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Scientific American
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Scientific American
about the Legal Battles around Standing Rock
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. In 2016 a group of activists who called themselves water protectors—led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe—set up camp on the windswept plains of North Dakota. Their protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline quickly grew into one of the largest Indigenous-led movements in recent U.S. history. At the protest's height more than 10,000 people gathered to stand in defense of water, land and tribal sovereignty. The response? Militarized police, surveillance drones, and a private security firm with war-zone experience—and eventually a sprawling lawsuit that arguably aimed to rewrite the history of Standing Rock. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. My guest today is Alleen Brown. She's a freelance journalist and a senior editor at Drilled, a self-described 'true-crime podcast about climate change.' The latest season of Drilled, which premiered on June 3, digs into the shocking legal battle the pipeline's builder, Energy Transfer, launched against Greenpeace. Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today. Alleen Brown: Yeah, thank you for having me. Feltman: So for folks who don't remember or maybe weren't paying as much attention as they should've, remind us what the Dakota Access Pipeline is. Brown: Yeah, so the Dakota Access Pipeline is an oil pipeline that travels from kind of the western part of North Dakota to Illinois. And in 2016 and 2017 it was being completed and sort of inspired a big Indigenous-led movement of people who were attempting to stop it. Feltman: Yeah, and what were their motivations for stopping the pipeline? Brown: There were a few motivations. I think the biggest one and most famous one was that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was worried about water contamination ... Feltman: Mm. Brown: The pipeline travels underneath the Missouri River, right next to the reservation and not far from where the tribal nation has a water-intake system, so they were really worried about an oil leak. Feltman: Right, and it had actually—the route had been moved from what was initially planned to [in part] avoid that same concern in a predominantly white area; am I remembering that correctly? Brown: Yeah, there were talks early on—one of the routes that was being considered was across the Missouri River upstream from the Bismarck-Mandan community's water-intake system. And so, you know, that's a more urban area that is predominantly white. Feltman: And again, you know, reminding listeners—it has been a very eventful few years [laughs], to be fair—what exactly happened at Standing Rock? You know, this became a big sort of cultural and ecological moment. Brown: Yeah, so to make a long story short, what became known as the Standing Rock movement started with a small group of grassroots people from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Eventually the tribe itself got really involved, and what started as kind of a small encampment opposed to the pipeline turned into these sprawling encampments, a sprawling occupation that, at times, had upwards of 10,000 people—people were kind of constantly coming and going. And all of these people were there to stand behind the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and stop the construction of the pipeline under the Missouri River. In response—you know, there was a very heavy-handed response from law enforcement and the pipeline company. So, I think, when a lot of people think of Standing Rock, they think of private security dogs kind of lunging at pipeline opponents who are trying to stop bulldozers. Feltman: Mm. Brown: They think of law enforcement spraying water hoses in below-freezing temperatures at people who are protesting. You know, they might think of tear gas. So it was very, very intense for the people who were there. Feltman: So in the new season of Drilled you're digging into a lawsuit filed by Energy Transfer, the company that built the pipeline, and, you know, folks might be surprised to hear that they sued at all, given that the pipeline was built. It's sort of the opposite direction [laughs] you might expect a lawsuit to be flowing, but then the lawsuit's claims are also very surprising. Could you summarize those for us? Brown: Well, I'm not a lawyer, but I can share what I found in my reporting. I remember when this lawsuit, or another version of this lawsuit, was first filed in 2017—at that time I was working at The Intercept and had been digging into these documents from this private security company, TigerSwan. So I was talking to all kinds of people who had been at Standing Rock and looking at these reports from the private security company. I really didn't hear anything about Greenpeace and this big lawsuit, which started out as a RICO lawsuit—which is [one that regards] the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, designed to go after the Mafia—turned into a conspiracy lawsuit. The lawsuit had Greenpeace at the heart of everything. Feltman: Mm. Brown: The lawsuit was eventually overturned in federal court and refiled in state court in North Dakota, but the damages that they were originally demanding were around $300 million. Ultimately, in that state court case, [the jury] awarded Energy Transfer over $666 million. Feltman: Wow. Could you tell us a little bit more about, you know, what it means to be accusing someone of conspiracy and sort of what Energy Transfer's actually trying to say happened here? Brown: Yeah, so, you know, for there to be conspiracy you essentially have to have multiple parties kind of conspiring together to do crimes ... Feltman: Mm. Brown: And this lawsuit just morphed a number of times since it was originally filed. Again, eventually it was turned into a conspiracy suit, and the players that they were alleging were involved kind of changed over time. So by the time it became a conspiracy suit they were saying two individual Indigenous water protectors—which is what a lot of the pipeline opponents referred to themselves as well as this encampment that called itself Red Warrior Society that was maybe a little bit more kind of into doing direct actions that blocked bulldozers, for example, and Greenpeace were all conspiring together. Feltman: Hmm, and so you had already been investigating the Dakota Access Pipeline for years when this lawsuit came about. In your mind, you know, what are the sort of major points that you had uncovered in your reporting that are, are really conflicting with this narrative from Energy Transfer? Brown: I would say one thing about Standing Rock is that everyone that you talk to who was involved will say, 'I'm gonna tell you the real story of Standing Rock.' So it's like people have very diverse ideas about exactly what happened, and I think that speaks to how many people were there and how many people were kind of approaching this question of pipeline construction from different angles. There were people coming in from all over the world, and some people were really, you know, aligned with what the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe wanted; some people had their own agendas. But people had, I think, overall really good intentions. So there was a lot of diversity, a lot of chaos—you know, the National Guard was called in, and there were kind of federal-level law enforcement resources being used and a lot of pressure from private security, which was working with law enforcement that really amplified the tension in those spaces. There were these lights beaming down on the camp. There were people infiltrating the camps and there were drones flying around. I think, for me, understanding the way, I think, militarism and the war on terror were brought home and into this Indigenous-led resistance space is something that I've really focused on. Feltman: Right. So, you know, based on your reporting this Energy Transfer lawsuit had raised a lot of questions, and was even dismissed initially and had to be sort of repackaged. But then it sounds like they sort of got everything they wanted out of the lawsuit. What do you think are the larger implications of that? Brown: One thing is that a lot of people think of this lawsuit as a SLAPP suit, which stands for 'strategic lawsuit against public participation.' So there are a number of groups that have called this lawsuit a SLAPP. Um, there's this coalition called Protect the Protest Coalition, which includes legal advocacy and movement organizations, like the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Union of Concerned Scientists. [ Editor's Note: Greenpeace is also a member of the Protect the Protest Coalition. ] Another group that has called this a SLAPP is the Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace Trial Monitoring Committee, which came together to keep an eye on the trial. That group is wide-ranging, but it's mostly lawyers—so human rights attorneys, there's a First Amendment attorney, law professors, nonprofit leaders, attorneys who have represented Indigenous and environmental defenders. Um, Greenpeace, of course, considers this a SLAPP suit. So, the idea is that, you know, it's not necessarily meant to win on the merits; it's also meant to scare people and send a message and drain a lot of different people of time and resources. This jury did deliver the verdict that the pipeline company wanted, and now the pipeline company can point to that verdict, even if it's overturned, and say, 'Well, a jury in North Dakota said XYZ is true about the Standing Rock movement.' Feltman: Mm. Brown: And, you know, a big part of this case, beyond the conspiracy, were these defamation claims. And, you know, Energy Transfer was saying, 'It's defamatory to say that the pipeline company deliberately destroyed sacred sites,' which was a huge issue in this whole pipeline fight ... Feltman: Mm-hmm. Brown: 'It's defamation to say that private security used violence against nonviolent pipeline opponents.' The third one is that 'it's defamation to say that the pipeline crossed tribal land.' Feltman: Mm. Brown: So those things—two of those things are things that come directly from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe stands behind. So now Energy Transfer has this record that they can lean on ... Feltman: Mm. Brown: And we don't know exactly how they'll use that. They've really hit Greenpeace hard, and I think [this] opens the door against the environmental movement at large. Feltman: Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about the show with us today. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing more of this story over the course of the season. Brown: Thank you so much for having me. Feltman: And just a small update, listeners: Greenpeace has stated its intention to appeal the jury's verdict. That's all for today's episode. You can start listening to the latest season of Drilled wherever you get your podcasts. For more of Alleen's work, check out her newsletter, Eco Files. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Big Oil is ruining a small ‘slice of heaven' town in Texas
This is a condensed story of a three-part series produced by The Xylom and co-published by Drilled, Floodlight and Deceleration News. Subscribe to The Xylom's newsletter here. On Jan. 6, 2024, nine minutes before midnight, the police department in Ingleside, Texas, uploaded on Facebook a now-deleted public advisory about an oil leak from a tank at the Flint Hills crude oil export terminal. The roughly 700 members of Facebook group Citizens of the City of Ingleside on the Bay were in a frenzy. They reported a gaseous odor and burning eyes from the 2,900-barrel on-site oil spill. Town pharmacist Idana Merrick posted that she turned off all fans in her house to keep the fumes from being drawn in. It was the second time in just over a year that the community had been subjected to a spill from Flint Hills. On Christmas Eve 2022, 335 barrels of crude flowed into Corpus Christi Bay, creating yellow gelatinous globs in the aquamarine water. Ingleside on the Bay is a small seaside town with 614 residents in San Patricio County, Texas. Residents in this toney enclave have a front-row seat to picturesque Corpus Christi Bay. Ingleside on the Bay is the opposite of the stereotypical 'fenceline' community: over 80% of the town's residents are white. Many are semi-retired. And unlike poor communities exposed to polluted air, water or land, many residents here have the means to move out. Almost overnight, this coastal community has become America's crude oil export capital — a place where residents supported Donald Trump — America's 'drill baby drill' president — by 50 points. Within a 2-mile radius of Ingleside on the Bay's City Hall are three massive crude oil export terminals, which send tankers the length of a football field into the Gulf. The facilities are located at and near the site of a decommissioned U.S. Navy installation. They include Gibson South Texas Gateway, Flint Hills Resources Ingleside Terminal and Enbridge's Ingleside Energy Center, the largest U.S. crude oil storage and export terminal by volume. Together they account for nearly half of U.S. crude oil exports — an estimated 700 million-plus barrels in 2024. The crude that passed through the three export terminals in Ingleside on the Bay in 2023 alone was worth roughly $50 billion, or more than the entire GDP of the state of Wyoming, The Xylom estimates. But the economic, health and environmental costs are also high: Local and federal governments have spent nearly half a billion dollars deepening the channel for the massive tankers. A 6-foot-tall pile of dirt from the dredging now blocks the Corpus Christi skyline. And white foamy gunk has started floating on the water. Dead sea turtles have washed ashore. The Xylom asked students at MIT to look at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency environmental risk indicators around Corpus Christi. They found the score for the county including Ingleside on the Bay increased nearly 17-fold since 2018. The indicators estimate risk based on 'the size of a chemical release, the fate and transport of a chemical within the environment, the size and location(s) of potentially exposed populations and a chemical's relative toxicity.' Suzi Wilder, an RV park owner and Ingleside on the Bay City Council member, recalls that when the largest terminal run by Enbridge came to town, 'All hell breaks loose.' 'Ingleside on the Bay is our slice of heaven that you're willing to turn into hell for a profit,' said Kelley Burnett, who captains the local dolphin boat tours. 'This is not just about our health, but our livelihood.' Troubled by what they could see, and even more so by what they thought they couldn't, the local Coastal Watch Association contacted Earthworks, a national nonprofit that aims to prevent the destructive impacts of energy extraction. Using special cameras that observe chemicals normally invisible to the naked eye, Earthworks found several volatile organic compounds — which can cause respiratory system irritation, nervous system damage and even cancer — leaking out from Flint Hills Ingleside. Lynne Porter, a retired assistant superintendent of the Ingleside School District, moved in three years ago. Porter, a board member for the Coastal Watch Association, says she now requires an inhaler to get through her day. 'That's the thing with this industry,' concludes Wilder. 'They're not out to protect this town.' Enbridge and Gibson declined comment. In an emailed statement, Flint Hills, which was fined nearly $1 million for its spill, responded that it 'has worked cooperatively with state and federal agencies to resolve all matters related to a release of crude oil … in December 2022.' In the mid-aughts, fracking technique refinements enabled the United States to precisely drill for more oil and gas where it would've been infeasible earlier. Two Texas regions benefited from the shale oil boom: The Permian Basin, which spans 75,000 square miles across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, and the Eagle Ford Formation, a 400-mile-long, 50-mile-wide band beginning in East Texas that snakes between Corpus Christi and San Antonio to the Mexican border. A decade later, the door to Ingleside on the Bay's future as an oil export hub opened. In late 2015, Intent on avoiding a government shutdown, Democratic congressional leaders held secret talks with Republican counterparts and reached a grand bargain. In exchange for an 'unprecedented' tax incentive for wind and solar power, President Barack Obama signed a bill that reversed over four decades of energy policy banning oil exports. The first barrel of exported U.S. crude oil set sail from the Port of Corpus Christi on Dec. 31, 2015. The change has been rapid, both for the country and for Ingleside on the Bay. For the past six years, the United States has produced more crude oil than any other country at any point in history. And, 'It used to be that we would be out here, and one (oil tanker) would go by every four days. We're like, 'Oh, look!',' said Charlie Boone, the president of the Coastal Watch Association. 'It's 10 a day or more, just back and forth, back and forth.' Despite being late to the environmental justice movement, Ingleside on the Bay residents are now enmeshed in the fight, along with local Latino and Indigenous allies. Around 200 residents and advocates trickle into Portland Community Center on the evening of Jan. 11, 2024. They are greeted by Enbridge representatives and staff from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). They are gathered to discuss the renewal of Enbridge's operating permit for the Ingleside site. (Since then, Enbridge has purchased the Flint Hills facility from Koch Industries and now owns two of the three export terminals in Ingleside on the Bay.) Inside Climate News and The Texas Tribune reported in December 2023 how Enbridge convinced the TCEQ to split the Ingleside Energy Center's contiguous oil and gas operations into separately permitted sites. The Coastal Watch Association and Environmental Integrity Project charged that the move serves to bypass public participation by exploiting the legal distinction between major and minor pollution sources. Although Enbridge has received six notices of violation, a then-Corpus Christi City Council member who chairs the local Sierra Club notes that the company maintained a perfect TCEQ compliance record at the time of the hearing. Tim Doty, retired manager of TCEQ's mobile air monitoring unit, takes his former colleagues to task, noting the "significant" hydrocarbon emissions from the three facilities. He questions whether the agency is 'rubber-stamping approval,' despite overwhelming opposition from the public. In a written response, TCEQ says the proposed permit has 'sufficient' requirements 'to demonstrate compliance with the applicable requirements.' On Feb. 7, 2025, the TCEQ greenlit Enbridge's permit renewal. This means that Enbridge is on the 1-yard line of a process that would cement five more years of operational risk and greenhouse gas emissions. A final public petition period before the U.S. EPA ended May 27. Ingleside on the Bay residents and their allies don't know the ultimate fate of their small town. But if they look across the bay at Corpus Christi's Black-majority Hillcrest neighborhood, the future may not be bright. That neighborhood is now a series of abandoned house foundations. Vulnerable residents were cornered, bought out and severed from the rest of the city, first by oil refineries, then by a sewage treatment plant, a towering highway bridge to make way for supertankers and a proposed desalination plant to serve the water needs of the oil and gas industry. At the hearing, Doty reserves his harshest words for Enbridge. 'You're not doing right by this community,' he says. 'You have not been a good neighbor.' Reporting of this story was supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and the Kelly-Douglas Fund at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The Xylom is the only Asian American-serving science news outlet in the United States.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Biden May Have Quietly Thrown a Wrench in Trump's Plan to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill'
This story was published in partnership with Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability. In December, the Biden administration quietly announced the finalization of its long-awaited study on liquefied natural gas, or LNG, exports. While Joe Biden is no longer president, the study's release could complicate President Donald Trump's plan to 'drill, baby, drill,' as environmental advocates believe the findings will aid their efforts to fight LNG export permits in court. Conducted by the Department of Energy (DOE), the study was the planned end point of the administration's 'LNG pause,' which put permits for certain types of LNG export terminals on hold until their climate and economic impact could be better understood. Contradicting the Biden administration's own moves on LNG, the study found that more LNG export terminals were not necessary to meet global demand for the fuel and would lead to increases in both domestic energy prices and greenhouse gas emissions. 'The Biden administration and Secretary [of Energy] Granholm ended up being much more critical of LNG than we would have anticipated a year ago,' says Alan Zibel, research director for energy and environmental issues at the nonprofit Public Citizen. Meanwhile, the new administration seems set to approve any LNG project that comes its way, if Trump's executive orders on energy are to be followed. In addition to requiring a review of all environmental policies, the orders mandate drilling everywhere, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, eliminating the electric vehicle mandate, banning wind energy, and revoking all of Biden's climate-related executive orders. Regarding LNG, Trump directed the Energy Secretary to 'restart reviews of applications for approvals of liquified natural gas export projects as expeditiously as possible.' It is yet to be seen how Chris Wright, Trump's nominee for Energy Secretary and CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, will interpret the DOE findings. Wright has previously claimed that climate change is not contributing to an increase in extreme weather events, and has championed the idea that natural gas is both environmentally preferable to coal and could lift the world out of poverty. In an interview with Drilled last year, Wright said decarbonization was inevitable in the long run but impossible in the next 20 to 30 years. 'We've been decarbonizing for 150 years from wood to coal to oil to natural gas to nuclear,' he says. 'Natural gas probably becomes the dominant hydrocarbon in the energy system 100 years from now; it's much lower greenhouse gas emissions, and with technology it will probably be much easier to inject underground or nature-based absorptions of it. I do think we will ultimately get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions if climate is a pressing problem, and it looks like it's worth the investment. But in 100 years, that's probably not that hard to do. In the next 10, 20, or 30 years? We just simply don't have a viable pathway.' Irrespective of Wright's views or Trump's executive orders, advocacy groups say the DOE study provides a strong basis to challenge LNG export permits in court. The study reached four noteworthy conclusions: Current LNG supply is sufficient to meet global demand. Additional LNG exports would displace renewables, not coal, leading to a net-increase in global emissions. Increased LNG exports would result in an increase in the price of domestic natural gas, adversely impacting American households. LNG entails emission of pollutants that disproportionately impact communities of color given how natural gas production, transportation, and export facilities tend to be disproportionately sited in areas that are disproportionately home to such communities. Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy and Climate Program, explains that exports of natural gas to countries with which the U.S. does not have a free trade agreement — i.e. 90 percent of the country's LNG exports — can only occur if there is a finding that those exports are consistent with public interest. 'The DOE report is a formal, public-interest assessment of the impacts of public interest in expanding LNG exports.' Slocum, along with other parties, has legally intervened in the various Department of Energy proceedings where applications to export LNG are being evaluated. 'It seems clear that they looked at the evidence and saw some serious risks of overbuilding LNG exports,' Zibel says. 'Because what's already been approved is insane. We're talking about the fourth wave of these things. Wave one is built, wave two is being built, wave three is approved, these are facilities that would come online way down the road, in five, six, seven years.' The new analysis 'reflects the realities of climate science and the testimony of communities near these massive LNG projects,' says Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International. Part of what makes the study so groundbreaking is its methodology. The DOE used a new model of the global economy and energy system that enabled it to look at how increased LNG exports would impact the demand for different energy sources — and for renewables in particular. This is a major shift from previous reports where the DOE simply assumed that U.S. LNG exports compete with coal or gas from other countries, and estimated the different lifecycle emissions of these competing fossil fuels. The agency had not looked at whether LNG exports compete with renewable energy. 'This has been part of our critique of the DOE assessments for many years,' Rosenbluth points out. Many interests, including those with a financial stake in seeing the LNG export pause lifted, have been pushing other narratives. S&P Global, an American company that deals in financial information and analyses, released a study on the same day as the DOE. Using a different methodology, one that largely rests on previous S&P Global findings, the conclusions of that report underscored the LNG industry's positive contribution to GDP and job creation in the U.S. and claimed that exports have 'no major impact' on domestic natural gas prices. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a longtime proponent of climate skepticism and frequent supporter of the fossil fuel industry, put its weight behind the S&P Global study, calling the Biden administration's findings 'politically-driven.' Slocum pointed to blind spots in the S&P Global report. 'The report ignores discrete impacts that LNG exports have had in exacerbating supply-demand imbalances, particularly during extreme weather events when we see an upward pressure on domestic prices,' he says. 'The S&P report also ignores environmental justice impacts on communities of color that are forced to live in proximity to these facilities.' Last year, the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, a trade group representing energy-intensive manufacturers, campaigned via outreach to media and letters to policymakers, in favor of the pause on LNG permitting, noting that the rapid increase in LNG exports had meant skyrocketing prices and volatility that put American industrial manufacturing at a disadvantage. Paul Cicio, president and CEO of the group, told Drilled at the time that the long-term contracts U.S. LNG exporters have inked with customers in Europe and Asia 'increase security for other countries and decrease security for U.S. consumers. They reduce both our economic stability and our national security.' A report released last year from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, declared that increased LNG exports are bad for U.S. residential energy consumers, too, connecting exports to a 9 percent increase in prices from 2016 to 2023. The International Energy Agency's 2024 World Energy Outlook issued a similar warning to the one in the DOE study, about the impact increased LNG could have on renewables. It noted that with a glut of new LNG on the market, gas consumption in the power sector could rise, particularly in Asia, at the expense of 'a major slowdown in clean technology deployment and efficiency improvements.' The DOE study could throw a legal spanner in the works for 14 LNG export facilities that are currently pending authorization. A new report from the nonprofits Friends of Earth and Public Citizen analyzed the contracts secured by these 14 facilities and found that more than half of the entities looking to buy LNG from these terminals are speculators, or what some call 'portfolio purchasers' — oil majors like Saudi Aramco, Chevron, and Shell, as well as large global commodity traders Gunvor and Woodside. These entities buy up gas, then hold on to it strategically, selling to the highest bidder when the price is right, or flooding the market to depress prices strategically. 'In the bigger picture, the idea is to use this glut of LNG that's coming online globally to open up additional markets in so-called 'price-sensitive' regions where companies can lock in natural gas dependency if the price gets low enough,' says Dan Wagner, research director on climate for Public Citizen. 'So we're talking about 20- or 30-year contracts.'Part of the irony here, explains Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International, is that the Biden DOE already authorized a lot more capacity than is safe from both an emissions point of view and in terms of prices for domestic consumers, locking in exactly the outcomes it warns about in its study. The additional authorized capacity includes U.S. LNG export facilities in America's neighboring countries, Mexico and Canada. Another point of critique is the underestimation of methane emissions in the report. The U.S. has a very complex gas supply network, made up of millions of pipelines, wells, and storage sites. Numerous analyses show that the official data underestimates U.S. oil and gas methane emissions. But the DOE study did not address this. And while the industry claims to be tackling methane leaks, Rosenbluth said, documentation is scarce and opaque. 'The problem is likely worse than the study concludes,' she adds. Advocates spent four years critiquing Biden's Department of Energy for its embrace of LNG, a fight that ultimately secured a small win in the form of its temporary pause on permitting and its commitment to study the LNG boom's economic and environmental impact. On their way out the door, those same department staffers may have given environmental advocates a powerful tool to stop the Trump administration from doing more of the same and baking in LNG overproduction for an additional decade or more. As they file legal challenges against Department of Energy permits for new LNG export terminals, environmental groups and public interest law firms will be able to quote from the department's own report and cite its data to argue that these terminals do not meet the public interest requirement in the Natural Gas Act. The Sagauro Mexico Pacific LNG export terminal, which would be built in Mexico, but falls under U.S. jurisdiction because it would be exporting U.S. gas, is a good example. Though it has secured several contracts, the terminal would be built right next to a globally significant whale nursery and would struggle to show economic benefit to the U.S. 'Under the Natural Gas Act you have to demonstrate an economic benefit to the U.S. to show that it's in the public interest,' Zibel explains. 'For the terminals in Mexico, there's clearly no U.S. jobs benefit, and now this report is saying that excessive U.S. LNG exports will have negative economic impacts for U.S. citizens, so those are going to be much harder to justify.' More from Rolling Stone Trump to Sign Executive Order Barring Transgender People From Military Service Selena Gomez Breaks Down as She Reacts to Trump Deportations: 'My People Are Getting Attacked' Dems Sound Alarm on Trump's Quiet Bid to Raise Prescription Prices Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
