(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Biden faces a crucial fossil fuel decision - The Washington Post [1]

['Ben Jealous', 'Bill Mckibben']

Date: 2024-01-24

Listen 6 min Share Comment on this story Comment Add to your saved stories Save

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and former head of the NAACP. Bill McKibben, author of 20 books about the environment, is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over 60 for action on climate and democracy. Sign up for Prompt 2024 to get opinions on the biggest questions about the 2024 election cycle ArrowRight The Biden administration, by all accounts, is approaching perhaps the most important fossil-fuel-related decision of its first term. Let’s hope it makes the right call.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the White House is expected to announce whether it will pause the permitting for new export terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG). That doesn’t sound like such a big deal — until you understand the scale involved. The United States is already the biggest gas exporter in the world, and it has already approved a bunch of new terminals only now breaking ground; those will add 200 million tons of export capacity over the next five years. What’s at issue is whether it will grant more permits still: If the industry gets what it wants, that would mean an additional 300 million tons annually.

Advertisement

Tons of LNG is not a statistic that means anything to most of us, so Bloomberg News helpfully broke it down this month: That’s enough new natural gas capacity to “power half a billion homes.” There are only 2.3 billion houses on this planet. So this is, by far, the biggest fossil fuel expansion plan ever, ensuring that for decades, huge swaths of Earth will be relying on fracked gas instead of sun and wind, the cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

Here’s another way of saying it: If this massive buildout continues apace (and, so far, the industry has gotten everything it has asked for), in a decade or so, as energy analyst Jeremy Symons recently reported, U.S. LNG exports will produce more greenhouse gas emissions than everything on the continent of Europe — that is, more than every car, factory and house from Athens to Helsinki. As a recent Sierra Club analysis found, the full proposed LNG buildout could contribute to the climate crisis as much as 681 coal plants or 548 million gasoline-powered cars each year. That’s not exactly a climate solution.

So it’s no wonder that climate scientists announced they are joining next month with residents of Louisiana and Texas, where these huge facilities are being built, in a week of civil disobedience outside the Energy Department. They’re asking for a pause in the licensing process so that the department can come up with new criteria to reflect the environmental damage from all those global greenhouse gas emissions and from the air and water impacts in Louisiana. If the Biden administration agrees, given the magnitude of this expansion plan, it will represent the most dramatic check on dirty energy that any president has ever made.

Advertisement

Which, of course, is why the fossil fuel industry and its allies in Washington are fighting it hard. They have a couple of basic arguments.

Share this article Share

One is that LNG somehow represents a cleaner future, supposedly because it could replace coal. But new data this past autumn made it clear that, by the time you’ve shipped LNG abroad in leaky vessels, the methane released into the atmosphere makes it distinctly worse for the climate than coal. And, in any event, coal is no longer the competitor: In Asia, LNG competes mainly with sun and wind, the costs of which have fallen 90 percent since the Energy Department wrote its criteria for approving these facilities.

The second argument is that the LNG industry is somehow good for the United States — and indeed it produces profits for the companies, such as ExxonMobil, that control the fracking fields. But exporting gas by definition drives up the price for Americans who still depend on it for cooking and heating. As the government’s Energy Information Administration pointed out in May, “higher LNG exports results in upward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices and … lower U.S. LNG exports results in downward pressure.” When one export facility had to shut down after catching fire in June 2022, the wholesale price for gas domestically dropped by one-third. Pausing new construction would be a genuine inflation reduction act, which probably helps explain the polling showing that Americans hate gas exports. No one wants their state fracked just to provide cheap gas to China.

Advertisement

The final argument is that LNG exports are necessary to support our allies, especially in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, American gas helped fill the breach when Russian gas became unavailable last winter and again this one — proving that we already have more than enough capacity. In fact, Europe is awash in gas at the moment, as low prices there attest. And the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis makes clear that European demand for natural gas will steadily drop in the years ahead, because the continent, in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, dramatically stepped up its conversion to renewables.

In fact, anyone worrying about our standing with our allies should remember that just last month in Dubai, the United States (with climate envoy John F. Kerry playing a lead role) signed on to an agreement announcing that the time had come for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” There is no possible definition of that phrase that is compatible with a massive buildout of LNG export capacity. If President Biden doesn’t do what he can to halt this expansion, then those were clearly just words on paper.

We also said in Dubai that we were serious about helping spread renewable energy not just within our own borders but everywhere, because it isn’t called global warming for nothing. This is the perfect chance to prove we meant it.

Advertisement

If Biden does stop the permitting process while his administration begins refiguring the criteria for granting more LNG licenses, then he will have responded in powerful fashion to the single biggest development of his term in office: the soaring temperatures that made 2023 the hottest year in the past 125,000 and that appear likely to make 2024 hotter still.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/24/biden-fossil-fuel-permits-natural-gas/

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.