In the last few days, Taiwan, India and Japan made clear they will be buying exported American LNG in the months and years ahead. Why? Entirely in an effort to hold off tariffs from the Trump administration. As the Japanese prime minister put it,
“We will cooperate to strengthen energy security between the two countries including increasing exports of United States liquefied natural gas to Japan in a mutually beneficial manner.”
Here’s how Bloomberg described the Indian decision-making:
Indian importers are under pressure from the government to reach deals that could smooth relations with Trump, the people said, but they will be looking for the best possible terms before signing any agreements.
Meanwhile, as Sing Yee Ong reports from Taipei
Taiwan is preparing to buy more liquefied natural gas from the US to reduce its trade surplus and potentially avoid higher tariffs.
Oh, and more to come
South Korea, Vietnam and the European Union are among energy buyers trying to appease President Donald Trump — and reduce the threat of tariffs — by looking to increase purchases from the biggest exporter of the super-chilled fuel and largest producer of crude.
I want to highlight these shakedowns, which have mostly been lost amidst the thousand other terrible things the Trump administration has loosed upon the world, because I know that before long Big Oil will be holding them up as evidence that the world needs and wants more fossil fuel. In fact, the world wants to move in entirely the opposite direction: 85% of new electric generation in 2023 came from renewables, and the numbers for 2024 will almost certainly be higher. That, of course, terrifies the fossil fuel industry—which is why they spent record amounts on November’s election. As fracking baron Harold Hamm explained, “We’ve got to do this because it’s the most important election in our lifetime.”
And now they’re getting the payoff: Trump threatens tariffs, and offers to make them go away if they buy some LNG. It’s akin to a protection racket. Pay up, or your windows get broken. It’s not criminal—it’s all entirely legal. It’s just wrong/
This particular protection racket makes no sense for America at large. Forget, for a moment, that LNG is a huge driver of the climate change driving fire and flood (by the time you’ve shipped it overseas it’s far worse even than coal); exporting it in huge quantities also obviously drives up the price for Americans still reliant on fracked gas for heating and cooking. The Energy Information Administration just predicted that natural gas prices will rise 21 percent in the year ahead. Politico did the math
Paul Cicio, president of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America trade association, said U.S. LNG exports are pushing natural gas and electricity prices higher.
Every “dollar increase in natural gas costs consumers $34 billion plus about $20 billion in higher electricity cost,” Cicio said in a statement Tuesday. It’s “only going to get worse from here as LNG exports increase.”t of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America trade association, said U.S. LNG exports are pushing natural gas and electricity prices higher.
As the Sierra Club points out, Trump’s strategy “makes no sense.” And they’re right—as long as we’re talking about the future of the planet or the cost to American consumers. But that’s not who Trump is thinking about. He’s got one constituency and one only: the Big Oil execs who bankrolled his campaign. For them, this is sweet payback, a 100-1 return on their investment.
And it’s a stark reminder that we have to fight back on the only turf we have: the fact that the sun and wind can deliver the same product as LNG, only more cheaply and much more cleanly. We can’t threaten tariffs to get our way; we can only make the case in such persuasive terms that we start to change the zeitgeist. That’s the point of SunDay project I described last week and that you are going to hear a lot more about. Many thanks to those who went to sunday.earth to help us draw some suns as we prepare for the official launch of this big effort. So many of you took part already. Here’s a beautiful example from the effervescent Ayana Johnson (whose book What If We Get It Right is a document for this tough moment)
It may seem like a mug’s game to take on Trump’s thuggish power with economics, physics, music, art, and justice. But perhaps they still hold some force in this world—we shall see.
' the fact that the sun and wind can deliver the same product as LNG, only more cheaply and much more cleanly'
No, they cannot. This writer is getting more and more adrift. Put differently, his angle is becoming dated.
All 'renewables' (they are really rebuildables; dams, PV, windmills, grids) rely on fossil input, indeed cannot be produced without it. I say this as a person who has lived off-grid for more than 20 years, and who reveled in being an early adopter). Writ large, society cannot function ex fossil energy subsidising it. And money as a marker, is fraught. If you're keystroking debt into existence – that's how money is created – and that debt has no hope of being meaningfully repaid (less surplus energy in the future, so less future work will be done) then why laud 'cheapness'?
Tom Murphy has led the on-thinking at this site. The divergence between his evolving thought, and this dinosaur sound-byte, is worthy of contemplation.
McKibbon has swallowed the pill.
He points out that "85% of new electric generation" is renewable. That's a statistical sleight-of-hand worthy of Convicted Felon Cat Meat! 85% of a very small number is still a very small number.
So-called renewables might not be petroleum-based (even though their production uses more fossil sunlight than proponents are willing to admit), but they are still like throwing gas on a fire — fossil-sunlight production is flat, and renewables are providing economic growth, rather than displacing fossil-sunlight use!
I wish McKibbon would instead attack the 800-pound gorilla in the room: growth. The more we pursue growth, the deeper we're in overshoot, and the harder the eventual fall.
Avoid the rush; de-grow now!