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Since Greenwald—a former Salon columnist, and after that a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Guardian — departed from The Intercept in September 2020, he’s become a stalwart defender of Fox, and Carlson in particular. As Carlson has gained in viewership and impact—he’s the most widely watched cable news host in the US—his commentary and political positions have come under increased scrutiny. With that attention has come intense criticism. But he has Greenwald in his corner, who has let forth a flood of pro-Carlson arguments, primarily delivered on Twitter, his medium of choice.
Shortly before the May 14 massacre in Buffalo that left 10 dead, the alleged shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, published a 180-page manifesto online. The post explained that he targeted the Tops Market grocery store because the neighborhood was majority Black, in an act of political violence aimed at striking fear into nonwhite US residents. Gendron’s ideological outlook was highly influenced by the racist conspiracy theory known as the “Great Replacement” which holds that whites in the US are being systematically replaced by people of color in a demographic change that’s being masterminded by a cabal of elites.
That demographic-threat conspiracy theory has been laundered in prime time by none other than Carlson. Using his perch atop cable news rankings, the Fox News host has worked to spread the message of demographic threat far and wide amongst conservatives. Gendron’s manifesto doesn’t mention Carlson specifically, a point seized on by Greenwald to explain away the connections between the messaging from his favorite cable news host and the shooter. But the ideological throughline is hard to miss.
Here’s Carlson on Sept. 8, 2018:
How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions, such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors or your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values?
Here’s Gendron in his manifesto:
Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum “diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength...”. Said throughout the media, spoken by politicians, educators and celebrities. But no one ever seems to give a reason why. What gives a nation strength? And how does diversity increase that strength? What part of diversity causes this increase in strength? No one can give an answer.
Nikki McCann Ramirez, a researcher with Media Matters, noted on my podcast last week that the interconnectedness of right-wing messaging, from neo-Nazi chat boards to Fox News, makes drawing distinctions between Carlson and Gendron somewhat irrelevant.
“The shooter did not cite Tucker Carlson as an inspiration in his manifesto or as a direct source of radicalization—but what I think is important to point out here is that this man was radicalized on online forums,” Ramirez said. “Extremism researchers know that these white nationalist online forums view Carlson as an ally in spreading their messaging to the public.”
* * * * *
Greenwald has been a Fox News partisan for some time, in near-perfect correlation to how often he’s invited on the network. Carlson has hosted Greenwald frequently, while gaining his unswerving loyalty.
What this loyalty has meant in real terms is relentless pro-Carlson arguments from Greenwald. He has seldom criticized Carlson or Fox News—as I detailed last year—and his deference has paid off with a near-weekly slot appearing on Carlson’s primetime show. (Greenwald challenged me to come on his show and hash out our differences. When I replied with a list of dates and times I could do, he did not respond.)
Greenwald argues to critics that his appearances on Carlson’s show allow him to get a pro-privacy, anti-war message out to the network’s viewers. Yet more often than not, he’s just on Fox News to talk about Twitter, liberals, and some aspect of the culture war.
For all of Greenwald’s claims that his presence on the show might shift at least a few Fox viewers from rabid right-wing ideologues to something approaching social libertarianism, his actual appearances seem to serve mainly to support Carlson’s worldview. Greenwald doesn’t challenge Carlson’s worldview, seldom if ever criticizes the right and generally stays in his lane—legitimizing the Fox News narrative.
Thus it was unsurprising that after the Buffalo shooting, Greenwald went out of his way to make outlandish defensive claims about that worldview. One of the main points Greenwald has hammered repeatedly is the idea that Carlson is simply reacting to liberals, who are really the folks spreading conspiracy theories.
“The Democrats and their leading [strategists] for years have been arguing that immigration will change the demographic make-up of the country—by replacing conservative voters with more liberal ones—and that this will benefit them politically,” Greenwald tweeted on May 16.
In a lengthy screed on his Substack blog, Greenwald expressed outrage over the very possibility that Carlson’s critics might tie the cable news host’s rhetoric to that of the Buffalo shooter. In particular, Greenwald found the suggestion that Carlson’s worldview was fundamentally racist beyond the pale.
“His anti-immigration and ‘replacement’ argument is aimed at the idea—one that had been long mainstream on the left until about a decade ago—that large, uncontrolled immigration harms American citizens who are already here,” Greenwald said, notably without a citation or, indeed, any evidence. “There is no racial hierarchy in Carlson's view of American citizenship and to claim that there is is nothing short of a defamatory lie.”
But the very backbone of Carlson’s replacement theory talk is, in fact, the story of racial hierarchy. Carlson doesn’t just rail at so-called “large, uncontrolled immigration”—he targets immigration as a whole from countries that he finds undesirable. It’s indistinguishable from the conspiracy theories about replacement spouted off by any number of far-right and sometimes overtly white supremacist figures.
* * * * *
Notably, when Greenwald is directly challenged on these points outside Twitter, he’s had difficulty defending his claims. A videotaped debate in late January with a young man named Nicholas provides a good example. Nicholas, who appears to be a teenager or very young adult, challenged Greenwald on his support for Carlson and the fact Greenwald has “never found anything negative to highlight” about the cable news host. Greenwald retorted that questions about the Fox News host were better directed at Carlson, since Greenwald didn’t watch the show. It was a strange admission from one of Carlson’s most fervent defenders.
Arguing that Carlson’s ideology is free of racism in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is stunningly brazen, even for a provocateur like Greenwald. In March 2021, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, Carlson complained that mob rule had overtaken legal justice. Finding Chauvin guilty, he argued, was essentially giving up on the rule of law because demonstrations had followed Floyd’s murder. “We must stop this current insanity,” Carlson declared. “It’s an attack on civilization.”
On Sept. 18, 2021, Carlson claimed that President Biden and the Democratic Party were attempting to “change the racial mix of the country.”
“In political terms,” Carlson told his audience, “this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”
Yet just months later, on Nov. 22, Greenwald tweeted that “Tucker’s view” was that the Fox News host believes “in a racially equal society.” In a debate with YouTube personality Steven Fritts released less than a week later, Greenwald said that, in his experience, Carlson’s views on race were hard to square with accusations of racism.
“I have never ever, ever, ever heard Tucker frame immigration or any other issue in the racist terms that you attributed to him,” Greenwald told Fritts. “In fact, he believes that what is racist is liberal discourse—the idea that we should judge people based on their race.”
It’s no longer enough to run interference for the Fox host—now, while expressing solidarity with Carlson, Greenwald repeats the same talking points on crime statistics and replacement theory that have been perfected in right-wing messaging.
In late March, Greenwald approvingly retweeted a cartoon by the avowedly neo-Nazi artist Stonetoss. An exhaustive New York Times report last month detailing how Carlson has mainstreamed white nationalist talking points—including 400 instances of him repeating “great replacement” language and conspiracy theories — was dismissed by Greenwald as hyperbole. “Conservatives know liberal outlets accuse everyone opposing liberalism of being racist,” Greenwald tweeted, two weeks before the Buffalo massacre. Last week, he posted FBI Black-on-Black crime statistics in an apparent effort to disprove that white nationalist violence posed a significant threat to public safety.
While Greenwald formerly defended Carlson while distancing himself from the more extreme interpretations of the Fox host’s views, today he is increasingly deploying his Twitter platform in service of spreading the white nationalist message. These vehement defenses of the most influential media purveyor of the racist “replacement” theory are destructive efforts to launder hate by a once-admirable journalist.
Eoin Higgins is a journalist based in New England. He writes The Flashpoint newsletter. Reporting for this article was funded by a grant from the ExposeFacts program of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Hanna Maliar is Ukraine's Deputy Defence Minister. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: Russian Advances Are Making the Battle for the Donbas
a 'Different Story' to the Start of the War
Source: Maliar on Facebook
Quote: "Currently, the situation at the front remains difficult and shows signs of worsening further.
The enemy has used all forces and means to capture the territory and encircle our troops.
The enemy is firing along the entire front line. The fighting has reached its maximum intensity. The enemy is storming the positions of our troops simultaneously on several fronts.
We have an extremely difficult and long stage ahead of us in the struggle for the complete liberation of our territories within internationally recognised borders.
We need to understand that this is a war and, unfortunately, losses on our side are inevitable. "
Details: The adviser to the Minister of Defence recalled that 8 years ago, on 26 May, 2014, the first battle for Donetsk airport took place.
According to Maliar, the whole world knows that Donetsk airport is a symbol of the invincibility of Ukrainian soldiers. Now the history of Azovstal's defence has become another.
Quote: "Both the defenders of Donetsk Airport and the defenders of Mariupol are a vivid illustration of our indomitability and desire for freedom.
These heroic episodes of the Russian-Ukrainian war should be a constant reminder to those who, in the fourth month of our struggle, are once again taking out treacherous ideas of appeasing the aggressor from the shameful ‘Munich’ drawers.
We reject this ‘powerless pacifism.’ Ukraine will fight, and Putin can save face by moving away from our territories."
A mother who was handcuffed outside the Texas school shooting later ran into the school and pulled her two children to safety: report. (photo: Marco Bello/Reuters)
Angeli Rose Gomez, a farm supervisor working nearby who has children in second and third grade at Robb, told the Journal that she drove 40 miles to the school when she heard about the shooting, only to see an apparent lack of response from law enforcement as the gunman barricaded himself in a classroom.
"The police were doing nothing," Gomez told The Journal. "They were just standing outside the fence. They weren't going in there or running anywhere."
Chilling reports have emerged of parents pushing past law enforcement to rescue their children by any means, their efforts growing increasingly dire as the gunman remained in the school. Law enforcement officials have given conflicting accounts of what was happening during the 40 minutes the gunman was inside – as groups of police remained outside.
According to The Journal, Gomez was put in handcuffs by federal marshals for "intervening in an active crime scene," as she and other parents demanded officers enter the school. Gomez persuaded Uvalde law enforcement officers to release her, and she moved away from the crowd.
Gomez then hopped the school fence, sprinted inside the school to grab her children and made it out of the school with them alive.
Another parent was pepper-sprayed as he attempted to get into the school, and a father was tackled by authorities, Gomez told The Journal.
The Uvalde Police Chief said on Thursday that officers responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School "within minutes," but did not specify whether those officers entered the school building and engaged the gunman in that timespan.
On Wednesday, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw said that roughly "40 minutes" to "an hour" elapsed between the time the shooter breached the school and when a US Border Patrol agent killed him. The shooting suspect shot and killed 19 students and two teachers, and 17 people were also injured in the attack.
'Medicaid provided invaluable coverage to individuals during the pandemic.' (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty)
An estimated 5.3 million to 14.2 million could lose Medicaid coverage when the public health emergency ends in July
According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an estimated 5.3 million to 14.2 million could lose their Medicaid coverage when the Covid-19 public health emergency ends on 15 July if it is not extended.
The analysts cited the wide range due to uncertainty on how states will respond to the end of continuous enrollment and how many people will lose coverage as a result. Medicaid enrollment is estimated to reach 110.2 million people by the end of fiscal year 2022, with enrollment expected to decline significantly when continuous enrollment ends.
Dylan Brown of New Jersey is disabled and relies on Medicaid for a home aide he requires around the clock to be able to get out of bed, dress and feed himself. He constantly worries about losing his Medicaid and Social Security disability insurance due to income and asset eligibility requirements and is very concerned about losing Medicaid when continuous enrollment ends.
“As I’ve been learning, trying to maintain my eligibility, you get a different story every time and you just have to hope one of them is right. And I’ve sort of been learning, none of them are really right,” said Brown.
Without Medicaid, he would have to rely on his parents, who work full-time, to provide the care he needs and pay out of pocket for care to the extent his family could afford it. These options, Brown argued, aren’t feasible as he is planning to start law school this fall at Rutgers University, and his parents shouldn’t have to uproot their lives to help him function, which is the responsibility of Medicaid.
“There shouldn’t be a cutoff date. There’s no reasonable argument for not giving disabled people the care they need to survive,” added Brown. “Regardless of what you’re feeling on whether people should have free healthcare, the disabled need it. There are no alternatives for us. It’s Medicaid or bust, and when the Medicaid rules are this convoluted and hard to keep track of, it almost feels like a full time job just keeping my benefits.”
During the pandemic, the federal government required states to continuously enroll Medicaid recipients into the program, providing $100.4 bn in new funds to cover the costs of doing so, halting coverage gaps and loss of eligibility for those who rely on healthcare coverage through Medicaid.
The current pandemic health emergency declaration is set to expire in mid-July. It is expected to be extended again, but an extension date has yet to be set by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“Medicaid provided invaluable coverage to individuals during the pandemic. And there’s evidence that it helped insulate people from loss of coverage that is associated with job losses, especially in the early stages of the pandemic,” said Dr Eric T Roberts, assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Pittsburgh. “Now, we face this unwinding of those provisions and a lot of confusion to beneficiaries and the public about how individuals will navigate that process and the schedule on which they will be required to do so. I think the great concern is that people lose their coverage without really knowing it, until they need it.”
Roberts said policymakers need to address these problems, as Medicaid determination and redetermination is complex already. Those complexities are magnified when states have to start conducting those determinations on such a large scale without the proper administrative and navigational assistance and resources in place.
“There is already a significant amount of administrative complexity to navigate Medicaid from the beneficiaries’ perspective and that can uniquely disadvantage people who have greater difficulty just navigating the healthcare system in general, the most vulnerable,” added Roberts.
Federal government subsidies to make healthcare plans more affordable on the insurance marketplace are expected to end on 31 December 2022, making health insurance plans more expensive, possibbly resulting in more Americans losing health insurance coverage because they can’t afford it.
Zachary Fusfeld of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a PhD candidate in epidemiology at Drexel University, is anticipating the loss of his Medicaid coverage when continuous enrollment ends, because his university stipend increase will put him over the income limit.
A type one diabetic who suffers from other illnesses, Fusfeld said he will have to rely on his student healthcare and pay out of pocket for copays on medications, medical supplies, and doctor visits when his Medicaid coverage ends later this year, the costs of which are not affordable and not covered by his pay increase.
He recently required surgery on his ankle and is worried about affording the physical therapy he requires, though he noted there are many people who are facing the loss of Medicaid and don’t have any sort of supplemental insurance coverage as he does.
“I’m really worried that I’m just not going to be able to properly manage my health and life in a way that I can stay as healthy as I need to be,” said Fusfeld.
Chris Bergh of St Louis, Missouri, relies on Social Security disability insurance for income and Medicaid for medical coverage. He’s concerned about the risk of losing medical coverage through Medicaid when the pandemic emergency is lifted.
“I’m at risk of losing coverage because I lost track of a piece of mail and the instructions in the letter were unclear about how I was supposed to proceed,” said Bergh.
He has repeatedly attempted to call Medicaid’s service hotline, but hasn’t been able to get through to speak to an actual person. Without Medicaid, he wouldn’t be able to see his doctors, afford his prescription medicine, or get dental care.
“I think they make this system harder than it has to be, in the hopes of weeding people out, just like other public assistance programs,” added Bergh. “I’m on social security so I have a fixed income and don’t make enough to cover the out of pocket cost of these things and still be able to eat and do other things.”
Senate Republican leaders speaking at their weekly press conference on May 10, 2022. (photo: Kent Nishimura/LA Times)
The final vote tally was 47-47, with every present Democrat voting in favor and and every present Republican voting against beginning debate on the measure, thus falling short of the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer switched his vote from yes to no at the conclusion of the vote in order to allow the Senate to possibly reconsider the bill at a later date.
"We've got plenty of laws on the books to deal with domestic terrorism," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Insider at the Capitol on Tuesday. "So I won't be supporting it."
The "Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act" would have authorized new offices focused on domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation while requiring joint biannual reports from those agencies on domestic terrorism threats, including assessments of threat posed by white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Furthermore, the bill would've required accounting for "white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies."
"This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensuring that the federal government devotes existing resources and authorities to what's been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats," said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate sponsor of the bill, in a floor speech on Thursday.
But Republican senators largely argued that the bill was unnecessary, while some — most prominently Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — claimed that the bill would be used to target conservatives.
"I'm completely opposed to this idea that we would be giving the federal government and federal law enforcement power and authority to surveil Americans, to engage in any kind of monitoring of speech that is directed toward censorship," Hawley told the Hill, adding that he finds the legislation "extremely frightening."
Schumer said on Thursday that the bill, originally put forward in response to a white supremacist killing in Buffalo, could serve as a vehicle to discuss gun violence prevention more broadly in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
"There is an additional benefit to moving forward today," he said on the Senate floor. "It's a chance to have a larger debate and consider amendments for gun safety legislation in general, not just for those motivated by racism, as vital as it is to do that."
The bill passed the House on a largely party-line vote last week. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois was the only Republican to support the measure. That's despite the fact that the bill was originally co-sponsored by three Republicans: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Fred Upton of Michigan.
Fitzpatrick, explaining his vote against a bill that he had co-sponsored, said in a statement that he was uncomfortable with changes to the bill that were made in response to progressive lawmakers' objections to the original bill, saying the bill would "give DOJ too much leeway in picking and choosing what it considers to constitute domestic terrorism."
Adam Atnip, who is homeless and lives in his car, accepts money from a driver as he panhandles on May 10, 2022, in Cookeville, Tennessee. (photo: Mark Humphrey/AP)
Now she has a new worry: Tennessee is about to become the first U.S. state to make it a felony to camp on local public property such as parks.
"Honestly, it's going to be hard," Atnip said of the law, which takes effect July 1. "I don't know where else to go."
Tennessee already made it a felony in 2020 to camp on most state-owned property. In pushing the expansion, Sen. Paul Bailey noted that no one has been convicted under that law and said he doesn't expect this one to be enforced much, either. Neither does Luke Eldridge, a man who has worked with homeless people in the city of Cookeville and supports Bailey's plan — in part because he hopes it will spur people who care about the homeless to work with him on long-term solutions.
The law requires that violators receive at least 24 hours notice before an arrest. The felony charge is punishable by up to six years in prison and the loss of voting rights.
"It's going to be up to prosecutors ... if they want to issue a felony," Bailey said. "But it's only going to come to that if people really don't want to move."
After several years of steady decline, homelessness in the United States began increasing in 2017. A survey in January 2020 found for the first time that the number of unsheltered homeless people exceeded those in shelters. The problem was exacerbated by COVID-19, with shelters limiting capacity.
Public pressure to do something about the increasing number of highly visible homeless encampments has pushed even many traditionally liberal cities to clear them. Although camping has generally been regulated by local vagrancy laws, Texas passed a statewide ban last year. Municipalities that fail to enforce the ban risk losing state funding. Several other states have introduced similar bills, but Tennessee is the only one to make camping a felony.
Bailey's district includes Cookeville, a city of about 35,000 people between Nashville and Knoxville, where the local newspaper has chronicled growing concern with the increasing number of homeless people. The Herald-Citizen reported last year that complaints about panhandlers nearly doubled between 2019 and 2020, from 157 to 300. In 2021, the city installed signs encouraging residents to give to charities instead of panhandlers. And the City Council twice considered panhandling bans.
The Republican lawmaker acknowledges that complaints from Cookeville got his attention. City council members have told him that Nashville ships its homeless here, Bailey said. It's a rumor many in Cookeville have heard and Bailey seems to believe. When Nashville fenced off a downtown park for renovation recently, the homeless people who frequented it disappeared. "Where did they go?" Bailey asked.
Atnip laughed at the idea of people shipped in from Nashville. She was living in nearby Monterey when she lost her home and had to send her children to live with her parents. She has received some government help, but not enough to get her back on her feet, she said. At one point she got a housing voucher but couldn't find a landlord who would accept it. She and her new husband saved enough to finance a used car and were working as delivery drivers until it broke down. Now she's afraid they will lose the car and have to move to a tent, though she isn't sure where they will pitch it.
"It seems like once one thing goes wrong, it kind of snowballs," Atnip said. "We were making money with DoorDash. Our bills were paid. We were saving. Then the car goes kaput and everything goes bad."
Eldridge, who has worked with Cookeville's homeless for a decade, is an unexpected advocate of the camping ban. He said he wants to continue helping the homeless, but some people aren't motivated to improve their situation. Some are addicted to drugs, he said, and some are hiding from law enforcement. Eldridge estimates there are about 60 people living outside more or less permanently in Cookeville, and he knows them all.
"Most of them have been here a few years, and not once have they asked for housing help," he said.
Eldridge knows his position is unpopular with other advocates.
"The big problem with this law is that it does nothing to solve homelessness. In fact, it will make the problem worse," said Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Healthcare for the Homeless Council. "Having a felony on your record makes it hard to qualify for some types of housing, harder to get a job, harder to qualify for benefits."
Not everyone wants to be in a crowded shelter with a curfew, but people will move off the streets given the right opportunities, Watts said. Homelessness among U.S. military veterans, for example, has been cut nearly in half over the past decade through a combination of housing subsidies and social services.
"It's not magic," he said. "What works for that population, works for every population."
Tina Lomax, who runs Seeds of Hope of Tennessee in nearby Sparta, was once homeless with her children. Many people are just one paycheck or one tragedy away from being on the streets, she said. Even in her community of 5,000, affordable housing is very hard to come by.
"If you have a felony on your record — holy smokes!" she said.
Eldridge, like Sen. Bailey, said he doesn't expect many people to be prosecuted for sleeping on public property. "I can promise, they're not going to be out here rounding up homeless people," he said of Cookeville law enforcement. But he doesn't know what might happen in other parts of the state.
He hopes the new law will spur some of its opponents to work with him on long-term solutions for Cookeville's homeless. If they all worked together it would mean "a lot of resources and possible funding sources to assist those in need," he said.
But other advocates don't think threatening people with a felony is a good way to help them.
"Criminalizing homelessness just makes people criminals," Watts said.
An oil drilling operation near a children's playground. (photo: The New York Times)
People who live near fracking wells and liquified natural gas terminals are pushing back.
Ozane, who lost her home to back-to-back hurricanes in 2020, was already fighting the growing number of terminals, where companies supercool and condense natural gas to load it onto specially-built tanker ships. Now, the ripple effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine are making her work even more urgent.
Ozane and other climate and environmental justice advocates fear that the industry is using the war to lock in long-term sales contracts and financing for a flood of new export terminals. They say this would do little to alleviate the current energy crisis, but could push climate targets out of reach and threaten nearby communities at every step of the supply chain — from fracked wells, to pipeline compressor stations, to massive LNG export terminals. While some Americans are hurting due to high gas prices and inflation, frontline communities could end up paying with their health and lives.
“If we bring in all these LNG facilities, they’re not going to start operating for a few years. But then, when they start, we’ll have to deal with them for 30 years,” Ozane said. “That’s why we’re fighting this.”
In response to the war in Ukraine, last week the European Union announced an ambitious plan to slash its use of Russian natural gas by two-thirds by the end of the year. Some of the gap in supply will be addressed by reducing demand and accelerating clean energy projects, but Europe is counting on LNG from the U.S. to replace a large portion of the Russian gas.
U.S. producers were already ramping up sales to the E.U., even before Russia’s invasion began. In December, at least two ships carrying U.S. LNG diverted mid-transit to deliver gas to Europe, instead of their original destinations in Asia, to take advantage of record-high prices. In mid-March, the Department of Energy allowed two LNG terminals in Louisiana and Texas to boost exports, meaning every export terminal in the U.S. is now operating at maximum capacity.
Still, a chorus of voices from the oil and gas industry has been demanding that the Biden Administration remove restrictions on oil and gas development, including new LNG infrastructure. In a statement, Mike Sommers, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, called on the administration to pursue “meaningful policy actions to support global energy security, including further addressing the backlog of LNG permits, reforming the permitting process, and advancing more natural gas pipeline infrastructure.”
The problem with these talking points is that the federal government is not holding back LNG development. The U.S. has eight existing LNG export terminals. An additional four are under construction, and the federal government has issued permits for 12 more, according to data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Integrity Project’s Oil … Gas Watch.
Those 12 aren’t moving ahead yet, but it’s not because of anything that the Biden Administration is doing. “It has been investors that have been standing by the sidelines,” Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said during a recent panel discussion. LNG export terminals are multi-decade investments, and in recent years, it hasn’t been clear to investors that there would be enough long-term demand to justify funding new terminals.
But now, things are shifting. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of natural gas has become more volatile, and buyers want to sign long-term contracts to secure more stable prices. Before, the financial outlook for LNG export terminals seemed uncertain. Now, “we are starting to see that certainty flow in,” Williams-Derry said.
It’s possible that the long-term contracts will give investors the confidence to back the pending facilities, and that more will be built. Williams-Derry also expects U.S. gas production to continue to increase, but not so quickly that it tanks prices.
Meanwhile, communities at every stage of the U.S. supply chain are worried about what this means for their lives and their health.
Lois Bower-Bjornson, her husband, and their four children live in Washington County, Pennsylvania — by far the most heavily fracked county in the state. “This is just locking me, my family, my community into more dirty energy, instead of a cleaner alternative,” said Bower-Bjornson, who serves as a field organizer for the Clean Air Council.
Bower-Bjornson’s home is within 5 miles of more than 20 active fracking wells. In 2019, she and her family participated in a study that found high levels of numerous hazardous chemicals associated with fracking in their bodies.
“It’s frightening,” said Bower-Bjornson. “It just becomes something that you live with, but, you know, it’s always on your mind.”
Beth Weinberger, director of research and policy at the Environmental Health Project, has been tracking the public health effects of fracking in Pennsylvania since 2012. She notes that numerous health studies have linked proximity to fracking operations with an increased risk of asthma, skin disorders, cardiac problems, preterm births, low birth weight, and childhood leukemia. If gas production continues to rise, “it just means more of the same,” said Weinberger.
At the opposite end of the pipeline, if the gas industry succeeds in building more LNG export terminals, that means more of the same for Ozane and her community, too.
Ozane and her six children lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, before Hurricanes Laura and Delta destroyed their home two years ago. Since then, they’ve been living in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, in the next town over. Every morning when Ozane steps out her front door, she sees a skyline filled with petrochemical plants, smokestacks, and flares. “Some days it smells like eggs. Some days it smells like a really strong smell of Clorox or chlorine. Some days there’s this chemical smell that you really can’t put your finger on,” she said.
Already, LNG export terminals are adding to that pollution burden. About 10 miles down the road from where Ozane lives, the Cameron LNG terminal releases sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, fine particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. Further south, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal began operating in January. Since then, “it has flared nearly continuously, sometimes with a 300-foot flame with black smoke at the end of it,” said James Hiatt, a former oil and gas worker who now serves as a coordinator for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “It really makes you think, how could this be clean energy in any sense of the word?” he said.
The flaring makes Ozane uneasy. “The plants will say, if you see a flare, that means you’re safe, because if the flare is going, that means the systems in place are working. But yet, we see the flare, we see the smoke, we see the steam, and we know that we’re inhaling whatever they’re releasing,” she said. On top of that, “each individual plant is talking about their individual emissions, but what happens when you put all of those emissions together? What are we breathing in?” she asked.
Southwest Louisiana was already the epicenter of the LNG export boom, and now companies are proposing even more terminals there. For Hiatt, that raises serious questions about safety. Lining the coast with LNG infrastructure degrades wetlands — a natural buffer against storm surge from the hurricanes that regularly slam the coast — making nearby homes more susceptible to flooding.
And then there’s the risk of explosions. “To put massive amounts of natural gas in these huge storage tanks and think that you can out-engineer Mother Nature in a way that’s not going to cause some catastrophic fire or explosion over the course of the next 30 years? How many storms can these things withhold?” Hiatt asked. In 2018, the Sabine Pass LNG export facility in Cameron Parish had to shut down two LNG storage tanks after workers discovered gas was leaking from numerous cracks. It was a near-miss that could have resulted in an enormous explosion.
Ozane and Hiatt are both worried about what’s happening in Ukraine, and about the looming gas shortage this winter. But like Bower-Bjornson, they don’t think that locking their community into decades worth of more pollution from the oil and gas industry is the right answer. Even if the proposed terminals are able to secure funding, it typically takes around three years for them to come online. Rather than doubling down on fossil fuels, they hope Europe will rapidly reduce demand and switch to clean energy sources. “We cannot put their fight on our backs by making ourselves a living sacrifice,” Ozane said.
Opposing anything that the oil and gas industry wants to do in southwest Louisiana is an uphill battle. People like Ozane and Hiatt have been working to educate their neighbors on the industry’s expansion plans and the harms they would bring. They’ve been asking regular people to speak up at meetings and write public comments to prevent the permitting of even more export terminals. They’re also advocating for policy changes at the state and federal level.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought that this was locked in and we were screwed,” said Hiatt. “We’re not there yet. I mean, we’re at the threshold,” he continued. To him, when it comes to both preventing new LNG terminals from being built and taking action on climate change, “our actions and our inactions today matter in a way that maybe they haven’t mattered as much previously,” he said. He understands that people need jobs, but hopes the region can switch to a more sustainable industry, like offshore wind. “We’ve got to do something different,” he said.
The way Ozane sees it, southwest Louisiana is facing two existential crises right now: pollution from the oil and gas industry and climate change. Every morning when she wakes up, she asks herself: “Am I doing enough to save this place for my children?”
“They have every right to drink the water, to fish in the lakes, to go to the beach and enjoy the sands, to go shrimping, to enjoy the festivals and the music and the culture,” she said. “I’m going to do everything that I can to protect it for them.”
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