Excerpted from “The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future” by Benji Backer in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Benjamin Backer, 2024. The book can be purchased here.
It’s no secret that the NBA and other sports enterprises are heavily funded by China, a country of avid sports fans. It’s also known that China runs a tight ship when it comes to public criticism of its regime, with noncompliance resulting in serious consequences. This strong-arming does not end in the private sector. Several US climate-related nonprofits are funded by Chinese companies and would collapse without this support. For this reason, many activist leaders have kept silent about China’s totalitarian rule, dirty (carbon-intensive) energy and human rights violations.
In June of 2020, I personally experienced the fallout of this un-written rule of remaining silent when I was scheduled to speak at an important event hosted by the Action for the Climate Emergency (formerly known as the Alliance for Climate Education) and just days before the event was informed by email that I was uninvited. One of ACE’s staff members had scoured my Twitter account and discovered previous tweets that did not “align with the organization’s values.” My words had nothing to do with climate change, but one particular tweet linked China to the coronavirus and suggested we rethink our economic and public health reliance on that country, which was enough to cancel me without a proper conversation first. They claimed it was racially insensitive to link COVID to the Chinese government — and offered to provide a coach to train me on being antiracist.
I was no stranger to criticism when it came to differing political views. However, this extreme reaction to something completely unrelated to the conference felt out of left field and, frankly, scary.
China is not the only totalitarian regime with which America has been doing business. Before the war in Ukraine, the US, like much of Europe, relied on Russia as a backup supplier of natural gas. In the wake of the West’s strategy to economically isolate Russia by minimizing oil and gasoline imports from that country, the Biden administration turned back to other countries as suppliers. In November 2022, the federal government issued an expanded license to Chevron, the nation’s second-largest oil company, allowing it to resume production and importation of oil in Venezuela, yet another dictatorial regime.
The potential amount of oil this new development would actually supply only amounted to about 1 percent of our country’s total demand. Still, the re-established negotiations with Venezuela have raised some serious concerns among environmentalists and social activists. Venezuela’s oil has been known to be among the most greenhouse-gas-intensive in the world, producing about twice the total emissions per barrel as oil from, say, Saudi Arabia. That factor, paired with the Venezuelan government’s horrendous human rights record, tells us that we need to find better alternatives for intermittent backup to renewable power sources.
If the world continues to rely on adversarial countries for dirty energy, any domestic progress in fighting climate change will be canceled out. Russia’s leaky, antiquated gas production system has been known to produce methane emissions eight times higher than those from the European Union or US domestic gas and is estimated to accelerate climate change twice as much as the coal it’s meant to replace. The world’s growing reliance on liquefied natural gas (LNG) only adds to the problem. LNG is a natural gas that has been cooled down to liquid form and takes up about 1/600th the volume of natural gas in the gaseous state. Although it is odorless, colorless, nontoxic and non-corrosive, LNG can emit just as much GHG as coal because of the methane that leaks out during processing.
Yamal LNG is only part of a much larger Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global infrastructure development strategy that began in 2013. The Chinese government is also investing in an Arctic free-trade zone and has upgraded rail and road links between Russia and China. Although both countries have always maintained conflicting interests, this basic relationship remains: Russia has energy to sell and China is eager to buy it.
What can the US and Europe do to mitigate our dependence on Russia? Specific policies that would help limit the security and climate costs of Russian gas include a temporary expansion of natural gas in America and allied EU countries while simultaneously increasing the EU’s renewable energy production (including nuclear).
Efforts to de-methanize US gas can greatly increase the EU’s openness to additional American LNG exports as well. Any climate benefits of low-carbon natural gas may disappear when too much methane is produced in its production, processing and transport. Very few people I speak to daily know that methane, the primary component of natural gas, when emitted into the atmosphere, has twenty-eight to thirty-six times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Even though its lifetime is much shorter than that of carbon dioxide, reducing methane released from natural gas is one of the most potent short-term wins in fighting climate change. Federal rules around pipe leak detection and repair are a simple solution to this problem.
Another easy win in methane emissions reduction is to decrease flaring, a harmful shortcut to handling the natural gas produced in oil production. At many well sites that lack the infrastructure or economic incentive to transport this by-product away for sale, the gas is burned, or flared, at the wellhead. While a handful of oil-and-gas states, including California, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, have methane emissions regulations in place, other states such as Texas have none. To give you an idea of the extent to which flaring takes place in some states, in Texas in 2019, enough gas was flared to meet the entire state’s natural gas demand. A federal requirement to connect oil wells to gas infrastructure before drilling begins would help resolve this issue.
If implemented carefully over time, each of the measures I’ve just discussed could stabilize energy prices along with lowering emissions. Just as importantly, collaborating on energy sourcing with allied nations would help reduce Russia’s leverage to use restrictions in natural gas supplies as a threat against neighboring European countries.
Benji Backer is founder and executive chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, the largest right-of-center environmental organization in the country.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.