Climate Change

On the same day this month that the head of the International Energy Agency confidently declared that fossil fuel demand would peak this decade, the climate advocacy group Oil Change International found that the United States would be responsible for over one-third of all planned fossil fuel expansion through 2050. The following week, as President Biden emphatically called climate change an “existential threat” and announced the creation of a climate conservation corps, the United States broke a record for oil production.

It’s nothing new for climate ambition and climate hypocrisy to flicker back and forth like the two faces of a lenticular hologram. When the United States helped forge the Paris agreement in 2015, it still forbade the export of crude oil and was shipping a pretty trivial amount of natural gas overseas. But that legal ban was lifted the same month the climate agreement was reached, and today the United States — already the biggest producer of oil in the world and its biggest consumer — is also the world’s second-largest interregional exporter of crude. In 2015, the United States was shipping out just 1 percent as much liquefied natural gas as Qatar, the world’s biggest exporter; today, it is the world’s largest exporter, as well as the largest consumer and largest producer.