Fossil Fuel Cash Is Fracking Democrats’ Climate Support

Earlier this year, Biden paused the nation’s massive natural gas exports in one of his most meaningful climate actions to date. But, as Josh Keefe reveals in today’s featured story, fossil fuel’s favorite Democrats have since joined Republicans to fight the pause, and maintain our position as the world’s leading natural gas exporter.

Rock the boat.

(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

[View in browser]

When President Joe Biden announced in January that he was temporarily halting approvals of new liquefied natural gas exports and processing terminals, Emma Guevara welcomed the news. 

A resident of Brownsville, Texas — a historically poor city and fossil-fuel hotspot on the Gulf of Mexico — Guevara is concerned about two multibillion-dollar proposed liquid natural gas terminals for the area. Beyond the projects’ potential impacts on nearby ecosystems, air, and water quality, Guevara is worried about how carbon emissions from the projects would impact the planet — and her home.

“We’re on the coast,” said Guevara, a local Sierra Club organizer. “And we’re a really marginalized community that can barely handle regular natural disasters, let alone what we’re looking at in the next 10 years.”

But Biden’s pause on such fossil fuel projects isn’t just being opposed by Republicans — it’s also facing pushback from some Democrats, including Guevara’s own Democratic Congressman, Vicente Gonzalez.

Gonzalez is one of 14 House Democrats who have either signed on to letters to Biden opposing the pause or voted with Republicans to re-launch natural gas processing and exports. Together, these legislators have received a total of more than $735,000 from the oil and gas industry since the 2022 election. More than a third of that money went to Gonzalez and three other Democrats who signed all of the letters and voted to end the pause on natural gas exports. All four of them are among the top ten Democratic recipients of oil and gas money this election cycle.

The Killer-Sunshine State

A state effort to outlaw workplace heat-protection standards is a preview of what will happen as the GOP’s war on workers collides with our climate reality.

Read The Article

While the letters are largely symbolic and the bill to reverse the natural gas export pause is likely dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, the efforts illustrate the steady drumbeat by members of Biden’s own party to slow the clean energy transition. 

While these Democrats claim they’re concerned about the loss of oil and gas industry jobs and Russia’s growing power in the international natural gas market, the campaign cash tells another story.

“At The Scene Of The Crime”

The U.S. is the world’s leading exporter of liquid natural gas. Exports have grown 40 percent since Biden’s inauguration until this year, mirroring a similar increase in U.S. crude oil exports. 

But as the U.S. has ramped up natural gas production, environmental groups and members of Congress have called on Biden to deny permits for new export facilities, arguing that exports will increase the world’s dangerous reliance on fossil fuels and raise domestic prices. 

On Jan. 26, the Biden administration conceded, announcing a “temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquid Natural Gas.” The pause will allow the administration to evaluate and update its standards for approving exports, as the current standards “no longer adequately account for considerations like potential energy cost increases” or “the impact of greenhouse gas emissions,” the administration said in a press release the same day.

Just six days later, ten House Democrats signed on to a letter urging Biden to “refocus on policies that support U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) exports.”

The letter went on to argue that natural gas exports were essential to helping developing countries transition away from coal. “As the leading producer and exporter of natural gas, the United States has an obligation to assist these countries in their energy transitions,” the Democrats wrote. 

The ten Democrats raised a combined $664,000 from the oil and gas industry this election cycle.

Four days later on Feb. 5, seven House Democrats joined 16 Republican colleagues in sending another letter to Biden voicing “concern” over the pause. “The Department of Energy’s plan to change the criteria used to approve new LNG export projects threatens national security, the economy, and clean energy goals,” they wrote. 

The seven Democrats raised a combined $330,000 from the oil and gas industry this election cycle.

Wear Your Support

Check out The Lever’s merch. Every purchase supports holding the powerful accountable through the tireless independent journalism that corporate media will not do.

Check Out The Lever Store Now

On Feb. 15, nine House Democrats joined with Republicans to pass a bill to reverse the pause that had been introduced by Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), the top recipient of oil and gas money in the House this cycle.

Together, the nine members have received a total of $395,000 this cycle from oil and gas interests, and six of them are among the top Democratic House candidate beneficiaries of oil and gas industry political donations. Roughly half of that total went to two Democrats representing south Texas’s prolific oil country, Henry Cuellar and Gonzalez, according to OpenSecrets. Cuellar and Gonzalez did not respond to requests for comment.

Finally, a week after the vote on Pfluger’s bill, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers, including four Democrats, penned another letter to Senate and House leadership asking that language be inserted into a must-pass spending bill that would prevent the administration from changing the standards used to evaluate natural gas export permits. (The requested language was not in the version of the bill passed by the House and sent to the Senate.)

“In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2021, our European allies have nearly tripled their import of U.S. LNG while significantly reducing their reliance on Russian natural gas,” they wrote in the letter. “The Department of Energy has also confirmed that American LNG is up to 30% cleaner than Russian natural gas, and if we do not fulfill the demand for LNG and let other countries like Russia control the markets, emissions will continue to rise.”

The four Democrats who signed the final letter — Cuellar, Gonzalez, Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) and Jim Costa (D-Calif.) — were also the only four Democrats to sign all three letters and vote for Pfluger’s bill. They are all among the top nine recipients of oil and gas money among House Democratic candidates this cycle, having together raised $287,000. 

Leading the pack is Cuellar. In addition to the $135,000 he raised from the oil and gas industry in 2023, Cuellar and his political action committee collected $370,000 from the industry during his 2022 reelection campaign, according to OpenSecrets. The total haul included donations from corporate political action committees representing Houston-based Cheniere Energy, the largest LNG producer in the U.S., as well as from fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil, Valero, Devon and Halliburton. Over the last two cycles, more than 10 percent of Cueller’s entire fundraising total came from the oil and gas industry, and it has given him nearly $1.5 million during his nearly two-decade congressional career, more than any other industry.

Cuellar’s office did not respond to emailed questions, but he has previously defended his support of the oil and gas industry as a way of protecting 40,000 jobs in his district, which covers parts of San Antonio to the north and a wide swath of border communities to the south. 

“Natural gas production and oil production are very important for jobs,” Cuellar told the Houston Chronicle in 2020. “We’re all trying to get to the same goal in combating climate change. It’s just the strategy we need to talk about.

Of the 14 Democrats who joined the calls to reverse Biden’s pause, only staffers for Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-Colo.) responded to emailed questions about the vote, pointing to a previous statement. 

“Our communities in Colorado need a balance between a clean energy transition and our current needs for fossil fuel and jobs,” Caraveo said after the vote. “We cannot make this transition in a way that threatens the job stability of those workers that rely on these high-paying jobs with good benefits.”

Unlike some of the other legislators who voted for the bill, Caraveo is not a recipient of oil and gas industry largesse. She received just $10 from the industry this cycle, according to OpenSecrets. 

In Texas, Gonzalez has touted the potential of a liquid natural gas terminal proposed for his district to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent — through the use of largely untested carbon-capture technologies.

“It’s the first of its kind,” Gonzalez said at a project stakeholder appreciation event last year. “I tell my green friends, including AOC and everyone, about this amazing project that we have here — that really reduces carbon emissions.”

Guevara, Gonzalez’s constituent who lives near two proposed terminal sites, isn’t buying it. Gonzelez, after all, has received nearly half a million dollars from the oil and gas industry in his four-term career. And she has no illusions about the environmental bona fides of Gonzalez and his colleagues.

When it comes to attempts to stop climate efforts, she says these fossil fuel-backed Democrats are “usually at the scene of the crime.”

Help us spread the word! Please forward this email to family and friends.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up for free to receive original reporting like this in your inbox every day.