Are shaky studies driving national--and Silicon Valley--energy decisions?
The Daily Caller’s associate editor Nick Pope reveals how a dubious Ivy League paper, backed by activist cash, swayed policy despite contradicting robust DOE research. Cornell’s Robert Howarth’s un-peer-reviewed study, claiming LNG exports outpollute coal, sparked Biden’s LNG terminal approval freeze, evoking Silicon Valley’s energy debates. Bay Area innovators want reliable energy for tech growth, so this discovery might stir up some change.
A questionable study by a Cornell University climate scientist gave climate activists and the media ammunition to wage a pressure campaign against the Biden administration to take action against liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
Cornell’s Robert Howarth authored the October 2023 study, which purported to find that lifecycle emissions associated with LNG exports are far greater than those attributable to domestically-mined coal. Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, amplified the study, and climate activists lobbying the Biden administration to kill LNG exports cited it as evidence to substantiate their position before the White House announced the moratorium on LNG export terminal approvals on Jan. 26.
The study, titled “The Greenhouse Gas Footprint of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Exported from the United States,” found that “greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are also larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 44% to more than 2-fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.” Howarth, who openly opposes the use of fossil fuels, admitted to releasing his study before it was peer-reviewed in order to influence the LNG export debate.
“According to the ethical guidelines from several of the professional societies to which I belong, scientists have a duty to provide information to the public and to decision-makers on important public issues when they have access to such information,” Howarth told the DCNF.
Howarth said environmental activist Bill McKibben was the one who convinced him to release the study before it underwent the months-long peer review process. McKibben himself wrote about the study in The New Yorker in October 2023, touting it as evidence that the Biden administration should not expand LNG export capacity.
Howarth’s study “clearly was a factor in the Biden administration’s decision to pause making the required determinations required for approval of new LNG export projects and launching a U.S. Department of Energy study of the climate impact of LNG exports,” Steven Hamburg, the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief scientist, told Bloomberg News.
Howarth‘s findings contradict plenty of existing research on the subject, including two Department of Energy (DOE) studies from 2014 and 2019, which concluded that American LNG exports to Asia and Europe do not create more lifecycle emissions than regionally-mined coal when used to generate power. The Cornell professor’s study has drawn the ire of the oil and gas industry, which has pointed out that Howarth‘s most recent findings are detached from a robust body of research on the subject.
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