The quick, quiet death of Biden’s natural gas export pause

Climate activists saw the policy as a major win. It fizzled out within six months.

When the Biden administration paused the approval of new liquefied natural gas exports in January, environmentalists and left-leaning politicians hailed the decision as a watershed moment for the climate movement. After months of pressure from climate activists, the Department of Energy, or DOE, announced that it would rethink how it evaluates the massive export projects that condense fracked gas into a supercooled liquid, known as LNG, and load it onto tankers that ship the fuel for sale in Europe and Asia. In the meantime, the administration committed to keeping the LNG projects awaiting approval in a holding pattern, preventing them from breaking ground.