Manchin's Last Gasp

Stop Big Oil's effort to use this lovely moment to lock in world-breaking LNG export levels

A story. In December of 2015, everyone who worked on climate issues was in Paris for the white-knuckled final negotiations of the historic accords. While that was going on, Big Oil’s friends in Congress passed—almost without debate—an end to the longstanding ban on oil exports from the U.S. I cobbled together—with the help of the Sierra Club’s Mike Brune—what may have been the only oped opposing the measure, in a Paris cafe fueled by pain au chocolat. But the Democratic Senators I reached out to back home laughed—it wasn’t a big deal, they said, and anyway they were getting a production tax credit for wind energy in return. They were wrong: America in a decade has gone from not exporting oil and gas to becoming the world’s biggest producer. Bigger than Russia and the Saudis.

The moral of the story is: Big Oil is sneaky, and they will use moments when attention is diverted (say, by the advent of a truly powerful new presidential candidate) to advance their agenda. And the point of the story is: they’re trying it again.

A couple of days ago—while all of us were paying attention to Brat Summer, heterosectionality, and the general splendor of Kamala Harris’ first week (huge thanks to the members of the climate community who came together online last night to raise huge money for the campaign)—Joe Manchin announced he had cobbled together a new proposal for “permitting reform.” On the face of it, some of the new proposal makes real sense: among other things, it would ease the process of approving the badly needed transmission lines for moving solar and windpower back and forth across the continent.

But remember: Joe Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC. And so it’s not surprising that there’s a huge cost for this sane policy change: the bill will also try and force the approval of huge new LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. This is not only disgusting on environmental justice grounds (watch Roishetta Ozane explain the cost to her community) but it is also the single biggest greenhouse gas bomb on planet earth.

Jeremy Symons, the veteran climate analyst who has supplied the most relevant climate analyses throughout the LNG fight, came up with these numbers last night. If enacted, he said, the LNG portion of the Manchin bill would “lock in new greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 165 coal-fired power plants or more” and “erase the climate benefits of building 50 major renewable electricity transmission lines.” It is exactly, to the letter, what Project 2025 has called for.

And yet it has some actual chance of passing. Martin Heinrichs, the Democratic senator from New Mexico, endorsed it on Wednesday—which makes a certain amount of local sense, since the state derives an outsized share of its government revenues from taxes on gas production. But Heinrichs is selling out the planet to help his state. The question is, how many of his fellow Democrats will go along? Enough to allow this legislation to move through the upper chamber?

Because remember: the ultimate goal of climate policy is not to rewire America so it can use more renewable energy. That is a good goal, and it will make money for solar and wind developers which is why many of them will support this bill. But the goal of climate policy is to prevent the planet from overheating. And if you make renewable energy easier in America at the cost of addicting developing Asian economies to exported American LNG, you have taken an enormous step backwards. (You’ve also screwed over the American consumers who still depend on natural gas and will now pay more, which is one reason Senators like Ed Markey have taken a dim view of this proposed law).

The big green groups have come out strongly against it. Here’s the position of the League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and EarthJustice, and the Sierra Club and Oil Change International. And here’s mine: this week saw the hottest temperatures on our planet in at least the last 125,000 years. Get real.

This week saw the explosion of joy that comes when politicians stand up to business as usual. Don’t undermine all of it with a “deal” whose main beneficiary is Big Oil. Don’t give Joe Manchin a gift on his way out the door. Don’t do what you did in 2015, when you opened the door to the oil and gas export boom. Don’t turn off the same young voters that Biden turned off by approving the Willow oil complex. Don’t get in the way of the momentum we’re trying to build as November approaches.

And on top of all that political reality, there’s reality reality as well. Physics doesn’t get a vote in Congress, but it gets the only vote that matters in the real world. Pay attention to it for once!

In other energy and climate news:

+Genevieve Gunther’s new book is finally out. It’s really interesting and really useful. Here’s a little sampler, from Mother Jones

Her book lays out six key terms that she believes command the conversation, to the detriment of climate action: “alarmist,” “costs,” “growth,” “India and China,” “innovation,” and “resilience.”

These words are often used to prop up fossil fuels: by accusing people who speak out about the risks as overly alarmed, by pitting climate action against economic prosperity, by deflecting attention away from the US and onto other countries, and by protecting the status quo by pointing to carbon removal technologies and societies’ ability to bounce back. The book seeks to debunk these points of view, smartly documenting, for example, how economic models failed to account for the true costs of climate change for so long.

For each term, Guenther offers substitute arguments that “will be hard for fossil fuel interests to appropriate.” Don’t talk about “resilience,” she says, because it implies people can tough out extreme weather; talk about “transformation” instead. The result is a binary approach that suggests there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about the climate. This quest for black-and-white moral clarity risks antagonizing potential allies—such as the climate-concerned folks who think that carbon removal has promise or advocates who worry that a message could backfire if it sounds too scary, not to mention younger Republicans, two-thirds of whom favor prioritizing renewable energy over expanding fossil fuels. But that’s a risk Guenther is willing to take.

+Speaking of language, Jonathan Watts argues persuasively in the Guardian that “petrostate” should define not just Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but countries (like the US) whose economies are far more diversified but where petroleum interests play a huge role in the government

Studies suggest, for example, that 25% of US Congress seats are held by climate deniers, which is not representative of a country where less than 15% of the public hold similar views. Government policies are similarly unbalanced with far more subsidies for fossil fuels than renewables, despite overwhelming public support for an energy transition in all of these countries.

As a result, it is possible to discern a group of “other petrostates” in democratic, economically diversified countries that do not fit the classic definition, but often behave in a similarly reckless manner when it comes to the climate, putting the interests of the fossil fuel industry above their domestic populations and global stability.

The US is the standout example but it is not alone as production figures in the new Guardian investigation, drawing on data from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), reveal. The analysis of industry data says that Australia is projected to award 20 new licences in 2024, which could generate an estimated 217m tonnes of carbon pollution, which would be the most since 2009 and more than the past five years combined.

Norway may have cultivated a green image, but it is forecast to hand out 80 oil and gas licences this year, which will add up to its biggest contribution to global emissions since 2009. Canada has missed every emissions target it has ever set. And unless the new Labour government acts to prevent it, the UK is projected to award an all-time record 72 oil and gas licences this year, which could result in an estimated 101m tonnes of planet-heating pollution.

+The Wall Street Journal offers the best account of Trump’s structural advantage, which is the support of oil zillionaires eager for an absolutely free hand.

“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country by far, we are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy,” Trump said during his prime-time address.

The speech was music to the ears of oil billionaires Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer, Jeffery Hildebrand of Hilcorp, and George Bishop of GeoSouthern Energy. Since March, they, together with their spouses and companies, have contributed at least $9.9 million to Trump-aligned committees and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission data. 

Those donations make the magnates among some of Trump’s biggest donors and represent an increase from past election cycles. Their contributions and those of another oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of CrownRock, topped $16 million since October, compared with the more than $20 million the tycoons donated to fund Trump’s 2016 and 2020 bids combined. 

Energy policy is shaping up as a key campaign issue. Some of Trump’s allies immediately attacked Vice President Kamala Harris’s energy record this week as she moved to nail down the Democratic nomination following President Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Harris previously backed a ban on fracking as a presidential candidate in 2019, but was also part of a Biden administration that presided over record oil production.

The oil executives are banking on promises from the former president and his allies for an energy agenda that is more stridently pro-fossil fuel than Trump’s first administration. Many of Trump’s top oil backers are openly skeptical about the effects of climate change, in contrast with the industry’s biggest companies, and want to slash regulations and subsidies for green energy.

+Apartment dweller without a roof of your own? Germans have installed 500,000 “solar balconies” across the country

New data shows another 220,000 PV devices were installed in the first half of 2024. A boom born from Germany’s “very strong solar culture”, in the words of one expert.

Solar balconies are a piece of the wider energy transition across Europe, explains Jan Osenberg, a policy advisor at the SolarPower Europe association.

“We see them as a subset of rooftop solar, but also as something different,” he tells Euronews Green. “We basically see it as a trend to use all possible artificial infrastructure for solar generation.”

Train tracks, motorways, carparks, car roofs, cemeteries and building facades… the list of structures getting a solar makeover goes on and on.