short-term expansion plans are Saudi Aramco (16.8 bboe), QatarEnergy (16.5 bboe), Gazprom (10.7 bboe), Petrobras (9.6 bboe), ADNOC (9.0 bboe), TotalEnergies (8.0 bboe) and ExxonMobil (7.9 bboe)," Urgewald noted. "These seven companies are responsible for one-third of global short-term oil and gas expansion."
The database also shows that fossil fuel companies are planning to expand global LNG capacity by 162%, a significant threat to critical climate targets. A United Nations-backed report published last week warned that fossil fuel expansion plans are "throwing humanity's future into question."
Urgewald pointed specifically to the LNG boom in the U.S., which the group said is "cementing its position as the world's largest export hub for LNG" with 21 new export facilities planned along the Gulf Coast. Those facilities account for more than 40% of worldwide LNG expansion documented in the GOGEL database.
"Most of the fossil gas that will be exported from these terminals stems from the Permian Basin, the heart of the U.S. fracking industry," Urgewald observed.
The updated database shows that nearly 80 companies—including Exxon, Chevron, and BP—are currently operating in the Permian Basin, located in the U.S. Southwest.
Climate campaigners and experts have also sounded alarm over Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), a planned $10 billion LNG export hub that would ship up to 24 million tons of gas annually once it is completed.
"The fossil fuel industry wants to pave undeveloped wetlands all along the coast with LNG facilities like NextDecade Corporation's Rio Grande LNG Terminal, Rebekah Hinojosa, a member of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network said Wednesday. "Besides their environmental implications, these plans violate Indigenous sacred lands, and people working in fishing, shrimping, and eco-tourism risk losing their jobs. Our communities refuse to be sacrificed for the fracking industry's dirty gas exports."
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Exxon Purchase of Fracking Giant Shows It Is 'Hellbent on Driving the Thermostat Even Higher'
"This deal shows that Exxon is doubling down on fossil fuels and has no intention of moving towards clean energy," argued one climate campaigner.
Oct 11, 2023
ExxonMobil announced Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire shale competitor Pioneer Natural Resources in an all-stock deal worth nearly $60 billion, a move seen as further evidence that the largest oil giant in the U.S. has no plans to heed scientists' increasingly dire warnings and scale back fossil fuel production.
"This deal shows that Exxon is doubling down on fossil fuels and has no intention of moving towards clean energy," argued Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media. "Even after the hottest summer on record, Exxon is hellbent on driving the thermostat even higher."
The merger, which is expected to face intense scrutiny from the Lina Khan-led Federal Trade Commission (FTC), would make Exxon the biggest producer in the Permian Basin, a massive oilfield in the U.S. Southwest that climate campaigners have described as a "carbon bomb."
"This is a potentially massive consolidation which should be closely investigated by the [U.S. government] for antitrust concerns, with Exxon doubling down on fossil fuels when it should be phasing them out," Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, argued last week amid reports of a looming agreement.
Environmental groups have estimated that if drilling in the Permian Basin is allowed to continue, it could unleash around 40 billion tons of planet-warming CO2 by 2050—roughly 10% of the world's rapidly dwindling carbon budget.
Exxon said in a statement that once the Pioneer merger is complete, the company "will have an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil equivalent resource in the Permian."
"At close, ExxonMobil's Permian production volume would more than double to 1.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (MOEBD), based on 2023 volumes, and is expected to increase to approximately 2 MOEBD in 2027," the company said.
As Reuters reported Wednesday, Exxon CEO Darren Woods "has rebuffed investor and political pressure to shift strategies and embrace renewable energy as European oil majors have done."
"He faced heavy criticism for sticking to a heavy oil-dependent strategy as climate concerns became more pressing," the outlet added. "Exxon's decision paid off when the company last year earned a record $56 billion profit, two years after losses ballooned to $22 billion during the Covid-19 pandemic."
News of the merger deal comes less than a month after The Wall Street Journal published documents detailing Exxon's decadeslong effort to cast doubt on climate science even after it publicly acknowledged the connection between fossil fuel emissions and climate change in 2006.
Exxon and other fossil fuel giants are currently facing lawsuits from dozens of U.S. cities and states for misleading the public about their role in the worsening climate emergency.
"ExxonMobil is planning to ramp up its climate pollution while continuing to lie to the public and policymakers about its so-called commitment to solutions," said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity. "Big Oil companies are driving the world toward climate catastrophe, and as the crisis accelerates, it's more important than ever that officials call out their climate deception and hold these polluters accountable."
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Center for Climate Integrity.
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With Support of 70 Climate Groups, Lawmakers Unveil Bill to Ban US Fossil Fuel Exports
The bill, led by Democrats, comes amidst mounting concerns about the increase in liquefied natural gas export infrastructure in both the U.S. and overseas.
May 18, 2023
Sen. Edward J. Markey and Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Yvette Clark reintroduced Thursday the Block All New Fossil Fuel Exports Act to preserve a livable climate and protect frontline communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The bill, which would amend the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to ban the international export of both American crude oil and liquefied methane gas (LNG), is backed by 70 organizations that wrote a letter to Congress endorsing the bill Wednesday.
"The United States is taking aggressive action to tackle the climate crisis and transition to create renewable energy solutions," the letter reads. "But recent approvals for new fossil fuel projects to export fossil fuels are threatening people's health and safety and stand in the way of global efforts to combat the climate crisis. Continued expansion of U.S. export infrastructure limits collective progress toward long-term energy security goals."
"Biden can't keep claiming to care about climate and environmental justice while allowing more of these projects that put our lives at risk."
The bill comes amidst mounting concerns about the increase in LNG export infrastructure in both the U.S. and overseas. A Greenpeace report published last month revealed that new European LNG terminals combined with both existing and proposed U.S. infrastructure would spew out as much climate pollution as adding 604 million new cars to the roads.
While the ostensible push behind this LNG expansion was the need to bolster Europe's energy needs in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, both the Greenpeace report and an earlier investigation from Friends of the Earth, Bailout Watch, and Public Citizen found that the fossil fuel industry was exploiting the situation to lock in LNG infrastructure that wouldn't begin delivering until 2026. More than 75% of the LNG contracts considered by the second report would actually direct shipments to the Asia-Pacific region.
What's more, the build-up of fossil fuel infrastructure connecting the Permian Basin to the Gulf Coast predates the Ukraine war—Congress spurred much of it by lifting a ban on the export of crude oil in 2015, the letter writers said. The new legislation would reinstate this ban and slow the record oil production in the Permian Basin, as well as add a ban on LNG exports.
The International Energy Agency has said that policymakers should not develop any new fossil fuels if they want to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and stave off ever more extreme climate impacts. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change went further, concluding that existing fossil fuel infrastructure would emit enough to push the Earth's average temperature past the 1.5°C goal. Another report commissioned by the International Institute for Sustainable Development from scientists at the University of Manchester's Tyndall Center found that wealthy nations like the U.S. need to end oil and gas production by 2034 to keep the critical goal alive.
Despite the science and his own campaign promises, President Joe Biden has approved more drilling on public lands during his first two years in office than President Donald Trump during the same timeframe. His Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also signed off on two Gulf Coast LNG facilities in April: Texas LNG and Rio Grande LNG, as well as the linked Rio Bravo Pipeline. In 2022, the Biden administration rubber stamped the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT) off the coast of Brazoria County, Texas. All of these approvals overrode the concerns of pollution-burdened Gulf Coast communities.
"We are sick and tired of the hypocrisy from this administration," Gwen Jones, a resident of the displaced East End community in Freeport, said in a statement supporting the new bill. "Biden can't keep claiming to care about climate and environmental justice while allowing more of these projects that put our lives at risk. Prove to us that you will prioritize the health and safety of people and our planet over fossil fuel industry profits."
The bill's supporters argue that Biden could turn off the tap himself by declaring a climate emergency, reinstating the crude oil export ban, and significantly restricting LNG exports under the Natural Gas Act. They also point out that the expansion disproportionately impacts low-income communities of color who neighbor the infrastructure.
"The fossil fuel industry is bombarding my community, and we can't take it anymore. The Biden Administration recently approved the SPOT oil export facility and has allowed Freeport LNG to reopen after their dangerous explosion," Melanie Oldham, founder of Better Brazoria and a Freeport, Texas resident, said in a statement. "The hearings and comment periods for these fossil fuel projects are constant, and it's too much. We can't continue to be sacrificed to build even more reckless projects that will destroy our air quality and the climate."
In addition to limiting local pollution, the new bill would help U.S. consumers as a whole since more oil would be available for domestic use instead of being sent overseas, supporters argued.
"The BAN Fossil Fuel Exports Act is a much-needed step to prioritize American consumers and to reaffirm the U.S.'s commitment to addressing climate change on a global scale," Rep. Espaillat (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. "As our national economy continues its recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic, we must ensure hard-working Americans are not shouldered with the burdens of high energy costs and the real-world effects of global heating. This bill would make real progress towards preserving our planet while supporting American families by bringing down domestic costs."
The bill's re-introduction comes amidst global calls to halt LNG expansion as the leaders of wealthy nations gather for the G7 Summit this weekend. A coalition of groups sent a letter to the Biden administration Tuesday urging it to push back against this expansion at the upcoming meeting in Hiroshima.
"The G7 Climate and Environment Ministerial Communique in April stated that investment in the natural gas sector, including LNG, is only appropriate if 'implemented in a manner consistent with our climate objectives and without creating lock-in effects,'" the groups wrote. "The G7 should clarify at its final meeting that new LNG export and import infrastructure fails this test."
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Biden Implored to Avert 'Carbon Bomb' by Blocking Texas Gulf Oil Terminals
"It's hypocritical for the Biden administration to allow these things to get built and then say the U.S. wants to decrease its own emissions," said one climate campaigner.
Feb 21, 2023
The Biden administration's plan to potentially allow four new oil terminals along the Texas Gulf Coast would unleash a "carbon bomb" potentially equivalent to three years of all U.S. emissions and belie President Joe Biden's stated intent to "act boldly on climate," according to an analysis published on Tuesday.
The analysis—which was conducted for The Guardian by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based NGO that tracks fossil fuel projects around the world—found that if all four terminals are built and operate at full capacity for their expected 30-year lifespan, they will generate a staggering 24 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases.
According to The Guardian:
The federal government has already quietly approved the Sea Port Oil Terminal project, a proposed offshore oil platform located 35 miles off the Texas coast, south of Houston, and will decide whether to allow three other nearby oil terminal proposals. Combined, the four terminals would expand U.S. oil exports by nearly seven million barrels every day, handling the capacity of half of all current national oil exports.
"The amount of oil going through these projects, and the resulting emissions, are pretty astounding," said Global Energy Monitor analyst Baird Langenbrunner.
Sea Port Oil Terminal (STOP), the largest of the projects, would produce an estimated seven billion metric tons of annual greenhouse emissions, followed by Bluewater Texas (6.7 billion metric tons), Blue Marlin (6.6 billion), and Texas GulfLink (3.8 billion). In 2019, U.S. emissions totaled 6.6 billion metric tons, according to the analysis.
"Even if the emissions are a bit lower... we are fast-forwarding ourselves to the date where we have to stop completely emitting," said Langenbrunner. "Any extra emissions are in direct conflict with climate goals and it's hypocritical for the Biden administration to allow these things to get built and then say the U.S. wants to decrease its own emissions."
SPOT was approved by the Biden administration last November over the strong objections of climate, environmental, and other campaigners. As currently planned, the project would consist of several pipelines—the longest of them 50 miles long—storage tanks, and a deepwater oil export platform.
Last month, green and community groups sued the U.S. Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration (MARAD) over its approval of SPOT.
"Licensing SPOT exclusively serves the fossil fuel industry's goal of extracting every last drop of oil from the Permian Basin, while failing the communities and ecosystems of the Gulf, our nation, and global climate," Devorah Ancel, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club—one of the groups filing the suit— said at the time.
"Considering the administration's stated commitment to 'tackle the climate crisis,' it is particularly troubling that MARAD's review of SPOT's environmental and community impacts entirely fails to account for the project's significant contributions to climate change," Ancel added, "including impacts from excessive greenhouse gas pollution that will push temperatures higher in the Houston area and disrupt global climate."
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Greenpeace Calls on US and Mexico to Defuse Largest Carbon Bomb in North America
"The oil and gas industry has lit a fuse on the Permian Basin carbon bomb that threatens to blow up any hope of a livable future," said one campaigner. "It's time for Presidents Biden and López Obrador to commit to ending the exploitation and destruction of our communities."
Jan 10, 2023
Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden's Tuesday meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Greenpeace implored the two men to commit to ending all new oil and gas development in the Permian Basin, increasing clean energy investments, and securing a just transition for fossil fuel workers.
As detailed in a recent multimedia report, the Permian Basin—home to two million people in West Texas and southeast New Mexico—was transformed into "the world's single most prolific oil and gas field" during last decade's drilling and fracking boom.
If fossil fuel executives' plans to expand extraction in the basin and boost exports from the Gulf Coast are allowed to go forward, experts estimate that nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide would be emitted by 2050—equivalent to 10% of the world's remaining "carbon budget," or the amount of pollution compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the century's end. Meanwhile, a recent study found that the basin's pipelines are currently leaking 14 times more methane than previously thought.
"Mexico's updated climate goals can only be attained if both Mexico and the U.S. put an end to exploitation of the Permian Basin," Gustavo Ampugnani, executive director of Greenpeace Mexico, said Tuesday in a statement. "Greenpeace offices in the two countries will campaign on all fronts until Presidents López Obrador and Biden put their money where their mouths are."
According to Greenpeace:
As both nations face increased threats from the climate crisis, leaders from the U.S. and Mexico continue to incentivize the fossil fuel industry to ramp up oil and gas production in the Permian Basin and greenlight polluting fossil fuel infrastructure projects that will lock us into decades of emissions. From drilling and refining operations in Texas, to pipelines carrying Permian oil and gas through Mexico, the fossil fuel industry jeopardizes the health and safety of communities at each stage of the fossil fuel production process.
Last year, the U.S. became the world's top exporter of liquefied natural gas. "Around 70% of Mexico's natural gas supply is being met by U.S. pipeline imports," Greenpeace noted. "This is not what climate leadership looks like."
"From drought and record heatwaves to stronger, more frequent storms and flooding, we are living in a climate emergency."
Prior to last November's COP27 climate conference—which ended, like the 26 meetings before it, with no blueprint for rapidly cutting off planet-wrecking fossil fuels—the United Nations published reports warning that due to woefully inadequate emissions reductions targets and policies, there is "no credible path to 1.5°C in place," and only "urgent system-wide transformation" can prevent a cataclysmic temperature rise of nearly 3°C by 2100.
According to the latest data, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—the three main heat-trapping gases pushing temperatures upward—reached an all-time high in 2021, and greenhouse gas emissions only continued to climb in 2022.
Despite ample evidence that new fossil fuel projects will worsen deadly climate chaos, oil and gas corporations—supported by trillions of dollars in public subsidies each year—are still planning to expand dirty energy production in the coming years, including in the Permian Basin.
"The oil and gas industry has lit a fuse on the Permian Basin carbon bomb that threatens to blow up any hope of a livable future," John Noel, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, said Tuesday. "The technology to address the climate crisis already exists. It's time for Presidents Biden and López Obrador to commit to ending the exploitation and destruction of our communities at the hands of the oil and gas industry."
"From drought and record heatwaves to stronger, more frequent storms and flooding, we are living in a climate emergency," Noel added. "Last year, President Biden said that he will treat it as such. It's time for him to make good on those words by kickstarting a fossil fuel phaseout and declaring a climate emergency."
Greenpeace's intervention came as Biden and López Obrador prepared to engage in bilateral talks as part of the so-called "Tres Amigos" summit in Mexico City, which also features Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In the lead-up to the meeting, more than 100 progressive advocacy groups from around North America urged the continent's heads of government to cooperate on mitigating the climate crisis, ensuring the just treatment of migrants, and reducing gun violence.
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