Americans, but particularly Louisianans, have been made victims of a baldfaced lie by Democrat Pres. Joe Biden and his administration, with damage done to labor markets, commerce, and local governments.
Early this year, Biden with Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris announced his Department of Energy would halt all vetting activity regarding exportation of liquified natural gas to countries without free trade agreements with the U.S. In practical terms, this meant that DOE wouldn’t advance permits to do this, on which new export terminal construction hinged. This caught up a number of proposed facilities already being slow-walked by DOE since Biden took office, including two major ones in Louisiana nearing the finish line.
Biden and Harris provided the rationale for the decision as DOE needed a new study of the matter to take into account what he asserted were higher costs based upon catastrophic anthropogenic global warming assumptions (summing these up as the country facing “the existential threat of our time”). He alleged since the last LNG export study occurred in 2018, four years after the previous, that none others had been conducted.
But at least one government insider contacted some interest groups claiming in fact one had been completed last year, contending that the study had been buried because it cast the major source of natural gas for liquification, hydraulic fracturing, in a favorable cost/benefit light. Perhaps the highest-profile government critic of fracking who has called for its banning (who recently, as she has on many issues, claimed to have reversed her preference), Harris, now the party’s standard-bearer in the upcoming election, as well as other garden-variety climate alarmists fault the process for its release of greenhouse gases and aim for its elimination.
As a result, the group Government Oversight & Accountability sued DOE for the documentation thought to exist – and apparently does, after a series of legal maneuvers by DOE to prevent that from coming to light. Finally admitting that in the first ten months of 2023 at some point lengthy documentation was issued on the subject – almost certainly a report that was circulated among its top officials – DOE should soon have to let it see the light of day.
Regardless of its contents, this indicates the “pause” was based on a wholesale fabrication. Fortunately, the damage was limited to only about a six-month delay as a court found the action illegal and the process has restarted, although alarmists now have shifted to a lawfare strategy to continue gumming up the works.
Still, any delay has cost Louisiana, from the forgone economic growth from facility construction and additional gas extraction and its liquification that will occur later rather than sooner, as well the price attached to deceased ability in aiding friendly trading partners whose strategic interests also align with those of the U.S. Fewer jobs, less economic activity, and reduced tax collections will result from the late start – and magnified as the start gets later still through initially successful lawfare by alarmists.
And all because Washington Democrats had to follow their evidence-free ideology even to the point of breaking the law – one of whom is president and another of whom who wants to be – lying to the public to substantiate their claim (and probably explaining why DOE didn’t appeal the decision, knowing this information would come out and invalidate any pretense towards legality). The pause justification was a fraud, but for climate crazies any dispensing with the law is acceptable, because climate emergency!
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