Different Kinds of Winning – by Bill McKibben

Source: Different Kinds of Winning – by Bill McKibben

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When I say I think we’ll win, it’s not because of any inside information; it’s because the logic of this campaign—waged for lonely years by wonderful frontline leaders along the Gulf of Mexico—has unfolded so powerfully in the last few months.

First, campaigners managed to finally comprehend and publicize the lunatic scale of this buildout. People living nearby these enormous facilities have always known they were enormous, but in recent months the rest of us have gotten a much better idea of the scale. So much fracked gas is now pouring out through the Gulf that it wipes out the gains under the president’s IRA clean energy plans; indeed, it wipes out all the emission reductions made since the turn of the century. As hundreds of top climate scientists pointed out this week, if the buildout keeps going as industry intends—and so far the Trump and Biden administrations have granted them every permit they’ve asked far—U.S. LNG exports will eventually account for more greenhouse gas emissions than every car and home and factory in Europe.

Second, new data has given that sense of scale extra heft: above all, Bob Howarth, the Cornell professor who is the planetary authority on methane, pubished new research demonstrating that huge amounts of LNG leak out to the atmosphere during shipping, making it far far worse for the climate even than coal.

Third, new data has demonstrated that these exports raise the price of natural gas for those Americans who still depend on it for cooking and heating—which probably also explains the remarkable polling data showing just how opposed Americans are to fracking the country and then sending the resulting gas off to Asia.

Fourth, more new data has demonstrated that we’re already supplying more than enough to make Europe whole against the cutoff of Russian supplies in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

And fifth—newest and most important of all—America joined 200 other nations earlier this month in Dubai in signing an accord promising that we would “transition away from fossil fuels.”

There is no possible way to read those words and conclude that we should further expand the already world-leading American export machine for fossil fuels. So I would bet that sometime soon—probably before planned civil disobedience outside the Department of Energy in early February—the administration will announce that it’s time to review the process for granting those export licenses. The DOE, to its shame, is still using a 2014 formula to decide if those export licenses are in “the public interest.” Since 2014 the price of renewable energy has dropped 90 percent and the planet’s temperature has spiked; it’s indefensible intellectually or morally to pretend we should just carry on as before.

If the administration does announce a pause on new export licenses, it will be a mighty win. But how they do it will be crucial, because this also represents a chance to reposition the president going into an election year.