Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we turn to our Climate Story of the Week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. On Friday, the Biden administration paused a decision on whether or not to approve what would be the largest natural gas export terminal in the United States. Instead, it has directed the Energy Department to evaluate the project's impact on climate change first. The proposed terminal called Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, is being planned for the Louisiana coastline.

If approved, it would involve bringing gas extracted via fracking through a new pipeline. At the terminal, the gas would be condensed into liquid, chilled, and sent to markets around the world. Now, climate activists are referring to the terminal as a carbon mega-bomb. The Guardian reports it would ship up to 24 million tons of liquified natural gas or LNG each year once built. The department has never before rejected a proposed natural gas project on these grounds. There are 16 other proposed terminals, which might face the same fate.

This policy decision one way or another is a very big deal and, in fact, for a country, the United States, which is now the largest liquid natural gas exporter in the world. Climate activists are lauding the Biden administration's new position as a victory. Others see it as Biden's way to appease climate activists while not really changing that much. Joining us now to break down the Biden administration's pause on natural gas export at CP2 as well as the environmental, political, and economic implications is Robinson Meyer, founding executive director of Heatmap, a relatively new climate-focused media company. Hey, Robinson, welcome back to WNYC.

Robinson Meyer: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get granular on both the natural gas export industry in the US, which a lot of listeners know very little about, and why the Biden administration is pausing this terminal now. First, as I said, since our focus is climate, activists have called this project a carbon mega-bomb. Can you explain just the scope of this terminal and what some fear the environmental impact might be?

Robinson Meyer: Yes, absolutely. CP2 itself is proposed to export about 20 million tons per year of liquid natural gas, which would increase US liquid natural gas exports at their current rate by 20%. By the time CP2 would be billed, US exports will be much higher than they are now because there is just already locked-in growth into the system. There's already terminals that basically have mostly been built and are just waiting to open, but it would represent a major expansion of US liquid natural gas capacity.

I think there's really two things that I would call out about it. The first is that CP2 just by itself is a very pollution-intensive proposal. It would emit just from the site itself about two coal plants worth of carbon pollution and, in fact, be the second most carbon pollution facility of any kind in Louisiana. I think the second thing is that CP2 is really just part of a wave of proposed new liquid natural gas export terminals that are slated to come online across the Gulf Coast.

I should add that while this announcement initially was that the Biden administration would pause CP2's proposal by itself, what it has done since then is actually pause all pending applications to the Department of Energy for new liquid natural gas export terminals to review their impact on the climate and basically how much US liquid natural gas exports should increase, what that would mean for the climate, how we should think about it, and so on.

Brian Lehrer: This is a big deal decision by the Biden administration. Let me ask you to give our listeners some of the economic context here because you're right. Although the United States only began exporting liquified natural gas in 2016, it is now the world's top exporter of that fossil fuel. For people who might not know, can you give us a bit of background on how new this is at all, 2016, it's like yesterday, and how the US became the biggest exporter of this energy source?

Robinson Meyer: Yes, absolutely. I think it makes sense actually to go back to the mid-2000s because back in the mid-2000s, when energy planners and experts and engineers were looking at what fossil fuels the US had and what it was believed to have, they actually thought the US was about to run out of natural gas. There was this concern through the late Bush administration that the US would soon not have natural gas.

We had a very natural-gas-intensive energy system already. People use it to heat their homes in New York, certainly in New Jersey where I'm from. The concern was that we were going to run out of domestic natural gas to mine. Companies started to build natural gas import terminals along the Gulf Coast. It was kind of a new thing. At that point, Japan had really been the first country to experiment with importing liquified natural gas.

The idea that the US would import liquified natural gas was very strange, but companies started to invest in these big facilities. Then in the late 2000s, fracking happened. We discovered that there were enormous quantities of natural gas that were previously not thought to be economical to extract that were now completely accessible and, in fact, very cheap. The US went from believing it would have a shortage of natural gas to realizing that it would have a surplus.

In fact, so much that we could burn natural gas for centuries and we would be fine. That would be disastrous for the climate obviously. Economically, it's there to consume. Those companies that had built these natural gas import terminals along the Gulf Coast, many of them retrofitted to being natural gas export terminals because suddenly, now, there was a surplus of natural gas. The first one of those opened in 2016.

Since then, trade has really expanded enormously. It really picked up after Russia began throttling natural gas exports to Europe in the run-up to what we now know was the invasion of Ukraine. Then after the invasion of Ukraine itself, Russia was messing with its natural gas exports to Europe in such a way that really messed up prices within Europe. The US wound up stepping into that breach and expanding exports as much as it could to support the European economy.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of it is going to Europe. Some of it is because of the Russia-Ukraine war. That's really interesting. Talk more then about the potential environmental impact of this industry expanding even more in the United States because natural gas, some people may remember, has long been touted as cleaner than other types of fossil fuels at least. For example, we saw the US Energy Information Agency, so part of the federal government, put it this way on their website, "Burning natural gas for energy results in fewer emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide than burning coal or petroleum products to produce an equal amount of energy."

I guess then burning those products. New reports are saying that this natural gas terminal could actually be worse than coal and you were putting it somewhat in that context before. What are the climate experts claiming if this were really to expand further as an industry in the United States and there were to be this dozen and more new liquid natural gas exporting facilities that are on the docket?

Robinson Meyer: To do the whole math here, I think, is really complicated, so I'm going to try to build it one by one. At just the root level, natural gas emits less greenhouse gas pollution than coal. If you just have a unit of natural gas there in your laboratory and a unit of coal and you burn them, you're going to get less carbon from the natural gas. There'll be less carbon pollution, less greenhouse gas emissions from the natural gas for the same amount of energy. That's exactly right.

I think, generally, over the past two decades, as we've realized, there is this surplus of natural gas in the United States in our domestic electricity grid. In the US power generating system, that huge amount of cheap natural gas has really driven out coal from the system. We've replaced all these coal plants with natural gas plants. They produce electricity more cheaply and with fewer carbon emissions. That has been actually the primary driver of America's decrease in greenhouse gas emissions over the past 10, 15 years. Domestically, we tend to think of natural gas as, yes, being cleaner than coal.

Recently, there have been a series of studies that, I should add, have not been published in a scientific journal. There's really two big studies or even one. It claims that natural gas as a system might be more damaging than burning coal. In fact, if you look at the entire system that we use to extract natural gas from the ground, move it across the territory through pipelines, store it, compress it maybe, get it ready to burn, get it ready for export, move it on ships across the ocean, if you look at that whole system, this one study by a scientist named Robert Howarth, he alleges that it is so leaky.

That system is so leaky across the board that natural gas is 24 times worse than coal. In fact, he says if you look at the absolute worst-case scenario, it's almost 300 times worse than coal for the climate. Now, I should add, this study hasn't been published in a scientific journal. There's a lot of disagreement about how exactly you should interpret this math, how earth really takes warming that happens in the next 10 or 20 years much more seriously than warming that happens in the next century. Other climate scientists disagree with that way of weighting emissions, but the basic issue is that natural gas itself contains methane or mostly is methane.

Methane is a greenhouse gas itself. It actually, on a short-term level, is far worse for the climate. It traps more heat at a very short-term level than carbon dioxide does. If you have this leaky system and it emits a lot of natural gas unburned into the air, then that would be very bad for the climate. What this recent campaign against liquid natural gas export terminals has been about among climate activists has been they say, "Look at this study. Natural gas is way worse than we thought." It's especially way worse if you look at it as this global liquified natural gas system. Therefore, we need to shut it down right now.

Brian Lehrer: Has the boom in liquified natural gas production in the United States made us energy-independent or let's say extremely less dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia? A lot of people, especially now, are looking for the US to be less dependent on anything involving us in the Middle East than we have been in the past.

Robinson Meyer: It definitely has. I think that is what is so interesting about this decision and what produces so many of the different ways of thinking about this decision in a way. First of all, America's ability to export a lot of natural gas has been a very big deal during the Ukraine war. It definitely helped the European economy that natural gas was there to be directed to help Europe.

Now, climate activists would say, "Yes, this natural gas may have been helpful to Europe in the past year or two, but Europe is going to be able to solve its problems with clean energy going forward. They don't really need our gas five years from now, 10 years from now. What they certainly don't need is an increase in export capacity." Right now, the other major exporter of liquified natural gas is Qatar.

I think what a lot of what US natural gas exports do is, "If we are not selling a country gas, probably Qatar will. If we're both selling a lot of gas, maybe countries that were not planning on building gas import capacity may build gas import capacity." It's very hazy how this works out. I think it absolutely has led to the US energy system being less coupled to oil prices. There's ways for us to generate energy that don't directly rely on Saudi Arabia or OPEC.

There's another dynamic that people sometimes bring up, which is the more export capacity for natural gas that we build in the US, the more coupled US domestic gas prices and the global price for natural gas become because these markets become more and more related, right? Potentially, by 2027, we'll be exporting about 20% of all natural gas we extract in the United States. That could lead to natural gas prices in the US getting higher. Even though that would give the US a lot of leverage and energy global geopolitics, it would actually maybe decrease our independence by raising costs for consumers.

Brian Lehrer: Right, because US consumers would be competing with the consumers that the companies want to ship to abroad to make more of a profit.

Robinson Meyer: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I hear the complexity there. I wonder if you think politically that this is going to become an issue in the presidential race this year with Biden now putting on pause this liquid natural gas exporting facility in Louisiana and possibly many more that the industry would like to build. We know Trump is already running on, "Drill, baby, drill!" Remember, Trump said he would be a dictator, but only on day one, and to do two things: close the border and drill, baby, drill. You don't have to be Donald Trump to be a Republican who's taken this position. Here's Senator Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor last Wednesday on Biden's decision to pause this export facility.

Senator Mitch McConnell: This move would amount to a functional ban on new LNG export permits. The administration's war on affordable domestic energy has been bad news for American workers and consumers alike.

Brian Lehrer: Almost awake for the day there, Mitch McConnell, who was saying the administration's war on affordable domestic energy has been bad news for American workers and consumers alike if he was too marble mouth for you to understand the words in the clip. Then later, McConnell said it was liquid natural gas exports from the United States that allowed Europe to reduce its reliance on Russian energy in the wake of their attack on Ukraine. If the Biden administration is foolish enough to shut down our exports or saddle their national interest analysis with Green New Deal schemes, I hope they understand which nation's interests they're advancing, meaning Russia. Do you see this as a big presidential issue this year?

Robinson Meyer: I do. I think it's actually the main way to understand this move is maybe as a piece of presidential politics and presidential election politics. From the Biden campaign side, what I think Biden officials and Biden campaign workers and the President himself have noticed is that despite passing several laws that are going to advance US decarbonization, first and foremost, the Inflation Reduction Act, that news has just not broken through among younger voters.

Younger voters don't seem to have realized the extent or maybe they don't believe the extent to which the Inflation Reduction Act and other recent laws and actions by the Biden administration will reduce US emissions. Younger voters are quite angry at the President for a substantive reason for the Israel-Gaza war. The Biden administration knows third that when the Biden administration approved the Willow Pipeline through Alaska, that was seen as a great betrayal by climate activists and by young voters.

In fact, it seems like the Willow Pipeline approval, which is this big oil pipeline in Alaska that the administration approved last year, seems to have broken through way more than the Inflation Reduction Act ever did. By putting these natural gas terminals on pause, the Biden administration seems to think that it can hold off another betrayal story, that it can show that it is interested not only in expanding clean energy but in slowing the growth of fossil fuels. On the Trump administration side, Donald Trump actually promised this weekend that if he took office, he would unpause this pause. He would restart the approval of these projects and would try to expand US liquid natural gas export capacity.

Brian Lehrer: We did get to it specifically already. I want to get one caller on here who I think is going to say, "We can have the best of both worlds. We can have the benefits of liquid natural gas but still crack down on its potential climate harms." Mark in Eastern New York, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hello, Brian. It's very simple thing that I have to say. Methane is a terrible greenhouse gas if it gets in the atmosphere, but it doesn't have to get in the atmosphere if you fix the leaks. The leaks are the problem. What we just need is to fix the leaks so that we keep the methane natural gas in the pipes and in the liquid form, and then the ships don't let it get out into the air.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, thank you. Are engineers saying that Mark's fix is possible or not possible or have you heard that proposal before?

Robinson Meyer: Not only is it possible, the US is doing it. I think this sits at a really interesting angle to the claim by climate activists that natural gas may be much more polluting than we previously think. The EPA has just implemented new regulations. Limiting leaks from natural gas pipelines, from natural gas facilities, it will result in major, major reductions of these leaks in the US.

Congress has actually backed up that regulation with penalties. If you don't comply with the regulation and you're still leaky, you have to pay a tax on the amount of methane that you leak into the air. What some activists, I think, would retort is that, yes, we will have that regulation. We will be monitoring liquid natural gas in the US. However, once you export natural gas, sometimes the ships on which you export are quite leaky themselves.

Sometimes the terminals that you export into or the pipelines where you take the natural gas can be themselves leaky. There is still leaks somewhere in the system. I think the caller has a great point. I think this is an aspect of this claim by climate activists that I'm hoping Heatmap, where I work, the climate site that I work, heatmap.news, you can find us, will be able to drill into this more because, at the one hand, we're understanding just how dangerous these leaks are. On the other hand, we are regulating these methane leaks way more now. We're about to regulate them way more than we ever have before. How those two assessments, how that assessment and how this new regulation fit together, I think no one's quite square the circle on yet.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of the climate-focused news organization Heatmap. Primer, for many of you who weren't familiar with this issue on what is a very important issue, how much liquid natural gas, which the US has become so dependent on and made so much money from but has such climate implications, how much should the Biden administration pause or halt the development of export capacity? He did put one major facility on pause. That is now drawing a reaction from Trump and other Republicans in part of the presidential election year debate. That's our Climate Story of the Week. Robinson, thank you for joining us.

Robinson Meyer: Thanks for having me as always.

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