Little Rock       Are you kidding me?  I do a report one day about the fight on the Gulf Coast about LNG terminals, and the very next day I see on the front page of the New York Times that the Biden Administration suddenly kicked the entire industry in the guts.  Are they reading my reports or listening to them on the radio?  Is my house or office bugged?  Is this just coincidence, or am I communicating telepathically directly to the White House?  I don’t know, probably not.  If I were ex-President Trump, I’d take credit for the whole shebang, but on the other hand, he’ll probably trash the whole affair.

Here’s what’s up, according to the big whoops:

The White House is directing the Energy Department to expand its evaluation of the project to consider its impact on climate change, as well as the economy and national security, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations. The Energy Department has never rejected a proposed natural gas project because of its expected environmental impact.

Don’t get me wrong.  They are building these things already like crazy, which is why communities are fighting them like cats and dogs.  We already have seven of these terminals in operation, some among the largest in the world.  There are also another five permitted by the Energy Department and under development, so this is more of a potential climate epiphany than it is past practice.  The industry wants to build another seventeen though, including this mother of them all in Louisiana.

Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, would dwarf the country’s existing export terminals. The $10 billion project would be situated along a shipping channel that connects the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Charles, La. It would export up to 20 million tons of natural gas per year, increasing the current amount of exported American gas by about 20 percent.

Like I said, the government has never NOT approved one of these, so it’s important to understand that this is a delay, not a denial.  Nonetheless, forcing the regulators to weigh the climate impacts is huge, and the fact that this is an election year might just make it an issue.

I was kidding earlier, because CP2 has been a big campaign for enviros and other heavyweights that understand our climate issues and commitments.  There have been letters, petitions, and lots of social media harrumphing like the Obama pipeline fights.  They have made a difference.

The industry is crying like a stuck pig that this will be the end of life as we know it, but that’s kind of point, isn’t it? Ending life as we have known it, so we can live differently.  Others speculate that this is a political decision.  If so, so be it.  There aren’t a lot of votes that Biden will be sacrificing in what residents were calling a “sacrifice zone” along the Texas and Louisiana border, and more to gain around the rest of the country for doing the right thing the right way.