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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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Feds to Vote on CP2 Project as Climate Campaigners Protest LNG Buildout
"FERC's approval of this massive new LNG export facility would cut through the heart of President Biden's LNG pause, realizing one of the largest fossil fuel export projects ever proposed in the United States," an expert said.
Jun 21, 2024
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will formally consider issuing a permit for the Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal, a major fossil fuel infrastructure project in Louisiana that environmental campaigners oppose, according to a notice the agency released Thursday.
It will come to a vote at the agency's June 27 meeting, E&E Newsreported.
Environmentalists campaigned against the project last year but quieted down after the Biden administration paused all liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to non-Fair Trade Agreement countries in January.
The planned terminal, owned by Venture Global and often called CP2, has been noticeably absent from FERC meeting agendas since last July, when the agency published the environmental impact statement. Venture and other corporate interests have pressured the agency to move the project, which is located near the Gulf of Mexico in western Louisiana, up on the agenda—and finally gotten their wish.
Advocacy groups urged the federal agency to deny the permit.
"FERC's approval of this massive new LNG export facility would cut through the heart of President [Joe] Biden's LNG pause, realizing one of the largest fossil fuel export projects ever proposed in the United States," Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said in a statement.
"Biden claims to be concerned by the devastating climate and environmental impacts of continued LNG development, yet the country is on track to export more and more LNG for years to come—with or without his temporary partial pause," he added.
FERC announced it will vote on the CP2 LNG export facility next week. While the current LNG export pause is still a hurdle for the facility, Venture Global could start construction if they get FERC's approval. https://t.co/p7C25drePj
— Sara Sneath (@SaraSneath) June 21, 2024
CP2 is modeled on the existing Calcasieu Pass terminal (CP1), which began operations in January 2022 and has been the subject of scrutiny not just for its role in the distribution of fracked gas but also for a series of deviations from permitted activities, including alleged flaring that the company didn't report and the accidental release of 180,099 pounds of gas.
The planned site for CP2 is an area of wetlands next to CP1. Venture says that it's already started off-site construction and spent billions of dollars on CP2 and, with speedy government approval, would begin shipping LNG from the facility in 2026, according toLNGPrime.
If FERC were to approve the project, the U.S. Department of Energy would still have a statutory duty to approve future exports, but DOE is required to do so quickly, Walsh of Food & Water Watch told Common Dreams. Still, a key holdup for Venture would be the pause on exporting LNG to countries without free trade agreements—many of the company's contracts are with such countries, Walsh said.
FERC's slowness to place CP2 on its agenda was "welcomed," Walsh said, but "a real victory will be FERC rejecting this project, and failing that, President Biden's DOE denying their export license."
Walsh expressed concern that the U.S. "continues to ramp up export capacity even as we have a pause on new LNG export approvals."
Environmental and community groups have called on the Biden administration to ban LNG exports permanently, as Common Dreamsreported last month, and a key part of that effort is blocking CP2 and closing CP1, they contend.
The groups have allies at the national level who've tried to draw attention to a project whose importance has often been overlooked.
Environmental campaigner and journalist Bill McKibben, who wrote a piece about CP2 for The New Yorker last year, has called the project "an environmental justice train wreck." He wrote in Common Dreams that CP2 is like Keystone XL "but with perhaps even more at stake." He also said that it could end up creating more than 20 times the emissions of the controversial Willow project in Alaska.
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Energy Experts, Frontline Advocates Call On Biden to Stop LNG Exports for Good
"You cannot say that tripling or quadrupling the level of exports from today's record highs is not going to result in significant financial harm," one expert said.
May 21, 2024
Gulf Coast community advocates on Tuesday called for U.S. President Joe Biden to permanently ban the export of liquefied natural gas.
In January, Biden's Department of Energy (DOE) announced a pause on approvals for new LNG exports to non-Free Trade Agreement countries so it could develop a new metric for whether these exports are in the public interest. The new metric should consider factors such as energy prices and the climate emergency, the administration said. The move was widely welcomed by climate and environmental justice groups, but it earned instant backlash from the fossil fuel industry and their allies in Congress.
In a Tuesday press briefing, frontline Louisiana fisherman and founder of the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (F.I.S.H.) Travis Dardar, Louisiana Bucket Brigade director Anne Rolfes, and energy policy expert Tyson Slocum spoke about the harm that the LNG export boom has already done to Gulf ecosystems, livelihoods, and communities and why permitting more would be disastrous for the region, the country, and the climate.
"We've seen the destruction that just one of these plants has, so to be in the public interest to build all these other ones would be… a ridiculous notion," Dardar told reporters. "I mean, this is literally destroying people's lives."
'We're Living This Nightmare'
Dardar described how life changed in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, after Venture Global built its first Calcasieu Pass terminal, which began operations in early 2022.
"We went from sitting on the porch at night, and you could hear the beach, to the roar of the plant, to the point where they would shoot, literally vibrate pictures off the walls and the flares would make nighttime seem like daytime," he said.
People began to get sick from cancer and other mysterious illnesses. Dardar was threatened with truancy charges because his children had missed so many school days due to ailments that doctors have failed to diagnose.
"It's awful to watch these people who are from Louisiana act as lobbyists, even when they're congresspeople, act as lobbyists for a company that is actually destroying our culture."
Dardar also detailed impacts to the fishing industry. LNG barges create large waves that have sunk and destroyed fishing boats, dredging has polluted the water with sediment, and the catches of fish and shrimp have "decreased dramatically."
"Cameron used to be No. 1 for shrimping, and now they call it No. 1 LNG capital of the world. You know, that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth," Dardar said.
Dardar and other fishers in the region are now mobilizing to stop Venture Global from building a second planned terminal, Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2).
He noted that politicians and others who support Venture Global's plants either live in other parts of the state or moved out of Cameron Parish.
"They know better than to live there, but yet they're willing to sacrifice the people in the industry for, you know, money, greed," Dardar said.
But the people left behind are not seeing any benefits.
"We're living this nightmare," he said.
Fishing Communities v. Industry Lobbyists
Rolfes of Louisiana Bucket Brigade said that one reason Venture Global had been able to get away with operating in such a destructive way was because the state of Louisiana has long been "controlled by the petrochemical industry."
This makes it all the more important, Rolfes said, that the DOE rule the LNG export boom is not in the public interest.
"This is why we need intervention at the federal level," she said.
She also criticized current and former Louisiana politicians who put the oil and gas industry over the well-being of their own constituents. She highlighted a letter sent by House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Willie Phillips on April 16, in which they urged FERC to approve CP2.
In the letter, they recycled debunked industry talking points, such as the argument that gas is a "clean-burning" fuel and that exports will help U.S. allies "transition away from Russian gas."
In fact, new science has shown that methane leaks make fossil gas at least as much of a climate pollutant as coal and Europe is moving quickly away from gas all together and toward renewable energy sources.
"At the highest levels of Congress, they are acting on behalf of Venture Global," Rolfes said.
She also pointed to the example of former Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who now works at law firm Van Ness Feldman and posted on Facebook Monday that the firm was "proud" to represent Venture Global, which she called an "outstanding company"
"This is who is in the debate regarding the public interest," Rolfes said. "On our side, it's fishermen, fishing families, and people who are worried about the prices of energy. And on their side, it's a damn Venture Global lobbyist."
Rolfes added, "It's awful to watch these people who are from Louisiana act as lobbyists, even when they're congresspeople, act as lobbyists for a company that is actually destroying our culture."
Failing the Test
Slocum, who directs Public Citizen's energy program and works as a professor at University of Maryland Honors College, said that restoring LNG exports wouldn't just work against the interests of frontline communities in the Gulf.
"The record volumes of methane gas that we're currently exporting have extraordinary impacts on domestic energy markets that have exposed working families and businesses across the United States to higher prices," Slocum said.
He also gave the history of why the DOE must consider the public interest before it approves shipping gas abroad: It dates to the Natural Gas Act of 1938, which placed this condition on future exports.
"It is inconceivable that it is in the public interest to force the poorest American families to bear higher and more volatile energy burdens."
"The Biden administration's decision to pause pending reviews was required by the law," Slocum said, "because the standards developed to assess the public interest that were conducted during the Trump administration were irrelevant and based upon extraordinarily poor data and methodologies."
As to what the DOE will eventually determine, Slocum said it has historically relied on an overall cost-benefit analysis. In this case, it would consider jobs created and money made from export operations on one hand and higher prices and impacts on local communities and industries on the other. Slocum said that the planned LNG expansion could not be considered in the public interest "by any metric."
"You cannot say that tripling or quadrupling the level of exports from today's record highs is not going to result in significant financial harm," he said.
At the same time, the Biden administration has also mandated that regulatory agencies need to complete a "distributional analysis," meaning they most consider how policies will impact people depending on their income levels. In the case of LNG exports, any increase in prices will necessarily hit low-income families and individuals harder.
"It is inconceivable that it is in the public interest to force the poorest American families to bear higher and more volatile energy burdens, to prioritize bigger profits for commodity traders, LNG exporters, and foreign markets," Slocum said.
He concluded, "Any honest assessment would have to conclude that additional LNG exports fail the public interest test."
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