The fight against Big Oil has a new target, and it’s leaving the home front

The climate change fight in America is pivoting to a new front. Activists are mounting a new campaign to oppose not the use of fossil fuels by citizens and companies here, but rather the country’s large-scale ramp-up of exports abroad. Their target this time is liquified natural gas—more commonly abbreviated as “LNG.”

As U.S. industries go, LNG is still in its infancy (it isn’t a decade old yet), making it even more remarkable that America became the top exporter globally of natural gas in the first half of 2022. Meanwhile, President Biden has embraced expanding LNG exports with a gusto that environmentalists find alarming, and which appears to at least conflict with his own stated goal of “achieving a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.”

Fracking’s immense success in the late 20th century increased America’s domestic natural gas production, and that is now causing an exports boom. The U.S.’s first LNG export was completed in 2016, and since then, more than two dozen new projects have materialized—some already under construction, though many still await a green light from the Biden administration. Exporting natural gas requires a federal permit; the Obama and Trump administrations granted a number of them to different projects, which are concentrated on the Gulf Coast.

It’s under Biden, though, that the government’s position shifted to geopolitics. The White House sees LNG exports as a boon to European allies, nations historically having an overreliance on Russian energy. Weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Biden struck a deal to ship large volumes of LNG to the European Union to undercut Russia’s supply. All told, America’s exports have now doubled in the past four years, and they’re set to double again by 2027.

On Monday, climate activists Bill McKibben and Lennox Yearwood published a Los Angeles Times op-ed calling it “gobsmackingly bananas” for Biden to continue to authorize more of these LNG projects. They argue that, in fact, “an enormous opportunity looms” for his administration: a “chance to prove to the world that it takes the supply side of the climate challenge as seriously as the demand side.”

McKibben, who led the fight that doomed the Keystone XL pipeline, and Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus and a Louisiana native, write that the massive LNG build-out currently occurring off Louisiana’s coast is “ludicrous” because it is situated in “a place where hurricanes grow ever stronger,” and will hurt poor communities of color the most despite Democrats’ common refrain that low-income communities of color need extra protection because they get hit “first and worst” by the climate crisis.

Other environmental groups, like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, have also grown more vocal in recent months about opposing the boom in U.S. gas exports. Critics argue that, at minimum, the Biden administration must assess the impacts of these projects it’s authorizing more carefully, before telling the fossil fuel industry to have at it.

McKibben et al.’s campaign has yet to draw a response from the White House. But beyond the current administration’s position that exporting more LNG is good for Ukraine and other key U.S. allies, backers also contend that adding new projects could be a net climate good for America—that is, if natural gas displaces coal, a fossil fuel that opponents label “the dirtiest of them all.”

“Ironically, Mr. McKibben and other activists who claim to want to lower global emissions are actually advocating for restricting access to a cleaner form of energy,” a spokesperson for Venture Global, the company behind Calcasieu Pass 2, a large-scale LNG project okayed by the Biden administration, told the Washington Post this week.

Supporters will also argue that LNG exports put energy into the hands of millions of the world’s poorest people. It’s a common counterargument by the pro-drilling side: The best way for people in developing countries to flourish is to make sure they have the same tools that western nations got to use—which, in this case, means fossil fuels. Give an Ethiopian village gas, and it can keep an 8-year-old girl from having to walk eight hours to retrieve water, Jason Isaac, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered initiative, told Fast Company earlier this year, in arguing why we can’t reduce our access to fossil fuels.

Environmentalists, of course, disagree. Not only do they reject the idea that human flourishing hinges on burning fossil fuels—some argue swapping coal for natural gas could make things worse, short term. For instance, LNG releases methane into the atmosphere. Methane has about 25 times more initial global warming potential, per the Environmental Protection Agency, than carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas formed by burning coal.

They’re also eager to try to connect these dots: If America keeps exporting large quantities of natural gas to Europe and Asia, its two fastest-growing markets, they’ll pay lower prices, but that in turn could drive up costs at home, increasing the bills Americans pay to cook and heat or cool their homes during a time of energy inflation. According to environmentalists, if Biden reduces LNG export projects, he could tell voters he’s putting money back into Americans’ pockets.