The gas export terminal, called Calcasieu Pass, or CP2 for short, will pipe, chill and ship up to 24m tonnes of gas a year once completed. But even this huge project is only part of a much broader build-out of the US Gulf of Mexico coast by a booming gas-export industry that climate experts warn could bust any attempts to restrain disastrous global heating.
Indeed, should the several dozen gas-export projects proposed for the Gulf coast go ahead, the fracking, transporting, processing and eventual burning of this fossil fuel, will result in 3.2bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, figures shared with the Guardian show. As a former US Environmental Protection Agency official told me, such a vast pulse of planet-heating emissions, comparable to the entire EU’s annual carbon pollution, would spell “game over” for a livable climate.
The Biden administration has, until now, been happy to wave through this surge in gas infrastructure, by talking up the assistance such exports provide key allies in Europe that have had to scramble for alternative sources after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. This gas, as the industry’s backers have claimed, is cleaner burning than coal, a possible alternative for this fuel.
In the nation-based accounting of carbon emissions, the bulk of the pollution resulting from all these new terminals will occur once the gas is burned, far from US shores and therefore not technically its problem. Biden will be able to point to laudable advances in clean energy at home, spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, and attempt to ignore all the emissions that have been exported overseas.
Unfortunately, the world, already hurtling towards the end of a year that will probably be the hottest ever recorded, won’t be tricked by such sleight of hand. The emissions, wherever they are released, will continue to escalate the planet’s temperature to a dangerous degree, with the tangle of new pipelines and terminals given a lifespan well beyond the point at which we are meant to have kicked our fossil fuel habit.
This gas export boom not only threatens to wipe out any progress the president will have made in cutting emissions within the US, it also poses Biden an electoral challenge. In an uncomfortably tight battle with expected Republican nominee Donald Trump, young, climate-conscious voters will be an important part of Biden’s coalition but his penchant for allowing oil and gas drilling across the country will probably dampen enthusiasm among this voting base. “Biden’s climate policies have been horrible, especially when compared to his rhetoric about taking climate change seriously,” said Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaigner at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade environmental group.
CP2 will be a big test for the US president, as well as for the planet itself.
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