American energy costs are on the rise again, and the Biden administration’s latest move—banning the transportation of liquid national gas (LNG) by rail—will only make energy even more expensive.
President Joe Biden has made his intentions very clear. He will use any and all means necessary to achieve the goals of the radical left, no matter the consequences for the American people. Chief among these are the promises made to sycophants of the climate change agenda. Starting with more than $1 trillion to subsidize their otherwise failed businesses, and a constant methodical war on American energy through regulations, the end goal is government control over our energy system.
Expanding government control means Biden’s bureaucrats must subjugate American energy businesses by any means necessary. The most recent attack on American energy production, the ban on LNG transport by rail, will go into effect at the end of October 2023. While at first glace this may seem small and trivial, it serves as a microcosm of the larger war Biden is waging against on American energy and American taxpayers.
In 2020, President Donald Trump’s administration approved a rule that allowed LNG to be transported by rail. Demand for U.S. natural gas, both domestically and globally, has been rising for years and will rise more in the coming years, but this didn’t stop the green lobby from fighting the rule. Now, these same advocates are back and attempting to make LNG the boogey man, even claiming LNG trains are equivalent to volatile nuclear weapons. In the event of a leak or spill, methane vapors—methane being the primary component of natural gas—are lighter than air which causes them to dissipate rapidly. Plus natural gas requires very precise conditions to be flammable (it must be between 5% and 15% of the air concentration to be flammable), and at its liquid temperature it is incredibly stable—not flammable.
Shipping by rail is one of the safest ways to transport LNG, especially considering modern technological improvements and safety regulations that were implemented in the 2020 rule. In fact, there was not a single derailment involving a train carrying LNG from the time of the implementation of Trump’s rule to now. For now, none of these facts change that the Biden administration is banning LNG transportation by rail due to “safety concerns.”
This means producers will have to find other methods of transportation, namely pipelines or trucking. Pipelines are by far the safest method to transport LNG. Even the Department of Transportation admits this, but that has not stopped the Biden administration and the radical left from nixing and roadblocking every pipeline they can, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline, Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and the infamous Keystone XL oil pipeline.
These projects were held up through multiple tactics, including frivolous litigation, permitting issues, and increased costs due to project delays caused by the federal government. That leaves the final option, trucking, which is the most dangerous for transporting LNG. A study found that trucks carrying hazardous materials were involved in 16 times as many accidents as trains. This is the only method the Biden administration is leaving available, and it also just happens to be, by far, the most expensive method of transporting LNG. These increased transportation costs will be passed onto consumers, who will either have to pay more or consume less this winter. At a time when Americans should be enjoying energy abundance, the administration is once again trying to force us into energy scarcity.
This one, illogical, rule change by the Department of Transportation shows that the president and the radical climate ideologs he has placed throughout his administration don’t care much about safety. This rule is a piece of the much larger assault from the green lobby on Americans. Since their preferred energy sources can’t come close to competing on the market, the left subsidizes and regulates producers of reliable, affordable hydrocarbons out of business while attempting to replace that energy production with expensive, unreliable, taxpayer-subsidized green bling.
From the gas-powered cars we use to get to work to coal power plants that keep the lights on, their goal is to eliminate all of it unilaterally without viable replacements. The American people will be footing the bill—and suffering when the lights go out.