See the Win, Take the Win

The Biden administration’s decision to apply a climate test to a massive LNG terminal is a landmark win, and not the only good news we’ve seen this month. Now let's build on that momentum.

Jan 28, 2024

For anyone who spends much time working on or thinking about climate change and energy, 2024 is already throwing an unexpected curveball, something it’ll take some time and effort to get used to:

Winning.

There’s little doubt that the Biden administration’s decision this week to apply a climate test to a massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Louisiana, Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), is a landmark victory in the fight to drive down carbon and methane pollution. Better yet, CP2 is the biggest but just one of 17 LNG megaprojects the U.S. fossil industry is pushing forward for approval. A decision to follow the evidence in Louisiana could call all of them into question.

The CP2 announcement, which could push regulatory review for the project beyond the November general election in the United States, is “the biggest thing a U.S. president has ever done to stand up to the fossil fuel industry,” wrote veteran climate author Bill McKibben, founder of the Third Act climate justice group, in his The Crucial Years newsletter.

McKibben’s headline for his post: “Um, I think we all just won.”

Programming note: If you’re in or around Ottawa, mark your calendar for this Friday, February 2. That’s when Bill McKibben will be in town, delivering a public lecture at Carleton University’s Richcraft Hall at 7:30 PM. The campus is easily accessible by bus, and registration is free. Sign up here.

No Minor Feat

An LNG plant isn’t just any fossil fuel project. Stopping one or many of them in their tracks is no small feat—and no minor victory.

The main component of natural gas, or “fossil gas” as campaigners have been trying to rebrand it, is methane. It’s a shorter-lived greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it packs a far bigger punch over the short term: methane is about 84 times more potent than CO2 over the crucial 20-year span when we’ll all be scrambling to get climate change under control.

Small wonder that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lists methane controls in oil and gas, along with energy efficiency, solar, and wind, as the cheapest path to the fastest, deepest emission cuts by 2030.

That begins with meaningful controls (it’s with some hesitation that I’ve linked those words to a voluntary agreement among 50 giant fossil companies) on methane emissions and gas flaring in oil and gas operations, and independent satellite monitoring (okay, that’s better) to hold them to account. But it also means heeding the International Energy Agency’s nearly three-year-old call for no new investment in oil, gas, or coal development if countries really mean it about holding future global warming to 1.5°C.

Biden’s announcement this week is a big, essential step down that road. It’s a signal that the world’s biggest LNG exporter might begin cleaning up its act, and that any minimally fit White House administration will not only massively fund and enable clean energy alternatives, but cut with both arms of the scissors by moving to curtail future fossil production.

Grabbing Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Climate media and listservs have been trumpeting this story since it began to emerge around the middle of last week. As with any advance on energy and decarbonization, there are questions to be answered and potential landmines to avoid. But as climate wins go, at least for the moment, this one is about as clean and complete as they get.

Which is why I was brought up a bit short by a reader’s comment when we ran a breaking story on the U.S. news. Tim Gard wrote:

More empty promises to gain votes? [U.S. President Joe Biden] is losing support for re-election in record numbers. He will grab at every straw he can. Like restricting the fossil fuel industry openly while winking at the fossil fuel animals in the back room. Politics is a snake pit. The best solution is to not put your feet into any snake pits.

Anyone involved in this line of work knows that backroom dealing is a given, and that coherent climate policy still has to struggle for traction. But that’s all the more reason to embrace good news when we see it. Our reader’s comment made me realize that, as we get closer to the turnaround we need on climate and energy, we’re all going to need to learn some new skills.

To see the win when it happens.

To acknowledge the win when we see it.

To notice it and celebrate the shift as climate voices and practitioners move toward centre stage, after years and decades of bashing away at the front door to get inside.

To realize that there will still be times when climate and energy advocates need to say ‘no’, but the job will increasingly be to fight for ‘yes’. And that that’s exactly where we need and want to be to get this transition done.

A Bigger, Wider Shift

The context for the news on CP2 is just as important as the win itself, showing that the White House announcement was part of a wider, deeper trend.

I was surprised to see a post on Grist, usually a stalwart and reliable source on U.S. climate news, that waved generously at two of the biggest myths supporting the gas industry’s hope of sustaining and expanding its operations: that substituting gas for coal is a win for climate, and that other countries will just get their LNG elsewhere if they don’t buy it from the U.S. (or, on our side of the border, from Canada).

The reality is that gas is at least as good at wrecking the climate as coal once you factor in methane releases, deliberate or not, at every step along the line—from extraction, to transport, to final use. And as Grist notes, the meteoric rise of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and heat pumps, particularly in response to Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, spells trouble for anyone who’s counting on a predictable, long-term global market for gas.

“There is no reason to believe that Europe’s energy security depends on further expansion of LNG export capacity that would only come online toward the end of this decade,” Felix Heilmann, a policy analyst at Germany’s Dezernat Zukunft think tank, told Grist. The same momentum is taking hold in Asia, long seen as a reliable, long-term market for LNG. That market is beginning to shift fast enough to raise tough questions about projects like the Indigenous-owned Ksi Lisims floating gas liquefaction facility in British Columbia.

And, crucially, LNG isn’t the only area where 2024 has delivered a series of early wins—not nearly. Here are just a few of the stories we’ve been following, all in the last three weeks:

• A global surge in renewable energy deployment brings a tripling of global capacity by 2030 within reach.

• New analysis shows (once again) that the transition off fossil fuels could cost less than energy futures modelling usually predicts.

• A wind developer closes an $11-billion deal for the biggest green infrastructure project the United States has ever seen.

• A U.S. judge sends a landmark youth climate case to trial, after years of government-instigated delay dating back to the Obama administration.

• British Columbia and Quebec are both in the midst of major clean electricity expansions.

• A First Nation north of Estevan, Saskatchewan unveils a 100-MW solar project, the province’s biggest to date.

• Hawai’i replaces its last coal plant with battery backup for its power grid, while Puerto Rico embraces virtual power plants.

• Ottawa’s Envirocentre looks at car-free “school streets” as a way to boost student safety and health while reducing emissions.

• Montreal looks to transform its Bonaventure Expressway into a pedestrian haven.

To be sure, the breakthroughs big and small were interspersed with stories about climate risk, climate and wider environmental pollution, and senseless, needless fossil fuel expansion. But the good news continued unabated. And it came on the heels of a UN climate conference late last year that issued an historic call for a transition off fossil fuels, plus independent analysis that showed Canada within reach of its 2030 climate targets.

Elections Bring a Year of Influence

All of which brings us back to 2024 as a pivotal year for climate progress, and Tim Gard’s comment about politics as a “snake pit”. That’s as may be. But anyone who decides to do something about climate change is tacitly deciding to jump into that pit.

It’s complex. It’s messy. As we’ve said so often on The Weekender, it rarely delivers a clean win.

And with elections coming up at every turn—including the U.S. and three Canadian provinces in 2024, and Canada’s federal campaign in 2025—a potential moment of influence is at hand.

In the coverage of the White House LNG announcement, at least two major news outlets cast the decision as a response to public or activist pressure on the campaign trail. The clear implication was that Biden is caving to youth voters and campaigners whose active support he’ll need to win a second term in a country that is, to put it gently, “flirting with authoritarianism”.

But important as they are, the “outside” anti-LNG campaigns by dedicated community activists aren’t the only game in town. There’s also a growing collection of “inside” stories from project developers, investors, workers, states and provinces, and municipalities, all of them seeing better economic prospects because of the billions flowing into climate solutions. And telling their politicians all about it.

So pick your storyline: Biden is caving to pressure, aligning with the win he’s been working for years to build, manifesting a genuine understanding of the depths of the climate emergency, or some unknown mix of all three. Whatever the answer—why does it matter, as long as we get the durable outcome we need?

It would be pure, cynical manipulation if politicians were waiting for campaign season to unleash another round of unkept promises. But even if that’s an old, familiar story, it isn’t what’s happening today, in the U.S. or in Canada. The U.S. economy is bouncing back in large part due to (mostly) clean energy and climate investments under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Canada is projecting solid, measurable climate performance for the first time ever, on the hope or assumption that a large collection of hard-fought regulatory measures and incentives will continue past the next federal election.

It's easy to dismiss all of that activity as typical politicians, just trying to get re-elected. Particularly when news of a big, ground-shifting announcement begins to break the day after the New Hampshire primary where Donald Trump more or less confirmed his party’s presidential nomination.

But why not? Work on the climate and energy transition needs to happen every day, not every four years. But as long as that work is going on—and it finally is—we shouldn’t be surprised if politicians save up some of their best announcements for the narrow period of time when distracted, overstressed voters will actually remember them when they cast their ballots.

As long as they’re pulling in the right direction toward faster, deeper carbon cuts, we should welcome it.

How Can We Call This a Win?

The continuing news of climate impacts—of record drought in the Amazon and epic ice loss in Greenland—means any win we declare is conditional. Quite clearly, the deep risks and tipping points we face are accelerating right alongside the climate solutions we’re working to build.

But in a climate emergency, this is what winning looks like, the only way it’s going to happen. Faced with such a big, all-encompassing, global emergency, no single announcement or breakthrough will deliver all the results we need. And there will be more than enough moments of grief, fear, and loss along the way.

That’s all the more reason to see the wins and take the wins, anytime we legitimately can. It’s the only way to keep the effort up for the long haul, the best antidote for friends and colleagues, relatives and neighbours in the grips of climate despair.

After that, we win when we treat each new round of powerful, good news as a prompt to double down, not ease off, on whatever we’re doing to bring renewables and efficiency to the mainstream and speed up the transition that will secure our climate future.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.