A Bridge to Nowhere | U.S. Natural Gas & LNG

Hello friend!

We’ve done it again: a new record for the longest Climate Town episode yet. 

Dead-on 40 minutes long, which means we’re getting dangerously close to videos as long as an entire episode of the hit television show House. A couple more minutes and we would’ve left you wondering:

Maybe doctors shouldn’t be renegades? 

Of course, we wanted to solve a medical mystery, but instead we made a brutally long climate comedy video, produced in partnership with Canary Media and Climate Power.

And if that isn’t your thing, we understand and appreciate that and are quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put the unsubscribe button all the way up here:

And while we’re up here, Climate Town is HIRING. That’s right, we’re looking to hire an Associate Producer, and if you think that could be you, here’s the job listing. Check it out!

Also, check out the methane leak regulation action playbook Climate Changemakers created for our episode. They’re also hosting in-person and Zoom Hour of Action events this week, where you can run through the playbook as a group.

And this is our newsletter, no one can stop us – we also updated our Patreon and added a ton of perks that are certified good. We’re talking a Patreon-only Discord channel, episode Q&As, Rollie cuts your hair once a year (NYC only) and why list them all when you can see the full breakdown here. On our Patreon. 

Now? Let’s scroll:

The Pause of the Year

If you’re reading this and you haven’t watched our latest video yet? Well friend, that’s quite alright. You can click that video box right above here and begin your winding journey through the past decade and a half in natural (methane) gas expansion in the U.S.

Okay now that you’ve watched or decided you’d like to go in cold (very House-like btw) let’s cut to the chase. A couple months ago, the Biden Administration delivered:

Quite possibly the biggest pushback against the fossil fuel industry by a U.S. President ever.

And it came in the form of: 

A permitting pause. 

Sounds boring? Yeah, it really does. But it’s also a big deal, so here’s what you need to know:

1. Natural gas is mostly methane, which has over 80 times the global warming potential of CO2 in the short term (a couple decades). So when natural gas leaks, that’s mostly methane busting up into the atmosphere – and methane is responsible for around a quarter of our current climate change.

2. For electricity generation, natural gas produces less CO2 than coal, but obviously way more CO2 than wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, or any zero carbon options. But then you add in the methane leaks, and natural gas GHG emissions are back up towards coal territory.

3. The U.S. now produces so much natural gas that we’ve started exporting about 10% of our production.

4. The only reasonable way to export gas via ship is to supercool it down to -260F, turning it into a liquid. That’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

5. As you can imagine, the process of cooling and shipping all that LNG means a lot of GHG emissions.

6. The U.S. is now the #1 LNG exporter in the world.

And with all that info crammed into your own personal head, we’ll now tell you this:

The U.S. was set to more than QUADRUPLE our LNG exporting capacity.

We’re already #1 in the world (14 billion cubic feet per day). If all the new proposed LNG infrastructure is built, we’d then be able to export almost five times that (66 bcf/d). Which is about half of our 2023 domestic gas production. That’s a f*cking ton of gas.

And up until now, new LNG terminals moved through the permitting process with (what appears to be) minimal concern for climate change. In fact, there are already permits issued for enough LNG infrastructure to triple our current capacity.

But then, after years of activists pushing for climate concern, we got this from the White House in late January:

“Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing a temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) … until the Department of Energy can update the underlying analyses for authorizations.”

Again, that’s a massive shift in the traditional U.S. approach to fossil fuel projects. The LNG projects that are now paused represent more export capacity than the U.S. has right now.

And that friends, is:

The Pause of the Year.

And goddamn we hope this is the start of the U.S. Government taking the climate impacts of fossil fuels more seriously. Maybe they’ll even look at the local impacts on people that live near LNG terminals. 

But whatever happens next, this is: 

A bonafide climate win.

If you want to read more about the permitting pause, here are a handful of pieces to check out:

• Understanding Biden’s LNG decision | HEATED

Actually, just read that one. If you want more, you can click some links or search LNG Biden Eye of Sauron. But Emily and Arielle at

HEATED

do a great job – if you haven’t already, you should check them out.

The Methane Slip of the Seas

Even though it’s been over a century since the Iceberg, your average ship will still do pretty much anything to avoid being compared to the Titanic. 

But the Icon of the Seas is not your average ship. In fact, the president of Royal Caribbean (the company that owns and operates the ship) called it:

“The biggest, baddest ship on the planet.”

And at almost five times the volume of the Titanic, with twice as many decks, at double the total height, the Icon of the Seas is the largest cruise ship in the world. Ever. In the world. Ever. (This part echoes out)

And, after one of the more depressing christenings we’ve ever seen, the Icon floated out to international waters on January 27, 2024. Nice.

Now, if we were a typical media site in our modern internet age, that would be the end of one of the twenty five articles we write today. I mean, “The Top 14 Illiterate Television Dads” isn’t gonna write itself! But we don’t have those kinds of problems. Our problem is that we can’t stop ourselves:

• Built to carry almost 10,000 people (7,600 passengers, 2,350 crew).

• It’s longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall.

• Has a beach club with a suspended infinity pool, which sounds terrifying, and we refuse to look it up. It also has 6 other regular pools.

• Features a jewelry store that only sells Royal Caribbean-themed jewelry.

• You can rent a multi-level, kid-friendly townhouse for $100K per week.

• This woman’s son called the ship “human lasagne”.

Awesome stuff. 

And look, the cruise industry has gotten a lot of shit for its climate and environmental problems in the past. Shit like:

“Passengers on an Antarctic cruise can produce as much CO2 emissions on a seven-day voyage as the average European in an entire year.”

Or maybe like the shit they got when a whistleblower from Princess Cruise Lines told everyone about something known in the cruise industry as:

The Magic Pipe. 

Sounds completely 420 stoked bro (yes!). But actually it’s just a pipe (maybe even a tube) they would secretly connect to the tank that’s supposed to be holding the ship’s oily bilge water, where that oil-contaminated water is supposed to wait patiently before it’s safely discharged at port – but instead they’d run that secret pipe (or could be a tube, you never know) to a different tank, so they could just drop that sludge water into the sea without all the hassle. F*cking fantastic.

But Royal Caribbean seems determined to leave behind that unfortunate cruise industry public image. They even started putting out Seastainability reports in 2018 about how determined they are to put an end to this terrible behavior (nothing says “we take this seriously” like puns).

And luckily for them, there’s a new climate solution that will help Royal Caribbean drop their carbon emissions by double digits by 2025:

Liquefied Natural Gas.

But unluckily for Royal Caribbean, they seem to either not know, or don’t really want to talk about, all the issues that come with LNG. Here’s a sentence from Bryan Comer, from The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT):

“Royal Caribbean’s decision to use LNG is their biggest climate blunder.”

But how could that be? The cruise industry has been telling everyone that using LNG leads to a 25% decrease in carbon emissions. But then here’s Bryan again:

“They are doubling down by calling LNG a green fuel when the engine is emitting 70 to 80% more greenhouse gas emissions per trip than if it used regular marine fuel.”

But how could that be? Well, among the other LNG issues we painstaking laid our in our video, it turns out there’s yet another big one:

Methane slip.

In a perfect world, a fossil-fuel-exploding engine would smash and blast every last molecule of fuel sent its way. But unlike the world Dr. House inhabits (brilliant/enigmatic/no consequences to law-breaking), the real world is far from perfect, which means some of that fuel escapes un-exploded.

And in the case of LNG, that’s mostly methane, rolling right up into the sky. That’s methane slip! (Author’s note: if possible, read that last line aloud in the same intonation as this clip)

And it really seems like the methane slip from some cruise ship LNG engines can be quite a lot… of methane slip:

“Cruise ship engines have an estimated methane slip of 6.4 per cent on average, according to 2024 research funded by the ICCT and other partners. The [International Marine Organization] assumes methane slip at 3.5 per cent.”

Huh?

Methane leaks potentially getting underestimated?

Good god they’ve done it again.

And if that’s all news to you, truly consider watching the video we just made about this.

Chart Town: a Chart of U.S. LNG Projects (In Operation to Proposed)

This chart from Jeremy Symons features pretty heavily in our video, but let’s take another good look at it.

That dark red chunk labeled “Proposed” is the part the Biden Administration paused. Wow, that’s so much natural gas.

If we built all those LNG projects, and kept our U.S. demand level, we would need to increase our domestic gas production by almost 50% to make use of that incredible increase in LNG capacity.

Alright, you get it!

Other Video Town: The Really Good Frontline Doc on Big Oil

Sometimes, when we’re researching an episode, we stumble across another piece of media that’s so incredibly well done we just sit back in awe. This is one of those.

It's the finale of a three-part Frontline series on Big Oil – this part’s simply called Delay. It covers the past decade or two of oil and gas companies delaying climate action, while simultaneously asserting themselves as the climate leaders of the future.

You should watch it.

And then go and watch the first two parts. Or you can watch all three in order. Either way, here we are, in our 30s, telling you about a PBS documentary we really love. Okay!

Chart Town: Electricity from U.S. Renewable Energy Sources (1950 to 2022)

Let’s roll towards the end with some good news. While natural/methane gas has taken the top U.S. power generation spot over the past decade, renewables (mainly solar and wind) have also been on a historic tear.

And a lot of that comes down to cost:

• In 2009, solar was almost six times as expensive as gas combined cycle (per megawatt-hour).

• Solar costs have dropped 83% since then – utility scale solar has been cheaper than gas combined cycle since 2016 (according to Lazard’s LCOE). 

• Onshore wind costs have also dropped 63% since 2009.

Now go back up and look at that renewables chart. Pretty nice.

And maybe you want to read more about the costs of renewable energy as it becomes a larger percentage of our power generation? Well, we don’t have it. BUT WE KNOW WHO DOES! You should just check out this piece from Andrew Dessler at

The Climate Brink

:

• Is renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels?

Official Rollie (no prize): Rollie Recently Watched Heat

The title pretty much says it all: Rollie recently watched the movie Heat and he’s been talking about it a lot.

Don’t believe us? If you remember from earlier today when you started reading this newsletter, we recently updated our Patreon offerings (which you can check out here) – and Rollie really wanted to include a Climate Town hotline as a perk. So he could get an old school phone for his desk. Like Al Pacino. In the movie Heat.

Help.

So here it is: send us a recommendation of an Al Pacino movie that Rollie should watch to get his mind off Heat. And keep in mind that this recommendation needs to include a pitch that’s strong enough to make Rollie actually watch this other movie, instead of just rolling Heat yet again. 

AND DON’T SUGGEST THE 1997 KEANU REEVES/AL PACINO FILM THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE. 

He already watched it and felt it was pretty bad. Good first act, then it fell off a cliff.

If Rollie watches your recommended movie before the next newsletter? Well then you will be declared an Official Rollie (no prize). Good luck.

And of course, we have our Official Rollie (no prize) honorees from our last newsletter, where we asked for submissions for a new Climate Town catchphrase. But just a list wouldn’t do them justice here, so here are your top three Official Rollie (no prize), along with their catchphrases:

1. Amanda Thoren – ‘Cli-yiy-yiy-’ and then you say ‘-mate!’ while high fiving

2. James Richard – Bike me!

3. Jack Johnson – Inbound for Climate Town!

Congratulations Amanda, James, and Jack. You win nothing (no prize). And here are the rest of your Official Rollie (no prize) for this round:

• Marty H.

• Loren [Redacted]

• Colin Kuroishi

• “Megafauna”

• Chris Rudkowski

• Clayton Summers

How about that, friend?

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Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen