Gas Will Be the First Big Climate Fight of the Trump Era
5 min read
When the tanker ships come toward the tiny town of Cameron, Louisiana, Travis Dardar, a shrimp fisherman, can hear their wake coming before he sees it, he told me earlier this year. They’re there to pick up natural gas that’s been supercooled to a liquid state at a sprawling export facility, built atop hundreds of wetland acres in the past few years, and to transport that gas to ports in Europe and Asia.
On the Gulf Coast, the rapid expansion of the United States’ gas-export ambitions is impossible to miss: Last year, the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and was building many of these enormous new export terminals. Then, in January, the Biden administration paused permitting for new exports and started analyzing the economic, national-security, and climate impacts of expanding natural-gas exports. That decision was hailed by activists as a tentative victory against the export terminals they’d dubbed “climate bombs” for the decades of future emissions they’d lock in. But no one I spoke with earlier this year in Louisiana, home to a large share of the built and proposed terminals, thought the pause would last: Opponents of liquified natural gas (known as LNG) expected that if Joe Biden won reelection, he’d eventually approve more terminals; none doubted that Donald Trump would.
Now the Biden administration has essentially written a playbook for LNG opponents to use in blocking these projects. Yesterday, the administration released the analysis of the LNG industry ordered when the pause on permitting began. The report was reportedly hurried to conclusion in these last weeks of the administration. And it suggests that the economic, climate, and national-security arguments for gas exporting don’t hold up. Now when the Trump administration moves to expand the country’s gas-export infrastructure, as the incoming president has promised, opponents have the evidence needed to turn that move into a dragged-out legal fight. The country’s present and future as the world’s largest gas exporter, and as a major contributor to climate change, will turn on the outcome.
The conclusions of the report are measured yet damning. The Department of Energy did not outright advise banning new exports of natural gas. But, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm wrote in a statement, the department found that “unfettered exports” of American gas would reduce supply domestically, potentially driving up wholesale gas prices in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. The report also found that increasing LNG exports could generate 1.5 gigatons of direct greenhouse-gas emissions a year by 2050. That’s equivalent to about a quarter of current annual U.S. emissions, and would more than eclipse the emission reductions the country has made since 2000. If the department’s predictions are correct, the U.S. would be essentially abandoning any pretense of trying to limit climate change. The LNG industry has long countered that it can use carbon-capture technology to counteract its emissions. But that technology is far from functional at any meaningful scale. Even when the Energy Department researchers factored in hypothetical “aggressive” use of carbon capture and storage, emissions were projected to rise.
In the report, the Biden administration also says that its original argument for LNG exports—that Europe needed the gas for energy security during the Russian war with Ukraine—has fallen apart. Demand in Europe is plateauing and is expected to decline, and instead, the increased exports from the U.S. would mostly go to benefit China, already the world’s largest LNG importer, Granholm wrote. This has long been pointed out by LNG’s opponents; it is striking to see the facts laid out by the federal government. The continued pace of LNG exports is “neither sustainable nor advisable,” Granholm wrote.
This marks a major departure in tone for a Democratic administration. As the writer and climate activist Bill McKibben notes, Democrats going back to Barack Obama have touted the American gas boom, glossing it as a step toward a cleaner power source than crude oil or coal. Kamala Harris even made a point to reverse her 2020 position on the topic during her recent campaign, promising that she wouldn’t ban fracking and touting America’s natural-gas boom in response to the only climate question asked at the only presidential debate where she was a participant. But the DOE report makes clear that liquefied natural gas is neither a form of clean energy nor a bridge to a cleaner future. In fact, exporting more of it, Granholm wrote, would serve mostly to generate “wealth for the owners of export facilities.”
I’ve heard that exact sentiment before, from John Allaire, who worked for oil companies (Amoco, which became part of BP) for 30 years but who opposes the giant LNG plant near his property in Cameron, and a second that is slated to be built right up against his property line. The projects he worked on as an environmental engineer sent oil to local refineries in the U.S. to fuel American industry, he told me; these new export terminals are destroying the fragile coastal ecosystem where he lives while helping China fuel its economy. In his view, exporting more gas serves only the interests of methane sales or transportation business; “it will never be in the domestic public interest to sell our finite, critical natural resources to the highest overseas bidder,” he said. The Biden administration has now situated its official analysis of LNG exports closer to that view than ever before.
The report itself does nothing to block plans by Trump to lift the pause on LNG-export terminals on his “very first day back.” Proponents of these terminals say they are an economic boon to the places where they are built, and create jobs in regions that need them. (Most of these jobs are connected to constructing the terminals, and are temporary.) The American Gas Association condemned the DOE report as a means to justify the “mistake” of Biden’s LNG pause; the financial research firm S&P Global put out a report the same day that found that LNG exports contribute $400 billion to American GDP, and that the pause and other regulatory measures jeopardize an additional $250 billion in incremental GDP.
Regardless of administration, in the years prior to the pause, the DOE never denied any company an LNG-export permit. To LNG opponents such as James Hiatt, a former oil-industry worker turned environmental advocate in Louisiana, the DOE’s analysis validates the “harsh reality” of living up against the terminals and could be a useful legal tool, he told me. With Republicans about to control all three branches of government, though, he wouldn’t predict how the coming fight against new export infrastructure would go. Still, to justify issuing future permits, the Department of Energy must determine that each new export operation is in the public interest. And now the Department of Energy has made a case for why it isn’t.
