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Sparks

The First Big Fight of the U.S. General Election Is Over LNG

Americans have yet another acronym to learn.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When the White House announced on Friday that it would temporarily pause the approval of new liquified natural gas export terminals, it wasn’t just a victory for climate activists. It also drew the line for the first big showdown of the longest general election in modern history. With all due respect to Nikki Haley and some guy named Ryan Binkley, who are both nominally still in the Republican race, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden are both acting, understandably, like the primaries are already over.

Trump wasted no time vowing to “approve the export terminals on my very first day back” in a campaign speech in Nevada, which his campaign made official in an email blast to supporters. Trump also claimed LNG is “good for the environment, not bad.” While LNG might not be the worst for the planet, only energy interests are bold enough to describe it as actually beneficial.

 

LNG was hardly a preordained battleground; though there’d been some jostling in the fall between activists and Republicans, Americans more generally are fuzzy on the specifics of how the U.S. meets its energy needs and divided on how to address them.

Still, the Biden campaign clearly picked its spot. For one thing, the administration’s LNG pause is a literal challenge to the existing methodology for assessing LNG projects, developed under the Trump administration back in 2018. The timing of the announcement further marks it as an opening salvo to young climate-conscious voters whose faith in the president suffered a bruising when he approved a ConocoPhillips oil exploration effort known as the Willow Project last spring. There could be some strategy here on the part of the campaign, as well — by baiting Trump into taking up LNG as a low-hanging talking point, it gets to amplify and contrast Biden’s climate agenda repeatedly in response.

But it’s a risky gambit. Attacks on LNG might not be as simple as they look at first glance — that is, after all, what the Energy Department’s review is all about, although it also likely kicks the decision to, conveniently, after Election Day. Heatmap polling also shows Americans aren’t very familiar with Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, even as experts believe “climate voters could make or break Joe Biden in 2024.” I fear Americans’ eyes will glaze over at yet another three-letter acronym — not that “liquified natural gas export terminals” is exactly any better. At the very least, other polling appears to indicate a public that is confused and conflicted about fossil fuels, see-sawing between a desire for energy security and anxiety over climate priorities.

Meanwhile, Trump can add LNG to his laundry list of dubious attacks on the energy transition and the “Green New Scam.”

Of course, none of these risks is a reason for the Biden administration not to get to the bottom of LNG’s environmental impacts. The U.S. is, after all, now the largest LNG exporter in the world. But the timing of the Biden administration’s announcement, just as the Republican race took a decisive and seemingly inevitable turn in Trump’s favor, means that one way or another, we’ll be hearing a lot more about LNG in the long, long months to come.

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Sparks

After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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