By Elan Sykes and Neel Brown
Under pressure from green activists, the Biden administration is considering adopting a climate test in permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities. Coming out of the pandemic-driven supply shocks and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American LNG exports were the largest of any single country in 2023 and served crucial roles in the U.S. economy, the environment and geopolitical support for European allies.
The activists hope to stop LNG infrastructure projects in spite of these benefits, apparently out of misguided trust for a single study and seemingly without concern for the political backlash among working-class and swing-state voters at home and allies abroad. The form of policy demand these left-wing activists have adopted is to require the inclusion of climate impacts in the federal government’s calculation of public interest in permits for LNG export facilities. Based on an unreviewed paper with what we view as overly narrow calculations and sorely outdated evidence, it seems the activists assume that the inclusion of climate criteria in the permit decision would end the export of LNG — which they believe would constitute climate progress. But gas is cleaner than coal, and because U.S. gas is relatively clean and getting even cleaner due to signature Biden policies, the climate calculus of growing liquefied gas exports does not mean that a comprehensive test of their impact would bear out the anti-export position of some environmental activists.
The economic and political risk for Democrats is enormous. President Biden knows that his political future is tied directly to issues like inflation and to winning back working-class voters in swing states like Pennsylvania. Remember that Biden made a late 2020 campaign stop in Pennsylvania for the explicit purpose of letting voters know that he was not against fracking. To allow the far left to derail the natural gas successes of this administration would be electorally disastrous.
This story was originally published by The Messenger on January 18, 2024.
