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A federal judge in Louisiana on Monday put the Energy Department’s pause
on natural gas export permits on hold, dealing another legal blow to the
Biden administration’s climate agenda.

Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, granted a request for a stay from 16 red states that had challenged the
pause, arguing it will harm their economies.

The decision to stay the LNG pause upends one of Joe Biden’s major policy
nods to climate-focused activists who have accused the president of not
doing enough to mitigate planet-warming emissions despite Democrats
passing the largest investment in climate in history via the Inflation Reduction Act.

Cain ruled that DOE failed to justify why it needed to pause approvals to review the process by which it permits projects.

“Past precedent, which the applicants relied upon, allowed the approval of
the applications to proceed when updates were made,” wrote Cain, who also blocked the Biden administration’s social cost of carbon estimate in 2022
— a decision overruled by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Cain also agreed with red states that DOE failed to consider their
concerns about the “impact on national security, state revenues,
employment opportunities, funding for schools and charities, and pollution allegedly caused by increased reliance on foreign energy sources.”

Given these factors, Cain found the states “have a likelihood of success
on the merits as to the claims.”

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, one of the state attorney generals leading the challenge, called the ruling a “big win for the
country’s energy industry and the millions of jobs it supports.”

“This administration’s Energy Department has no such authority to justify
this ban— authority on matters like this lies with Congress and Congress alone,” Morrisey said in a statement.

Administration officials have defended the pause — which is expected to
last through early next year — as necessary to ensure the approval process takes into account current market dynamics and the environmental impacts
of LNG exports. They note that LNG projects that are under construction or already have permits will more than double U.S. export capacity in the
coming years.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement
the administration is “disappointed” in the ruling.

“We remain committed to informing our decisions with the best available economic and environmental analysis, underpinned by sound science,” he
said. “The United States remains the world’s largest exporter of LNG, and
is currently on track to more than double existing capacity by the end of
this decade.”

An Energy Department spokesperson said in a statement it “disagrees” with
the court’s ruling and is evaluating next steps.

Environmental advocates said the ruling will have no immediate impact on
the pending permits for LNG export projects, nor the ongoing study being conducted by DOE’s national labs to determine the economic and
environmental impacts of those exports.

“While the decision requires DOE to proceed with evaluating pending LNG applications, this preliminary injunction does not order DOE to issue any specific decisions or stop the critical process of updating the data it
relies on to determine whether those applications are in the public
interest as required by law,” Louisa Eberle, a staff attorney at the
Sierra Club, said in a statement.

Craig Segall, vice president at the environmental group Evergreen Action,
said the ruling has a “paper tiger quality” to it.

“The judge basically says that you can’t have this pause, whatever it is,
but DOE still has to make a public interest determination [on each
project],” Segall said. “That’s just true in the law.”

Segall said the judge is “reaching pretty hard” with the ruling, which
refers to the pause as an “export ban” throughout.

“DOE saying it wants to study a question sure doesn’t sound like an export ban,” Segall said. “Even with that reach, he ultimately can’t tell DOE
what to find is true about science or economics.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/01/judge-blocks-biden-lng-pause-
00166157

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