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"The science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals," said one campaigner.
More than 125 climate, environmental, and health scientists and researchers on Thursday implored the Biden administration to "follow legitimate science and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs," pointing to a new study showing liquefied natural gas has a 33% greater greenhouse gas footprint than coal.
"As U.S. scientists and researchers we are closely following efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Treasury to develop greenhouse gas analyses of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and hydrogen, and implore you to use the best available science when conducting this analysis," the scientists wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
"The stakes could not be higher," the letter asserts. "The choices that you make relating to modeling assumptions for the heat-trapping potential of natural gas will determine if the federal government will make decisions based on climate science or wishful thinking."
The scientists continued:
The main constituent in natural gas is methane, a powerful climate-disrupting pollutant that traps more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years, the relevant timeframe in which we must act. We agree with President [Joe] Biden's declaration to world leaders that this is the decisive decade. As the climate crisis becomes more urgent, we are rapidly approaching planetary thresholds that, once breached, cannot be reversed.
The fossil fuel industry wants you to distort the scientific evidence and asserts, falsely, that decisions to expand natural gas production and consumption are consistent with U.S. and global climate goals. They are advocating for flawed modeling assumptions that would hide the true climate impact of gas. It is imperative that the Departments of Energy and Treasury reject these efforts.
The letter's signers cite a study published this month by Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth which—when properly accounting for LNG's full life cycle, including extraction, liquefaction, transportation, and end-source combustion—found that the fracked gas has a 33% greater greenhouse emissions impact than coal.
"An abundance of scientific evidence now shows that natural gas is at least as damaging to the climate as coal and may be worse due to inevitable leaks and disproves the claim that natural gas can serve as a 'bridge fuel' while renewable energy sources ramp up," the scientists wrote.
Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that "the science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals."
"This administration must ignore industry propaganda, follow legitimate science, and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs like LNG exports and gas-sourced hydrogen," Walsh added.
Noting that "over 20 years, methane is a far more powerful climate villain than ever previously appreciated," Science & Environmental Health Network senior scientist Sandra Steingraber said that "methane is the Houdini of greenhouse gasses, escaping into the atmosphere from all parts of the natural gas system at a pace that far exceeds earlier estimates."
"Taken together, these findings mean that the stakes for the modeling assumptions chosen for estimating the climate impacts of LNG and hydrogen fuels could not be higher," Steingraber stressed. "It's imperative that our Departments of Energy and Treasury base their climate modeling assumptions on the abundance of scientific evidence and not the distorted claims and wishful thinking of the fossil fuel industry."
Despite campaign pledges to center climate action—including by banning new fossil fuel drilling on public lands—Biden oversaw the approval of more new permits for drilling on public land during his first two years in office than former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, did in 2017 and 2018.
The Biden administration has also held fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and has approved the highly controversial Willow project and Mountain Valley Pipeline. Biden also increased liquefied natural gas production and export before pausing LNG exports earlier this year.
Despite the pause—which activists are calling on the Biden administration to make permanent—the president has also overseen what climate defenders have called a "staggering" LNG expansion, including Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and more than a dozen other projects that, if all completed, would make U.S. exported LNG emissions higher than the European Union's combined greenhouse gas footprint.
"To reject the very idea of a global minimum tax on billionaires is to cede control of our economies and our democracies to oligarchs and plutocrats," warned one progressive critic over the U.S. Treasury Secretary's position.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is being taken to task by progressive critics after coming out Monday in opposition to a proposed global tax on billionaires at an upcoming Group of 7 nations meeting where the measure is on the agenda.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Yellen told the newspaper that while the Biden administration broadly supports more progressive taxation, in which those at the top of the income and wealth scale pay higher rates, the U.S. will not back a plan—put forth by Brazil and backed other G20 leaders earlier this year—that would set a minimum international rate for the planet's ultra-wealthy.
In her remarks, Yellen said the "notion of some common global arrangement for taxing billionaires with proceeds redistributed in some way—we're not supportive of a process to try to achieve that. That's something we can't sign on to."
The proposed 2% global tax on the assets of the world's billionaires, backers of the idea argue, would be a way to curb the international race to the bottom on taxation by hampering the ability of those with vast fortunes to move their money from bank to bank and nation to nation as a way to avoid paying their fair share into public coffers.
The EU Tax Observatory, which helped formulate and backs the proposal, estimates that the 2% levy on the billionaires would raise $250 billion in annual revenues.
Given President Joe Biden and Yellen's support for a global minimum corporate tax and recent political messaging on the need to compel corporations and the wealthiest to pay higher taxes domestically, Morris Pearl, chair of the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires, said opposition to a global billionaire tax was confounding.
"We are mystified by Secretary Yellen's comment suggesting she has rejected the G20 proposal for a global minimum tax on billionaires," Pearl said. "Her comment is starkly at odds with President Biden's stated goal of compelling billionaires to pay their fair share; it is at odds with the growing consensus on taxing the ultra-wealthy; and it is at odds with her own history of being a champion of international cooperation on tax matters."
Successful implementation of a billionaires tax, reports the WSJ, "would allow countries to raise more in tax revenue to finance other priorities and use the tax code to reduce income inequality, which has widened sharply in recent decades."
Floating the idea back in January, Brazil's Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said, "In a world where economic activities are increasingly transnational, we have to find new and creative ways to tax these activities [and] thus direct the revenues to common global endeavors such as ending hunger and poverty and fighting climate change."
According to Pearl:
Secretary Yellen's statement seems to stem from concerns that the revenue from such a tax would be"redistributed." However, the proposal would not institute a global tax that is then globally redistributed. The blueprint for this proposal is the OECD agreement for a global corporate minimum tax that she herself championed, which enables individual governments to determine how the taxes collected within their borders are spent.
If her concerns are simply about redistribution, she should clarify that ahead of her meetings later this week. But to reject the very idea of a global minimum tax on billionaires is to cede control of our economies and our democracies to oligarchs and plutocrats. In short, a wholesale surrender to the political influence of the ultra-rich would be a grave mistake.
Oxfam International calculated earlier this year that a 5% wealth tax targeting multimillionaires and billionaires in G20 countries could raise around $1.5 trillion a year in revenue globally. Such funds, the group said, would be "enough to end global hunger, help low- and middle-income countries adapt to climate change, and bring the world back on track to meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)—and still leave more than $546 billion to invest in inequality-busting public services and climate action in G20 countries."
Over the weekend, economist Gabriel Zucman, one the key architects behind the billionaires tax proposal put forward by Brazil, said "the super-rich will fight" such measures "tooth and nail," but "yes—we will have, one day, a coordinated minimum max on the super-rich. And perhaps sooner than you think!"
If he's correct, it doesn't look like Secretary Yellen or President Biden have received the memo.
"Now is the time to prioritize peace and the safety of all children and all people in the world," the Pennsylvania congresswoman asserted.
Citing the tremendous human and financial costs of the decadeslong U.S. global war against terrorism, Democratic Pennsylvania Congresswoman Summer Lee on Wednesday urged the Biden administration and congressional colleagues to eschew a "weapons-first approach" to international conflicts and instead "meet real human needs and move towards peace."
"Post 9/11, our federal government's decision to fund endless wars cost 4.5 million lives, including over 7,000 U.S. service members, and displaced tens of millions in a time of deep pain after 3,000 beloved American lives were brutally stolen by al-Qaeda on September 11th," Lee said in a statement.
"These endless wars cost U.S. taxpayers $8 trillion," she continued, enough to end worldwide hunger with "$135 billion to spare—enough to provide universal pre-K, provide universal family and medical leave, and eradicate student debt in the United States—had Washington made better decisions."
"Post 9/11, our federal government's decision to fund endless wars cost 4.5 million lives, including over 7,000 U.S. service members, and displaced tens of millions."
Lee's remarks followed President Joe Biden's request last week for $14.3 billion in new military aid to Israel—which already gets nearly $4 billion from the U.S. annually—and another $61.4 billion for Ukraine, which has received more than $75 billion from Washington since Russian troops invaded the country in February 2022.
U.S. military aid and support for Israel have come under fire by critics, some of whom have
described the Israeli assault on Gaza—which has killed more than 6,400 people, wounded over 17,000 others, destroyed at least 177,000 homes, and displaced 1.4 million Gazans—as "genocidal."
The congresswoman's comments also stood in stark contrast with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's assertion earlier this month that "America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel's military needs, and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia."
Lee noted that U.S. leaders sometimes come to regret their support for wars.
"In 2007, 57 of the 77 senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq said that they would not vote the same way with the benefit of hindsight," she said. "Now is the time for every one of us in Congress and the Biden administration to exercise that hindsight and use every point of leverage to push allies to do the same."
The congresswoman added that Americans "know that lining the pockets of weapons manufacturers won't help families struggling to afford housing, medicine, or grocery costs."
She continued:
They know defense contractors won't safeguard Medicare and Social Security or shield our communities against the climate crisis. Unlike the CEOs of Raytheon [now called RTX], Lockheed Martin, and Amazon—who we're simultaneously working to make pay their fair share in taxes—moms who can't afford childcare, young folks who can't pay off their debt, veterans who can't keep up with housing costs, and children who go to school hungry don't have million-dollar lobbying budgets. So it's up to us to stand up for their needs.
That means recognizing that our country's security starts with funding humanitarian aid... and diplomacy, climate-resilient infrastructure, assistance to end food and housing insecurity, and [disarming] white supremacy that continues to threaten marginalized communities in districts like mine forever scarred by the trauma of hate-fueled mass shootings.
"Now is the time to recognize that the power of life and death, the power of war, the power of prosperity, and the pathway to peace and justice [come] through Congress," Lee stressed. "Now is the time to prioritize peace and the safety of all children and all people in the world."