It wasn’t that long ago that Democratic politicians would brag about growing oil and natural gas production. In 2014, President Obama boasted to Northwestern University students that “our 100-year supply of natural gas is a big factor in drawing jobs back to our shores;” two years earlier, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer devoted a portion of his speech at the Democratic National Convention to explaining that “manufacturing jobs are coming back — not just because we’re producing a record amount of natural gas that’s lowering electricity prices, but because we have the best-trained, hardest-working labor force in the history of the world.”
Third Way, the long tenured center-left group, would like to go back to those days.
Affordability, energy prices, and fossil fuel production are all linked and can be balanced with greenhouse gas-abatement, its policy analysts and public opinion experts have argued in a series of memos since the 2024 presidential election. Its latest report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, goes further, encouraging Democrats to get behind exports of liquified natural gas.
For many progressive Democrats and climate activists, LNG is the ultimate bogeyman. It sits at the Venn diagram overlap of high greenhouse gas emissions, the risk of wasteful investment and “stranded” assets, and inflationary effects from siphoning off American gas that could be used by domestic households and businesses.
These activists won a decisive victory in the Biden years when the president put a pause on approvals for new LNG export terminal approvals — a move that was quickly reversed by the Trump White House, which now regularly talks about increases in U.S. LNG export capacity.
“I think people are starting to finally come to terms with the reality that oil and gas — and especially natural gas— really aren’t going anywhere,” John Hebert, a senior policy advisor at Third Way, told me. To pick just one data point: The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook included a “current policies scenario,” which is more conservative about policy and technological change, for the first time since 2019. That saw the LNG market almost doubling by 2050.
“The world is going to keep needing natural gas at least until 2050, and likely well beyond that,” Hebert said. “The focus, in our view, should be much more on how we reduce emissions from the oil and gas value chain and less on actually trying to phase out these fuels entirely.”
The memo calls for a variety of technocratic fixes to America’s LNG policy, largely to meet demand for “cleaner” LNG — i.e. LNG produced with less methane leakage — from American allies in Europe and East Asia. That “will require significant efforts beyond just voluntary industry engagement,” according to the Third Way memo.
These efforts include federal programs to track methane emissions, which the Trump administration has sought to defund (or simply not fund); setting emissions standards with Europe, Japan, and South Korea; and more funding for methane tracking and mitigation programs.
But the memo goes beyond just a few policy suggestions. Third Way sees it as part of an effort to reorient how the Democratic Party approaches fossil fuel policy while still supporting new clean energy projects and technology. (Third Way is also an active supporter of nuclear power and renewables.)
“We don’t want to see Democrats continuing to slow down oil and gas infrastructure and reinforce this narrative that Democrats are just a party of red tape when these projects inevitably go forward anyway, just several years delayed,” Hebert told me. “That’s what we saw during the Biden administration. We saw that pause of approvals of new LNG export terminals and we didn’t really get anything for it.”
Whether the Democratic Party has any interest in going along remains to be seen.
When center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for Democrats to work productively with the domestic oil and gas industry, influential Democratic officeholders such as Illinois Representative Sean Casten harshly rebuked him.
Concern over high electricity prices has made some Democrats a little less focused on pursuing the largest possible reductions in emissions and more focused on price stability, however. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, for instance, embraced an oft-rejected natural gas pipeline in her state (possibly as part of a deal with the Trump administration to keep the Empire Wind 1 project up and running), for which she was rewarded with the Times headline, “New York Was a Leader on Climate Issues. Under Hochul, Things Changed.”
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (also a Democrat) was willing to cut a deal with Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature to get out of the Northeast’s carbon emissions cap and trade program, which opponents on the right argued could threaten energy production and raise prices in a state rich with fossil fuels. He also made a point of working with the White House to pressure the region’s electricity market, PJM Interconnection, to come up with a new auction mechanism to bring new data centers and generation online without raising prices for consumers.
Ruben Gallego, a Democratic Senator from Arizona (who’s also doing totally normal Senate things like having town halls in the Philadelphia suburbs), put out an energy policy proposal that called for “ensur[ing] affordable gasoline by encouraging consistent supply chains and providing funding for pipeline fortification.”
Several influential Congressional Democrats have also expressed openness to permitting reform bills that would protect oil and gas — as well as wind and solar — projects from presidential cancellation or extended litigation.
As Democrats gear up for the midterms and then the presidential election, Third Way is encouraging them to be realistic about what voters care about when it comes to energy, jobs, and climate change.
“If you look at how the Biden administration approached it, they leaned so heavily into the climate message,” Hebert said. “And a lot of voters, even if they care about climate, it’s just not top of mind for them.”
