Alarmed US climate campaigners Frack Action appeal to President Joe Biden not to approve new fracking infrastructure

At the same time that US groups have used COP26 to highlight and advocate to stop LNG exports in the US, European groups are demanding that the European Union stop funding LNG import terminals and energy infrastructure.

Over 100 groups sent a letter to EU member states on Monday, advocating against subsidies for LNG import terminals and pipelines in Europe. Discussions about EU funding for new LNG infrastructure will begin this week, with a vote expected to take place in 2022.

Julia Walsh, director the US-based anti-fracking group Frack Action, says her group and many others have been fighting for years to stop fracking in the US along with LNG export terminals and import terminals in Europe. She points out that LNG imported by Europe includes gas coming from fracking sites across the US. Fracking is a extraction method where oil and gas corporations drill deep underground into rock formations and inject large volumes of water and chemicals at high-pressures to blast open the rock to obtain pockets of oil and gas.

Health professionals and environmental specialists across the US have condemned this extraction method as inherently dangerous to human life as well as having disastrous environmental consequences. Several US health groups published a report of the nearly 2,000 academic studies, government reports, and investigative reporting.

The scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that drilling and fracking harm public health and the environment and that those harms cannot be mitigated. Due to such dangers states including New York, Vermont, and Maryland have banned fracking. In Europe, England, Scotland, Wales, the Republic of Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Bulgaria have banned or halted the practice.

“In 2005, when fracking was approved by Congress, the US government exempted the oil and gas industry from our most stringent environmental laws including key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Many states have little or no enforcement to monitor the industry or the pollution and harms that result from fracking,” said Walsh.

“After a great deal of advocacy, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) produced a report during the Obama Administration which found pathways of contamination to groundwater sources from fracking,” says Walsh. “In some shale rock formations, fracking also brings unsafe levels of radioactive particles to the surface from deep beneath the ground.”

Walsh points out that in the second quarter of 2021, the US passed Australia as the largest exporter of LNG to Europe. “We are seizing the momentum of COP26 and building a strong coalition between European and US climate activists to stop our reliance on LNG and instead focus on investing in renewable energy,” she says.

US groups and advocates, including actor Mark Ruffalo, best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel’s The Avengers, have been urging the EU for years to not import US fracked gas that is poisoning Americans. In 2020, Ruffalo released a video asking the EU to not subsidize gas import infrastructure and instead continue to invest in the European Green Deal.

Appealing to EU leaders, Ruffalo said: “I would urge you from your hearts to recognise the negative health impacts on our communities here and the degradation of our social fabric (being caused by fracking). I am asking you to say no to these frack gas infrastructure projects that are coming your way. You are relying on something that is going to come to an end so you are wasting your money.”

There have been some successes in 2020 including in Ireland where the Green Party joined a coalition government with the condition that the Irish government implement a policy to ban the import of fracked gas from the US and other countries.

A French energy company indefinitely postponed a contract to import LNG from the US, citing concerns with fracking. Also in 2020, US Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also attending COP26, introduced legislation to ban fracking in the US.

Thus far the Biden Administration has been supportive of LNG exports, breathing new life into the fracked-gas sector, which at one point in the pandemic was looking close to collapse. Under the Paris Climate Agreement, the US will not have to count LNG export emissions as part of their climate pledge. Instead, the emissions will be counted by the country that imports the gas.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that climate pledges do not include the emissions of fossil fuel exports. This is a glaring loophole. The construction of these new LNG terminals is not temporary. These are long term structures and they are going to lock us into decades of reliance on natural gas, which is predominantly methane,” Walsh points out.

Methane is 87 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and methane must be curtailed for the world to limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“It is absolutely critical to cut all methane production and emissions,” she says. “Building these new LNG terminals will be a massive move in the wrong direction and further jeopardize our chances of reaching the Paris Agreement’s goals.”

Frack Action maintains that recovery funds from the pandemic must go to building renewable energy infrastructure, but governments are falling short. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency issued a report finding that only 2% of recovery funds are going toward building a green economy.

Instead, coal, oil and gas were subsidized $5.9 trillion in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund. “We have all the technology required to transition to a renewable energy economy, but the oil and gas industry continues to have a death grip on governments around the world. We need to continue to build a global climate movement to demand our political leaders take immediate action or humanity will face extinction.”

www.frackaction.com

www.priceofoil.org/biden