Joe Biden just did the rarest thing in US politics: he stood up to the oil industry; The Biden administration suspended new permits for natural gas terminals. Can we see more of this kind of backbone?
I will say this about Biden: the dude's downright sneaky. It seems to be his administration's main strategy to publicly walk back a major agenda point, let right-wingers celebrate, and then after the media hype (and potential for right-wing backlash) dies out, quietly split it up into smaller programs that get pushed further than the original agenda ever could.
He let Senator Manchin gut EV tax credits, but then spread that money out in the IRA and IIJA with green infrastructure funding so comprehensive that it has international attention.
He's been criticized for being soft on China's military (by the right) and emissions (by the left), but the CHIPS Act and FABS Act and ban(s) on chip and tooling exports have all but eliminated China's greatest source of geopolitical leverage: their nascent monopoly on electronics.
So yeah, it seems on-brand that the Biden administration would push for LNG exports after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and then go back later and curtail them instead.
A great start! We're going to need to see way more of this to reverse the massive increase of natural gas production since Feb 2021 (2.6 trillion cubic ft / month then vs 3.5 trillion now, a 34% increase in less than 3 years and an all-time high for the US)
I don't expect the work of getting off fossil fuels to be completed in the term of any one President; it's a multi-decade project. He's been doing a lot more than 'better than the Republicans' though.
"It's not perfect, therefore it's useless, and because it is, I'm going to vote for the worse alternative. Don't make me explain my reasoning further."
The idea that all politicians are corrupt and conniving bastards is mainly a right-wing fiction. They assume everybody acts exactly like they themselves do
You say that like most Americans wouldn't support doing literally anything that would lower gas prices. The problem is trying to make everyone happy.
I mean, most people I know bring up gas prices before they bring up climate change, if at all. I try to remind these people that while the president/Congress can take actions to increase drilling there are many of us in the US that would prefer they didn't.
I usually then make it clear how obviously easy it is for me to say that as someone that works from home and isn't as impacted by gas prices; context is always important.
Regular people are paying for it when a hurricane destroys their city. Think of switching to clean energy as an investment, if having a planet to live on doesn't do it for you. edit: typo
Heat pumps don't really work in extreme cold. My office has only electric heat and it runs constantly when it's really cold, never getting up to a comfortable temp. My home stays warm with gas heat and the furnace runs far less.
This is about blocking export terminals. Building them raises domestic prices. So it has a financial benefit for Americans who use gas for heat and has a climate benefit.
I am aware, but the reason we're seeing sensationalist articles right now is because it's election year, and the reason certain things were held off until now is because he wanted to look good during an election year
Natural gas is produced as a byproduct of gasoline production. He hasn't done shit besides screw us out of access to a cleaner energy source we're already producing.
You can re-inject it into the reservoir instead of burning it and dumping the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere. He's done a good thing here, especially light of the incredible death toll from the by-products of combustion.
Yeah i criticize Biden all the time and while I'll always say "he could go further" i can't find enough to hate here. It actually looks kind of good. Ill have to dig deeper if i want to hate this move.
these are export terminals.. which are used by the industry to sell the product for more profit than they can get selling it domestically. it also eliminates the ocean-crossing trips made by those pollution-spouting tankers to deliver the product overseas.
Natural gas comes out of the ground naturally, and isn't necessarily a by-product of gasoline refinement. I can't speak from experience on the refinery side of things, but I can speak from experience on the upstream production side of things. The natural gas we use for power generation, and heat at the facility I work at essentially comes straight out of the ground with minimal processing. Any excess is put back in the ground. That's specific to where I work. I imagine other places, the gas is separated out like we do and sent to "the market."