LNG is worse than coal.

Guess what the US is flooding the world with.

Author

Brad Johnson
November 01, 2023

PRESENTED BY PUGIBRANCHS

President Joe Biden is making, as far as I can tell, a sincere attempt to fight global warming within the bounds of political reality. The only problem is that physical reality is, in the end, utterly unforgiving. His administration is investing in Green New Deal-type programs—though far from at the scale needed for a Green New Deal—while also pumping billions into programs to appease climate polluters, and using greenwashing language to sell them.

On the Green New Deal front, we’ve got some mixed news to report. On Tuesday, Dominion Energy’s planned 2.6 GW offshore wind farm off Virginia’s coast received a favorable record of decision on its environmental impact from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, while Danish energy developer Ørsted announced it is cancelling its 2.6 GW Ocean Wind I and II projects off the coast of southern New Jersey.

On the greenwashing front, the news is, well, all bad. As we recently discussed, “green” hydrogen isn’t. And now, as Bill McKibben writes, scientist Robert Howarth is out with new research finding that the U.S.’s booming liquefied natural gas exports are a climate killer:

In recent years, Howarth has demonstrated that, domestically, natural gas is no better for the climate than coal, largely owing to the methane leaks associated with it; now, though, it appears that exporting L.N.G., because of the extra leakage of the supercooled gas during transit, could allow even larger amounts of methane to escape into the atmosphere and, hence, could do much more damage to the climate than coal does.

The LNG export boom is being overseen by Biden’s global methane czar Amos “Darwin Mayflower” Hochstein—official title Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security—and White House official Sarah Ladislaw, a former Statoil lobbyist who is now Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Climate and Energy at the US National Security Council. Hochstein and Ladislaw spent Halloween meeting with European officials Björn Seibert and Ditte Juul Jørgensen, European Commission Director-General for Energy. Seibert is European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s chief of staff. From the official read-out:

The discussion focused on reviewing the diversification of Europe's natural gas supply sources and the growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade between the United States and Europe, with the US now by far the largest supplier of LNG to Europe.

Now that’s spooky!

Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is claiming the recovery efforts in Acapulco from the devastation of the explosive Hurricane Otis are going well—but the people of Acapulco have a different story to tell. Obrador says those who talk of suffering and rising death tolls “want to hurt us. What they want is for there to be a lot of death so they can blame us.” No bueno.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and 22 other Senate Democrats have written to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Kahn in opposition to ExxonMobil’s proposed $60 billion acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources and Chevron’s proposed $53 billion acquisition of Hess Corporation.

Schumer’s new counterpart, the oil-funded House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) argues that climate activists are akin to Satan:

When you take God out of the equation, and you remove absolute truths…you got to make all this stuff up. So what they’ve done is, as the devil always does, they take the truth and they turn it upside down. So the radical environmentalists—they actually believe that the environment is God.

At 10 am, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on the science of how climate change is fueling severe weather events. The witnesses are Lawrence Berkeley climate modeler Michael Wehner, climate resilience officer and marine scientist Jennifer Jurado, and former Trump administration technologist Paul Dabbar, who is now at the oil-backed Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth pointed out in 2011, the only reasonable starting assumption is that all weather is inflenced by climate pollution.

At 2:30 pm, the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee holds a hearing on small businesses and America’s outdoor recreation economy, which is being reshaped by global warming. Witnesses include New Hampshire backcountry skier Andrew Drummond and outdoor recreation lobbyist Jessica Wahl Turner.

This afternoon at 4 pm, the House Rules committee is meeting to authorize the floor plan for the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act (H.R. 4820), and Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act (H.R. 4821), both of which have extreme anti-climate provisions, as well as the Israel military supplemental, which would cut $14 billion from the Internal Revenue Service budget1 and authorize $14 billion in military spending for Israel’s genocidal response to Hamas’s war crimes.

The fossil-fueled Storm Ciarán is hurtling toward England and France, bringing 100-mph (okay, 145-170kph) winds, heavy rains and 10-meter waves. A wildfire in Hawaii’s Central Oahu has grown to cover more than a square mile. The Panama Canal is drying up. We’ve screwed up the salt cycle.

Hearings on the Hill:

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected] and  @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky

1 Cutting IRS funding isn’t a very good budget offset, is it? Since doing so would decrease government revenue. It’s why it’s called the Revenue Service!

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