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Zero Carbon

With Chris Hatch
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January 26th 2024
Feature story

A freeze for LNG

Climate activists in the U.S. are celebrating. The Biden administration announced that decisions on Big Gas projects will now take the climate into account. And that means delaying decisions on LNG terminals so the Department of Energy can conduct a full evaluation.

The next looming project is a towering showcase of the absurdities of the current fossil age. Proposed for the rapidly disappearing shores of Louisiana, the engineers designing Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) plan to defend it with a 31-foot seawall to protect against the impacts it would be accelerating.

The region is “a very, very bad location” for LNG projects, Torbjörn Törnqvist, a professor in Earth and environmental sciences at Tulane University, told E&E News last year.

“If someone gave me a map of the United States and asked me, ‘Can you point out the most vulnerable coastline?’ Well, this would be pretty much it.”

The proposed CP2 terminal is big. Really big. The biggest so far in the U.S., which has become the biggest LNG exporter in the world. Bill McKibben calls it “mammoth.”

“Biden is halting the biggest fossil fuel expansion on Earth,” McKibben wrote this week, referring to CP2 and the other LNG proposals that will also be subjected to a climate test.

There are 16 LNG proposals in the queue behind CP2. But, as the “2” indicates, there’s already an LNG operation at Calcasieu Pass. The U.S. now has seven terminals in operation and another five under construction.

The United States surged to become the world’s biggest producer of fossil fuels, and now the largest exporter of fossil gas. All at a point where it’s become clear that meaningfully tackling climate change means no new investment in fossil fuel projects.

The political dynamics are similar on both sides of the border. Just as certain Prairie premiers manage to present record levels of oil and gas production as an industry under attack from the feds, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, apparently dissatisfied with becoming the world’s biggest fossil fueller, is blasting the Biden administration for its “war on domestic energy.”

A climate test for LNG “would amount to a functional ban on new LNG export permits,” McConnell seethed on the Senate floor.

McConnell appears to have forgotten to accommodate industry’s claim that fossil gas is a net benefit for the climate. But the real party boss sees no need for nuance on this (or any other) issue, and it’s the Biden-Trump rematch that’s the most consequential backdrop to the new LNG test.

“We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” Donald Trump declared immediately after winning the Iowa caucuses this month. “Right away,” he emphasized. In fact, for several months, Trump has been answering “drill, baby, drill” to anyone asking about his first move if he wins the November election.

The Biden camp obviously knew they were chumming the water by pausing LNG. The campaign is clearly choosing to run on climate, not away from it. And the White House statement on LNG was remarkably blunt. It begins with framing you never hear from Conservatives or Republicans: “In every corner of the country and the world, people are suffering the devastating toll of climate change.”

After a brief summary of the devastation — wildfires, floods and record temperatures — U.S. President Joe Biden describes the clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act as “the largest climate investment in the history of the world.”

And then, the crucial point you hear much too rarely from any politician: “to transition away from the fossil fuels that jeopardize our planet and our people.”

“This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time,” Biden says.

From front-line communities in Louisiana, to the sterile offices of Washington, D.C., advocates are celebrating a surprisingly short campaign. It was barely six months ago that the climate movement really began to prioritize LNG en masse, rallying behind environmental justice activists fighting the LNG buildout on the Gulf Coast.

In Canada, climate advocates seized the moment to call for provincial governments and the feds to abandon plans for fracked gas exports.

One precedent for the Biden pause came from north of the border. The government of Quebec and the federal government rejected a gas liquefaction plant near the port of Saguenay in 2022. The project would have impacted the cultural heritage of the Innu First Nation and species like the beluga whale.

And on climate change, the assessments wordily concluded it would have “significant effects resulting from greenhouse gas emissions given the effect that the project’s greenhouse gas emission could have on the achievement of Quebec’s and Canada’s greenhouse gas emission and climate change objectives.” (Only a big fossil fuel project can pack three “greenhouse gas emissions” into one sentence.)

British Columbia is due for a provincial election just weeks before Americans go to the polls. And environmental groups in the province want a queue of LNG proposals nixed. A coalition campaigning under the banner “Frack Free BC” applauded Biden’s LNG pause as a “victory for affordability and the climate.” (It’s a little-known fact that LNG exports increase gas costs domestically.)

“The decision could not be more clear for Premier [David] Eby and the B.C. government,” said Sven Biggs, oil and gas program director at Stand.earth. “Will they align themselves with the Biden White House and progressives across North America on the side of everyday consumers and the climate — or will they side with Donald Trump and lobbyists for Big Oil and Gas?”

But the decision is more complex than Trump versus Biden. The big LNG proposals for the West Coast are led, or supported, by First Nations governments. And the nations have a compelling case: the massive LNG Canada project got approved (with owners like Shell, Malaysia’s Petronas, and PetroChina). Where’s the justice in rejecting smaller projects owned by the Haisla or Nisga’a Nations?

Frankly, there isn’t any. In a climate-sane world, LNG Canada would never have been approved, both because of its direct impacts and the precedent. Now that it’s near completion, the question becomes: How many other LNG projects get added on?

There is, tragically, "lots of complexity,” the David Suzuki Foundation’s John Young told me this week. “But it all adds up to a truly terrible idea."

The roundup

Headline of the week goes to U.K.-based The Independent:

The Canadian Press went with: Pollution from oilsands far higher than official estimates, new research shows.

The point is that if you fly over the oilsands, you find actual emissions dwarf what is officially reported. In a previous study, the authors found that to be true for carbon dioxide. This time around, the researchers found volatile organic compounds are also underreported.

And headline-maker of the week goes to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, first for participating in a “white grievance festival” and then imploring Tucker Carlson to “put Steven Guilbeault in your crosshairs” — only days after a man fired a long gun and threw a Molotov cocktail inside Edmonton city hall.

“White grievance festival” is Max Fawcett’s description of the events he lays out in Danielle Smith’s dangerous dance with Tucker Carlson.

Gassy politics

Enbridge is pushing to hook more Ontario homes onto gas and expand its network. And it’s pushing into politics to do it.

The Ontario Energy Board recently ruled Enbridge can’t raise rates and charge existing customers for the cost of expanding its infrastructure. It was a blow to the gas company as well as developers and the provincial government has waded in, vowing to overrule the decision. You can read all about it in Ford government’s vow to override energy ruling could make housing even more expensive.

Now, Enbridge is arguing before the Ontario Energy Board that the federal Conservatives are leading in the polls and would repeal the carbon price. That would change the cost-benefit analysis of switching to heat pumps, says Enbridge.

Enbridge is “pursuing any and all means to be able to continue to expand its gas network and hook up new customers to gas,” Environmental Defence programs director Keith Brooks told Canada’s National Observer.

“It's unfortunate that Enbridge seems to be banking on a repeal of carbon pricing and that they don't want a survey out there that talks up the benefits of heat pumps, both from an economic perspective and an environmental perspective.”

‘No future for our farm’

Alberta rancher Bob Tolman writes in Maclean’s that “our family farm has thrived in Alberta for more than a century — but the dire weather conditions of the past few years have spelled its end.”

“Water is everything to a farmer, and without rain and snowpack melting into river basins, crops suffer and cattle have nothing to graze.”

Clean Creatives

“Over 50 Canadian advertisers and PR agencies have joined a 900-strong global group that has pledged not to work for the fossil fuel industry,” reports Marc Fawcett-Atkinson.

Fossil fuel companies and their trade associations are “not very good” at greenwashing, says Sarah Riley, whose company joined Clean Creatives. They hire agencies where the younger generation of communications professionals is acutely aware of the climate crisis.

Ontario’s first electric fire truck

Brampton is the first city in Ontario to get an electric fire truck, reports Abdul Matin Sarfraz. “(It’s) the second city in Canada to buy an electric fire truck; the first was Vancouver, which purchased a similar vehicle from the same company in 2023.”

Passing the mic

I’ll leave you with thoughts and writing from two of your fellow Zero Carbon readers.

Renota wrote about the new climate denial, especially targeting young people. “Back when Microsoft was the major player in tech … they maintained their monopoly using the same tactics,” she writes. “We called it ‘spreading FUD.’”

F - fear

U - uncertainty

D - doubt

“Their goal was not to win (they were being bullies), but to make people uncertain enough that they didn’t take action… It’s a great slogan for a complex psychological/gaslighting trick that people on the receiving end are likely to remember.”

And David Chernushenko writes from Ottawa: “Given the attention you are giving to disinformation and gaslighting, I thought you might enjoy/appreciate my modest act of civil disobedience…”

Chernushenko found himself blindsided by fossil fuel ads in his local arena. So he took some direct action.

“As usual, in a hockey arena, it was the one who retaliated that got the penalty,” he notes wryly.

You’ll find his sharp but humorous version of events published in the Ottawa Citizen: Ad in Brewer Arena by Canadian oil and gas was simply gaslighting: What I was seeing was a campaign crafted to confuse.