“At the Scene of the Crime”

The United States is the world’s leading exporter of LNG. Exports have grown 40 percent since Biden’s inauguration until this year, mirroring a similar increase in US crude oil exports.

But as the United States 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 January 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 US 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 February 5, seven House Democrats joined sixteen 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.

On February 15, nine House Democrats joined with Republicans to pass a bill to reverse the pause that had been introduced by Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), 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, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) 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 US 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 percent 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-AK), and Jim Costa (D-CA) — 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 United States, as well as from fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil, Valero, Devon, and Halliburton. Over the last two cycles, more than 10 percent of Cuellar’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 forty thousand 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 fourteen Democrats who joined the calls to reverse Biden’s pause, only staffers for Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-CO) 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 LNG 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 Alexandria Ocasio Cortez 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. Gonzalez, 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.”