Bill McKibben has some very good news for us and for the environment.
I highly recommend you go to his Substack newsletter and read for yourself.
I’ll link and excerpt below:
I wrote you two days ago with provisional good news—it looked as if the long and deep fight to rein in runaway LNG export growth had scored a huge victory.. The succeeding 48 hours have been full of joy, because that news turned out to be entirely true. As the White House confirmed with the official release of its policy at 5 a.m. this morning, all new licenses for LNG export terminals are hereby halted, until the policies used to figure out if they’re in the “public interest” can be updated to include modern economics and science.
That this is a huge victory can’t be said strongly enough—for the people in the Gulf who have fought so long and hard (it was such fun to join Roishetta Ozane et al in a press conference this morning), and for the planet. This is the biggest check any president has ever applied to the fossil fuel industry, and the strongest move against dirty energy in American history
I’d say there are several clear and crucial take-homes:
- The pledge to “transition away from fossil fuels” that John Kerry and the rest of the world’s governments signed in Dubai was given actual meaning by Biden’s move. He’s thrown down the gauntlet to other world leaders: the world’s biggest hydrocarbon producer has said we’ve reached a limit.
- There’s finally an actual climate test in place for American fossil fuel expansion plans. This is what we failed to win in the Keystone XL fight; though Barack Obama indicated in his rejection of that plan that we should build new stuff if it “only if it does not significantly exacerbate carbon pollution,” we’ve had to wait ten years for that to be turned into policy. It now needs to be formally expanded to every decision we make!
- Because of that, Biden deserves to reap the benefits of powerful environmental backing in his re-election. He had to make sad compromises to get the IRA passed, and he made a dumb decision about the Willow oil complex in Alaska; the scale of this, in climate terms, is far larger. Here’s what Roishetta Ozane told the newspapers yesterday: “I’m super excited and ecstatic.” And also, “we know that if this administration is not re-elected, then everything he’s done on climate is going out the window.” That’s about as bottom line as it gets..