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 Based on an unreviewed paper with what we view as overly narrow calculations and sorely outdated evidence, it seems the activists assume that the inclusion of climate criteria in the permit decision would end the export of LNG — which they believe would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.
Furthermore, world energy markets and our allies in Europe and East Asia are relying on the U.S. to serve as a clean backstop supplier of LNG exports to avoid market shocks like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Because American natural gas exports provide such significant geopolitical and economic benefits, and because they provide world markets that lack other coal substitutes with a key source of lower-polluting LNG, a well-constructed test for the climate impact of LNG exports would not be the death knell of the export industry supposed by both sides of this debate. If the groups pushing for a test were to write it themselves, the simplistic result could cause significant damage to the global environment and world energy markets.
By contrast, a well-designed calculation could serve as a rigorous and transparent benchmark for assessing the relative climate benefits of U.S. natural gas and the development of differentiated markets for lower-methane gas with like-minded green importing allies. An honest approach to evaluating the climate and geopolitical impacts of LNG facilities would take into account the climate costs of mining more coal, burning more coal and using coal as a chemical feedstock. A fair test would acknowledge air pollution differences and coal mine methane leaks that exceed natural gas methane emissions by likely underestimated official measurements. It would account for the boon to Putin if U.S. LNG shipments to Europe and Asia declined, sending those markets back into the fold of the Russian petrostate.
The U.S. reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2% in 2023, largely as a result of lower coal use. The U.S. was instrumental in averting an energy catastrophe in Europe following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There is finally a path forward to help Asia reduce its dependence on coal by switching to cleaner U.S. LNG. The synergies of natural gas electricity production with intermittent wind and solar are paying huge climate benefits. And future technology deployments in carbon capture and hydrogen may require infrastructure innovations developed in gas transport.
Some far-left environmentalists seem willing to throw all of that away in a misguided attempt to just keep all of the oil and gas in the ground. Who benefits from this new push to stymie the U.S. LNG infrastructure buildout? Ultimately, it would be the coal industry and Putin. Out of a misguided fear of stranded assets and infrastructure lock-in, some greens believe that turning off U.S. exports will reduce emissions, simple as that. However, America exports LNG to meet real global energy demand, and simply cutting off supplies of gas does not mean that demand disappears; instead, energy importers will be forced to buy dirtier fuels and are likely to reward autocratic suppliers like Russia.
The energy transition is a global and gradual process that cannot be implemented immediately with only good intentions to power it. We have no choice but to build our way through the energy transition with the energy system we have.
There are credible environmental organizations working on pragmatic greenhouse gas reductions from energy supply chains in concert with industry, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and ambitious policies in the Inflation Reduction Act will allow the Biden administration to push already declining emissions down even further. The real absurdity here lies in an unreviewed working paper using 30-year-old numbers that, in a matter of months, has ascended to seemingly steer national policy at the highest levels of the Biden administration. Our geopolitical allies, the climate, the U.S. economy and the electoral future of the Democrats depend on better policy.
This op-ed was originally published in The Messenger.
