Biden opposes LNG Export Terminals

 American Update:

The Biden administration relied on questionable and misleading scientific material to support its decision to pause new approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.

In January, the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on approving new LNG export terminals so that the Department of Energy (DOE) can expand its reviews to include facilities’ climate impacts, a move celebrated by climate activists and slammed by industry groups and elected Republicans alike. In written testimony to Congress earlier in February defending the policy, Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk pointed to billion-dollar disasters (BDDs) as a proxy for the intensity of climate change, and he also cited projections based on a de facto “worst-case” emissions scenario that critics have derided for failing to accurately project emissions in the present, let alone the future; both statistics are misleading and questionable.

Turk’s testimony states that “our understanding of the economic and human impacts from climate change has only sharpened” since 2019, when the agency last published its estimates for the full lifecycle greenhouse gas impacts associated with American LNG exports.

Turk leads off by comparing the number of BDD events recorded in 2019 and 2023, observing that 2019 saw 14 natural disasters that caused damages in excess of $1 billion while there were 28 such instances in 2023. These statistics are sourced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

However, using BDD events as a proxy for meteorological conditions is misleading for several reasons. Primarily, this is because population and asset density has increased in coastal areas susceptible to natural disasters. The increased loss potential in coastal areas means that the same exact hurricane in the same exact place may not have caused $1 billion in damages in 1980 as it might inflict today.

NOAA acknowledges as much, having previously told the DCNF that “the number and cost of disasters are increasing over time due to a combination of three things: increased exposure (i.e., values at risk of possible loss), increased vulnerability (i.e., where we build; how we build) and climate change that is increasing the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion–dollar disasters.”

Put another way, there are several factors that influence the frequency of BDD events other than meteorological conditions and things that are related to climate change. Notably, NOAA does not express natural disaster costs in terms of American gross domestic product (GDP). Roger Pielke Jr. — an academic who writes extensively about politicized science and considers climate change to be a real and serious threat — has conducted his own analysis and found that “North American catastrophe losses as a proportion of U.S. GDP clearly show no upwards trend” over time.
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Maybe it is because I live in rural Texas, but I am just not seeing much in the way of "climate change."  Our climate is pretty pleasant for the most part.  In fact, we seem to be seeing fewer hurricanes than in past years.