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The answer depends on where it’s going and what it’s replacing.
President Biden’s decision to pause approving liquified natural gas export terminals until it can better study their climate effects — functionally delaying or even outright preventing their construction — got real political, real fast. Almost immediately, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin called for a hearing on the president’s decision-making.
“If the Administration has the facts to prove that additional LNG export capacity would hurt Americans, they must make that information public and clear,” he said in a statement last week. “But if this pause is just another political ploy to pander to keep-it-in-the-ground climate activists at the expense of American workers, businesses and our allies in need, I will do everything in my power to end this pause immediately.”
While Senator Manchin is not exactly the administration’s biggest fan lately, he’s also asking some pretty interesting questions. One of the animating ideas of the past few months in climate politics has been the argument that LNG (and maybe even pipeline gas) are in fact far worse for the global climate even than coal, which has long been assumed to be the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuel around. That view is based on research by Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth and has been expounded by climate advocates and elected officials alike.
But that research has not yet passed through peer review. Even if it had, Howarth’s past research has gotten criticism from other climate scientists for using some idiosyncratic assumptions that yield more dramatic results.
Make no mistake, meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels requires winding down our use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. If we meet those goals, the natural gas export terminals delayed by the Biden administration’s decision will likely go dormant well before the end of their expected lifespans. But it’s not the case that in all possible worlds, continuing or even expanding natural gas production and exports would actually be worse for the climate.
The basic physics of coal emissions versus LNG emissions are just part of the equation. When it’s burned, natural gas releases carbon dioxide, the primary source of human-caused climate change, albeit less carbon dioxide than coal. But natural gas is itself mostly methane, CH4, which traps far more heat than CO2 when it leaks from wells, pipelines, and production facilities. (LNG is also much more energy-intensive to extract, produce, and store than regular natural gas, since it has to be cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, sailed across the ocean and then “regasified” and shipped via pipeline on the other side.) While CH4 is more potent than CO2 from a warming perspective, it also breaks down much more quickly in the atmosphere, which means the warming effect doesn’t last as long.
How to think about LNG’s effect on overall emissions, then, largely depends on how much you think each of these factors matters. “Only if we assume high methane leakage rates and a 20-year global warming potential is natural gas worse than coal, and such assumptions are likely unrealistic,” wrote Carnegie Mellon energy systems researcher Paulina Jaramillo in an essay titled, aptly, “Navigating the LNG Dilemma.”
Absolute emissions aren’t even what we should be asking about, Arvind Ravikumar, a professor at the University of Texas and a leading scholar on natural gas and energy policy, told me. “The climate impact of U.S. LNG depends on what it replaces in countries — whether those alternatives have more or less emissions than U.S. LNG.”
When the United States stepped in to replace much of the gas the European Union would otherwise buy from Russia with LNG, Ravikumar explained, it likely reduced overall emissions because of lower methane emissions from the U.S. gas industry. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied about 155 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe; by 2022, that was down to around 80 billion cubic meters. That’s a lot of energy to replace. In that time, the U.S. more than doubled its LNG exports to Europe, which has guaranteed demand of at least 50 billion cubic meters from the U.S. through 2030.
Had the U.S. not ramped up its LNG exports, boosters argue, these countries might not have had a viable alternative and might have turned to coal, instead. But that won’t be the case in every single possible future scenario. “There’s no right answer,” Ravikumar told me. “It depends on who buys, what time frame, which country, and how are they using LNG.”
There’s at least one clear case study of the coal-to-gas switch working to lower emissions: the United States itself.
In 2007, the U.S. was consuming just over 1 billion tons of coal for electricity; by 2016 that had declined to 679 million, and by 2022 to just under 500 million — in other words, by more than half. In that same time, natural gas use for electricity grew from 7 trillion cubic feet in 2007 to 10 trillion cubic feet in 2016 to 12 trillion cubic feet in 2022.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have dropped more than 15% since 2007 to even below their 1992 levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Rhodium Group. The drop in emissions has been going on since 2010, which the EPA attributes, in part, to "the growing use of natural gas and renewables to generate electricity in place of more carbon-intensive fuels.”
As climatologist Zeke Hausfather put it in an earlier commentary on an earlier Howarth paper, “While it isn’t responsible for the majority of emissions reductions, natural gas replacing coal is the largest single driver.”
Much of the conceptual infrastructure on which climate policy operates relies on estimating what the world will be like in the future — not just figuring out the effects of different levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but also figuring out different likely pathways for the evolution of those emissions over time.
This works in both directions — asking how specific projects either reduce or lower emissions, and asking about what an energy system would look like in a world where emissions have been reduced enough to avoid certain levels of temperature increases. And that’s really where the rubber meets the road.
In a scenario where the world hits its Paris Agreement goals, there would not be the coal-to-gas switching envisioned by LNG advocates precisely because there would be very little coal still being used to generate electricity. The fear, then, is that LNG terminals would either become stranded assets, capital investments that wind up becoming liabilities; or that, once they’re in operation, the companies behind them would use their political and economic leverage — not to mention just the power of inertia — to keep enough natural gas in the global energy system to be profitable.
“Either you’re building and planning to shut it down early,” Hausfather told me, “or you’re building something that’s going to be inconsistent with the world we’re aiming to have under our climate targets.”
In a Paris-compliant world, almost 90% of the world’s coal reserves and over half of the natural gas and oil reserves will stay in the ground, according to researchers from University College London. They estimate that in order to meet the Paris targets, gas production would “see rapid decline” from 2020 to 2050 and would be eliminated as a fuel for electricity generation by 2040, with accompanying “low utilization rates of infrastructure, and limited prospect for future additional liquefaction capacity” for exports.
In other words, in a world that comes in under 1.5 degrees of warming, the emissions reductions from coal-to-gas switching peter out after 2035; with 2 degrees of warming it’s around 2040 to 2045 — in any case, beyond the planned life of the export terminals that the Biden administration’s decision affects.
But how much LNG export capacity the United States builds up in the next decade is only a tiny part of the overall emissions picture now, in 2035, or in 2050. “This is the issue with regulating at a project level in general,” energy consultant Sean Smillie told me. “The decision of any given project in the scheme of global emissions is small. For me, that points to the fact that we’re trying to regulate climate change — which is a systemic issue — at the project level, and that’s a very hard thing to do.”
The biggest question is just how energy systems overseas evolve — and what role LNG exports play in that determination. The European Union is about to decide whether to reduce its net collective emissions 90% from 1990 levels by 2040, on their way to zero by 2050, which would signal a sharp reduction in demand coming from that part of the world. Meanwhile, for U.S. LNG export projects currently in the permitting pipeline, Asian countries are contracted to receive a much bigger share, according to a Public Citizen analysis. Bloombergreports that those buyers have started looking elsewhere — including to Russia.
But what if we don’t hit our Paris Agreement targets, as the United Nations and Bill Gates agree we’re increasingly unlikely to do? What if developing countries prioritize cheap, available energy (like India’s growing coal production) over climate goals? In that case, Ravikumar argues, then LNG export capacity turns from a potential “stranded asset” into an insurance policy.
“The way to think about LNG in the longer term is the insurance against a 3 [degrees of warming] world,” Ravikumar told me. If we fail at taking quick action to change our systems from carbon-polluting to zero-carbon energy, we might still be doing some coal-to-gas switching by 2050.
“It’s hard to say for certain that we will or not need the LNG export terminals by 2050 and 2060,” Elan Sykes, an energy policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute and an opponent of the Biden administration’s decision, told me. “Absent aggressive foreign policy measures [like] a Green Marshall Plan for worldwide clean energy, it’s hard to imagine a world where LNG doesn’t provide” some value, whether from continuing to help reduce emissions or simply maintaining a reliable supply of energy, he said.
Modelers are good at figuring out what the energy mix of a 1.5, 2, or 3-degree world would look like. They’re less good at predicting how that energy mix will evolve over time in the world we actually live in — and it’s in that world that the Biden administration will have to decide whether more LNG exports will serve the public interest.
The job isn’t just to make decisions for an ideal world. As Hausfather told me, it’s “aiming at the best versus mitigating the worst.”
With reporting by Emily Pontecorvo.
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What he wants them to do is one thing. What they’ll actually do is far less certain.
Donald Trump believes that tariffs have almost magical power to bring prosperity; as he said last month, “To me, the world’s most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. It’s my favorite word.” In case anyone doubted his sincerity, before Thanksgiving he announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods.
This is just the beginning. If the trade war he launched in his first term was haphazard and accomplished very little except costing Americans money, in his second term he plans to go much further. And the effects of these on clean energy and climate change will be anything but straightforward.
The theory behind tariffs is that by raising the price of an imported good, they give a stronger footing in the market; eventually, the domestic producer may no longer need the tariff to be competitive. Imposing a tariff means we’ve decided that a particular industry is important enough that it needs this kind of support — or as some might call it, protection — even if it means higher prices for a while.
The problem with across-the-board tariffs of the kind Trump proposes is that they create higher prices even for goods that are not being produced domestically and probably never will be. If tariffs raise the price of a six-pack of tube socks at Target from $9.99 to $14.99, it won’t mean we’ll start making tube socks in America again. It just means you’ll pay more. The same is often true for domestic industries that use foreign parts in their manufacturing: If no one is producing those parts domestically, their costs will unavoidably rise.
The U.S. imported over $3 trillion worth of goods in 2023, and $426 billion from China alone, so Trump’s proposed tariffs would represent hundreds of billions of dollars of increased costs. That’s before we account for the inevitable retaliatory tariffs, which is what we saw in Trump’s first term: He imposed tariffs on China, which responded by choking off its imports of American agricultural goods. In the end, the revenue collected from Trump’s tariffs went almost entirely to bailing out farmers whose export income disappeared.
The past almost-four years under Joe Biden have seen a series of back-and-forth moves in which new tariffs were announced, other tariffs were increased, exemptions were removed and reinstated. For instance, this May Biden increased the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to over 100% while adding tariffs on certain EV batteries. But some of the provisions didn’t take effect right away, and only certain products were affected, so the net economic impact was minimal. And there’s been nothing like an across-the-board tariff.
It’s reasonable to criticize Biden’s tariff policies related to climate. But his administration was trying to navigate a dilemma, serving two goals at once: reducing emissions and promoting the development of domestic clean energy technology. Those goals are not always in alignment, at least in the short run, which we can see in the conflict within the solar industry. Companies that sell and install solar equipment benefit from cheap Chinese imports and therefore oppose tariffs, while domestic manufacturers want the tariffs to continue so they can be more competitive. The administration has attempted to accommodate both interests with a combination of subsidies to manufacturers and tariffs on certain kinds of imports — with exemptions peppered here and there. It’s been a difficult balancing act.
Then there are electric vehicles. The world’s largest EV manufacturer is Chinese company BYD, but if you haven’t seen any of their cars on the road, it’s because existing tariffs make it virtually impossible to import Chinese EVs to the United States. That will continue to be the case under Trump, and it would have been the case if Kamala Harris had been elected.
On one hand, it’s important for America to have the strongest possible green industries to insulate us from future supply shocks and create as many jobs-of-the-future as possible. On the other hand, that isn’t necessarily the fastest route to emissions reductions. In a world where we’ve eliminated all tariffs on EVs, the U.S. market would be flooded with inexpensive, high-quality Chinese EVs. That would dramatically accelerate adoption, which would be good for the climate.
But that would also deal a crushing blow to the American car industry, which is why neither party will allow it. What may happen, though, is that Chinese car companies may build factories in Mexico, or even here in the U.S., just as many European and Japanese companies have, so that their cars wouldn’t be subject to tariffs. That will take time.
Of course, whatever happens will depend on Trump following through with his tariff promise. We’ve seen before how he declares victory even when he only does part of what he promised, which could happen here. Once he begins implementing his tariffs, his administration will be immediately besieged by a thousand industries demanding exemptions, carve-outs, and delays in the tariffs that affect them. Many will have powerful advocates — members of Congress, big donors, and large groups of constituents — behind them. It’s easy to imagine how “across-the-board” tariffs could, in practice, turn into Swiss cheese.
There’s no way to know yet which parts of the energy transition will be in the cheese, and which parts will be in the holes. The manufacturers can say that helping them will stick it to China; the installers may not get as friendly an audience with Trump and his team. And the EV tariffs certainly aren’t going anywhere.
There’s a great deal of uncertainty, but one thing is clear: This is a fight that will continue for the entirety of Trump’s term, and beyond.
Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.