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Take Action to Stop Trump from Exporting U.S. Gas [1]

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Date: 2025-03-06

“By unleashing American energy, we will defeat inflation and dramatically lower costs. ... It's called, ‘Drill, baby, drill!” Trump reprised his campaign pledge when he addressed Congress this week. On the campaign trail, his pledge was often coupled with a vow to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) to foreign markets.

Earlier in the year, Biden had paused approvals of LNG export projects to allow the Department of Energy (DOE) time to study their impacts and determine if they are in the public interest. Without the pause, LNG exports might have gone on largely unnoticed. Instead, it provided some of the Trumped-up drama of the energy emergency declared on Day 1 when the new president ended the pause.

Nevertheless, the Department of Energy concluded its study shortly before Biden left office. It was a surprisingly frank assessment that found that “the amounts that have already been approved will be more than sufficient to meet global demand for U.S. LNG for decades to come.” And it’s a good thing because the study also confirmed what we in the environmental advocacy community have been saying for years. LNG is a dangerous process that harms our environment, health, and safety and contributes to climate change.

The study pointed out other impacts, though. “DOE analysis exposes a triple-cost increase to U.S. consumers from increasing LNG exports – the increasing domestic price of the natural gas itself, increases in electricity prices (natural gas being a key input in many U.S. power markets), and the increased costs for consumers from the pass-through of higher costs to U.S. manufacturers.”

So we’ve got a president who wants to “unleash” a product on the global market for which there is no demand and that poses a variety of risks to the public.

If the demand for LNG is already met, how will Trump create a market for it? Tariffs. Trump is using the threat of tariffs as a cudgel to pressure countries to buy our gas. Several countries are considering becoming customers. In fact, the EU is even considering relaxing its upcoming emissions rules that would fine importers.

Any tariffs Trump would impose on uncooperative countries would only compound the economic impacts on consumers here caused by the imports going to the cooperative ones. It’s a lose-lose for consumers who are already taking out bank loans to buy eggs and watching their Social Security contributions circling the drain.

There is some hopeful news. The release of the DOE’s LNG export study triggered a public comment period that was scheduled to close on February 18. Our Better Path Coalition in Pennsylvania and many other organizations urged members to submit comments by January 19, the day before the inauguration, in case Trump ended the comment period early. People responded in a big way. The Federal Register lists that nearly 97,000 comments were received before the February 18 deadline.

Trump did not end the comment period early. In fact, he took the advice of his advisers who told him to extend the comment period to allow time to refute the study. We now have until March 20 to comment.

We’ve seen so far that when the public speaks out in big numbers, the administration backs down. We need to keep growing the number of comments in these last two weeks of the comment period. If the numbers don’t convince him to back down, then our comments will be helpful to the attorneys fighting the exports in court.

We’ve made it easy for you to comment. Our EZ form asks you to write opening and closing sentences and select points to include from short lists we provide. We’re formatting your comments as PDFs and uploading them to Regulations.gov. We’re also storing copies of your comments and the tracking numbers in case Trump changes his mind and removes them.

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