This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.

Its future, however, may hinge upon $500 million in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.

In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.

In a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.

“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.

“America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said.

“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”

This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370 billion bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.

The steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10 billion in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.

When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”

America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J. Trump.”

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.

Such plans have major implications for Vance’s hometown. The Middletown plant’s $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds.”

“The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows…It gives you an instant headache.”

Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs, and out-of-town malls.

“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”

Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.

Climate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500 million investment in US manufacturing in his own hometown,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his hometown, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that Big Oil can profit.”

Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio,” according to Messer.

“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them—how else will this empty floodplain produce $1 million for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”

Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry—he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.

This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with polls showing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.

Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump—with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden—in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.

“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.

“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.

“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”

“Somewhere in there, JD changed. He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”

The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.

“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”

Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.

Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just four miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.

Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightward shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.

“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.”

“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators—deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, which wrote the report.

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

It also highlights examples of denial from representatives. “Of course the climate is changing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

Just because politicians “say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Other instances are more recent. “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23 percent of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11 percent.

While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.

“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum—alarmed and dismissive—were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.

“There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion”—a different form of “climate obstruction,” the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.

“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.

“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power…kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”

Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.

“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said. “They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You can find more of Bryan Tarnowski’s photos on his website. Follow his work on Instagram: @btarnowski

To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana.

Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo overseas. Another such terminal lies a few miles to the west, yet another to the north. The theme continues even in Allaire’s seaward vista—alongside a boneyard of old oil rigs, a new floating offshore LNG platform is in the works.

Every hour, on average, roughly 1 million barrels of oil and 2 million tons of gas are sucked up from drilling fields from Alaska to Appalachia.

“I’m pretty much surrounded,” said Allaire, a retired oil industry engineer who has a trailer, a couple of friendly dogs, and a patch of marshland and beach in Cameron parish. Yet another gas export plant is planned just a few hundred yards from Allaire’s property, while his existing imposing neighbor, which Allaire compares to Las Vegas due to its incandescent flaring of gas into the night’s sky, is on track to expand to become one of the largest such facilities in the world.

“We don’t really have a Gulf Coast in the US,” said Allaire. “We have the East Coast, the West Coast and the Carbon Coast. This is simply a sacrifice zone for the oil and gas industry.”

The rise of the United States as the world’s oil and gas powerhouse has come at an astonishing pace. Within just the last decade, Congress lifted a ban on exporting crude oil and America became one of the world’s leading oil exporters, elbowing aside classic petrostates like the UAE and Kuwait. In that timeframe, US exports of gas, cooled to liquid form and shipped, also started in earnest; last year America became the world’s leader.

“To go from zero to billions of barrels is just stunning,” said David Dismukes, an energy expert at Louisiana State University. “It can be hard to comprehend.”

Domestic oil and gas production, turbocharged by the advance of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rocketed. No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years, with a fifth of all oil drilled in 2023 being American-flavored. US gas production also tops the global charts, having surged 50 percent in the past decade. Every hour of every day, on average, around 1 million barrels of oil and 2 million tons of gas are sucked up from oil and gas fields from Texas to Appalachia to Alaska.

“The United States can’t preach temperance from a barstool,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) “We can’t tell other countries to reduce greenhouse gases as we export oil and gas to them.”

The US’s hydrocarbon dominance, coming as experts have warned there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to avoid climate breakdown, challenges conventional assumptions about what makes a “petrostate.” While the vast, diverse US economy doesn’t hinge upon oil and gas like Libya’s and Kuwait’s economies do, some regions have become hooked on industry incomes, research shows.

“The US has become a petrostate and is still, even under President Biden, permitting new drilling,” said John Sterman, a climate policy expert at MIT.

Nationally, though, it’s been a mostly unheralded ascension. “I bet if you asked 10 people in the US which country was the world’s biggest oil producer, most would say Saudi Arabia,” said Dismukes. “That narrative is so imprinted now. I’m not sure many would even mention the US.”

Yet it is wealthy countries such as the US that have spearheaded oil and gas expansions in recent years even as they vowed to restrain dangerous global heating, data shared with the Guardian has shown. Without the US, global gas production would have actually declined over the past two years.

“The United States can’t preach temperance from a barstool,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a proponent of the Green New Deal. “We can’t tell other countries to reduce greenhouse gases as we export oil and gas to them.”

“When the crude oil export ban was lifted, over my opposition,” he said, “the US prioritized Big Oil over the planet. Everything I warned in 2015 has come true and it will only get worse as the years go by and oil companies rush fossil fuels to the highest bidders.”

That such a boom has occurred during Joe Biden’s presidency is not only inconvenient for Biden, who has called the climate crisis an “existential threat” and offered a now-broken promise of “no more drilling on federal lands, period,” but also Donald Trump, who has pledged to “drill, baby, drill” if he returns to the White House and has lambasted Biden, falsely, for supposedly shutting down US energy production.

It’s therefore not politically expedient for either Democrats or Republicans to fully extol how the US has become the world’s leading oil and gas dealer, even as processing plants, pipelines and shipping terminals are unfurled at a galloping pace along the Gulf coast. US gas export capacity has tripled since 2018 and will double again in the next three years, with a pause placed by Biden on new gas export licenses tossed aside by a Trump-appointed judge this month.

The center of this frenzy of activity is a slice of the Gulf coast barely 50 miles long on either side of the Louisiana and Texas border. This small stretch, rapidly chewed away by some of the fastest rising seas in the world, has 11 LNG plants at various stages of operation and construction that, at capacity, will export more gas than Australia and Qatar, the next two largest LNG exporters after the US, combined.

“What sustained us for generations has gone; it’s like an alien invasion. CP2 will be the nail in the coffin, it will finish everything off. But we are going to keep fighting it.”

Heralded by the gas industry and even the Biden administration as a way to bolster European allies roiled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or to help wean Asian countries off dirtier coal, LNG has its own, huge, climate cost. Drilling, transporting, cooling, shipping, and then ultimately burning this gas expels so much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that the planet-heating emissions of all 18 current and proposed US export projects could equal the entire current carbon pollution of Europe.

Venture Global, an oil and gas operator, is at the vanguard, welcomed by the state with tax breaks and responsible for the Calcasieu Pass facility near Allaire’s property in Cameron, which started operation in 2022 but, according to green groups, already has more than 2,000 violations of its air quality permits through the release of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and other pollutants.

A planned $10 billion extension, called Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), would shift about 20 million tons of LNG at capacity, single-handedly boosting US gas exports by a fifth and causing planet-heating pollution equal to 46 coal-fired power plants. Venture Global has hired two lobbying firms, one headed by former Biden aide Chris Putala, to tout the jobs and investment flowing from the project, but this has not stemmed a furious backlash from environmental groups that have labeled it “climate vandalism.”

There are fears of mounting localized impacts, too, with poorer communities and people of color long bearing the brunt of industrial pollution along the Gulf coast. “Approving CP2 would be signing our death certificate,” said Roishetta Ozane, head of an environmental justice organization in nearby Lake Charles. “Our air smells like rotten eggs, our water is polluted, our children are sick, our family members are dying of cancer. We can’t take any more—enough is enough.”

Ozane’s family has twice been displaced by hurricanes, which are being made fiercer by rising global temperatures. Others here, too, have suffered anguish from both the climate crisis and its cause—Travis Dardar, a shrimper, had to flee his home in low-lying Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, because sea level rise was swamping it, only to end up trying to ply the fisheries off Cameron, a place that became a global LNG industry hotspot.

There’s little evidence this is a region with billions of dollars of investment gushing into it, with a single food truck serving Cameron’s desolate town center of tumbledown homes.

“This used to be a beautiful place, but all the docks are now gone, the shrimp and crab have been poisoned and killed by all the dredging,” Dardar said. “What sustained us for generations has gone; it’s like an alien invasion. CP2 will be the nail in the coffin, it will finish everything off. But we are going to keep fighting it.”

Dardar, Ozane and Allaire are part of a loose-knit coalition trying to halt the stampede of gas, with Allaire acting as a sort of frontline general, his trailer festooned with maps, photos and documents of the industry’s ills, a truck with a sticker reading “Stop LNG!” sitting outside. This coalition has traveled to protests in New York City and Washington DC, filed complaints, implored the Biden administration to do more. The actor Jane Fonda—“a hugger,” according to Allaire—has visited in support.

“I’ve been a huge pain in the backside for them,” said Allaire of Venture Global and Commonwealth, the company that wants to build the latest gas plant next door. He estimates his complaints have cost the developer millions of dollars to remedy the dumping of sludgy waste and to preserve local sand dunes.

Still, the weight of power firmly remains with the industry. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has never denied a permit to a major gas project, approved CP2, despite one of the body’s three commissioners objecting that it will cause “particularly disturbing” levels of air pollution to the surrounding community. CP2 will go ahead should it get an export license, and Trump has said, if elected, he will provide a rubber stamp “on day one.”

Just a few hundred people remain in the town of Cameron itself, a once bustling community of several thousand that was ravaged by a parade of hurricanes, most recently Hurricane Laura in 2020.

There’s little evidence this is a region with billions of dollars of investment gushing into it, with a single food truck serving a desolate town center of tumbledown homes. Some local parks and fishing spots have been swallowed up by the gas industry. Nearby, a couple of steel-hulled boats, swept far ashore like toys by Hurricane Rita in 2005, lie rusting in the sun.

It’s uncertain that all of the proposed new plants will go ahead, locking in decades of further fossil fuel use, but that’s mostly because the markets are already shifting—Europe needs less gas than was previously thought and there’s evidence that even a global glut of gas won’t displace much coal in China.

“If the projects are left stranded because the world changes—well, that happens, much like what happened with the whaling industry,” said Dismukes. “But if you kill these projects, what happens then? You have people working for six-figure salaries in the industry—who else will pay them that, Uber?

“It’s not like Microsoft and Dell are going to suddenly come in. There is no new thing, there is no plan in Louisiana. That’s the sad thing.”

A spokesperson for Venture Global said the company had confidence “in the ultimate demand for US LNG, including our CP2 project, which is already contracted to supply countries like Germany, Japan, and Ukraine and strengthen energy security.

“The few highly paid activists who oppose economic development and job creation in Louisiana are bankrolled by the environmental lobby and their Sierra Club-backed shell organizations are not representative of the local community,” the spokesperson said, adding that Venture Global followed all environmental regulations and had invested in Cameron via a training program and a new development that includes a market, marina and RV park.

If you can ignore the gargantuan gas storage tanks nearby, Allaire’s small patch of beach is bucolic. It sits amid marshland that is a riot of wildlife, with Allaire often breaking off to point out a brown pelican, or a snowy egret, or to talk about seeing some turtles the other night.

This small haven is shrinking, however. Allaire estimates he has lost about 30 or 40 acres of the property since buying it in 1989, eroded away by the relentless rising seas. Stalks of tall grass and withered trees poke up from the surf offshore—remarkably, they were on solid land just six months ago.

Should Commonwealth build its LNG plant next door, complete with a towering wall to keep the Gulf at bay just long enough to make a few billion dollars, Allaire said he will concede defeat and move. Until then, he hopes to at least slow things down a bit.

“Once it’s all over, these LNG guys will just walk away and what will be left behind?” he said. “We’re left with a mess, the area permanently destroyed. It’s all bullshit, if you ask me.”

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You can find more of Bryan Tarnowski’s photos on his website. Follow his work on Instagram: @btarnowski

To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana.

Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo overseas. Another such terminal lies a few miles to the west, yet another to the north. The theme continues even in Allaire’s seaward vista—alongside a boneyard of old oil rigs, a new floating offshore LNG platform is in the works.

Every hour, on average, roughly 1 million barrels of oil and 2 million tons of gas are sucked up from drilling fields from Alaska to Appalachia.

“I’m pretty much surrounded,” said Allaire, a retired oil industry engineer who has a trailer, a couple of friendly dogs, and a patch of marshland and beach in Cameron parish. Yet another gas export plant is planned just a few hundred yards from Allaire’s property, while his existing imposing neighbor, which Allaire compares to Las Vegas due to its incandescent flaring of gas into the night’s sky, is on track to expand to become one of the largest such facilities in the world.

“We don’t really have a Gulf Coast in the US,” said Allaire. “We have the East Coast, the West Coast and the Carbon Coast. This is simply a sacrifice zone for the oil and gas industry.”

The rise of the United States as the world’s oil and gas powerhouse has come at an astonishing pace. Within just the last decade, Congress lifted a ban on exporting crude oil and America became one of the world’s leading oil exporters, elbowing aside classic petrostates like the UAE and Kuwait. In that timeframe, US exports of gas, cooled to liquid form and shipped, also started in earnest; last year America became the world’s leader.

“To go from zero to billions of barrels is just stunning,” said David Dismukes, an energy expert at Louisiana State University. “It can be hard to comprehend.”

Domestic oil and gas production, turbocharged by the advance of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rocketed. No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years, with a fifth of all oil drilled in 2023 being American-flavored. US gas production also tops the global charts, having surged 50 percent in the past decade. Every hour of every day, on average, around 1 million barrels of oil and 2 million tons of gas are sucked up from oil and gas fields from Texas to Appalachia to Alaska.

“The United States can’t preach temperance from a barstool,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) “We can’t tell other countries to reduce greenhouse gases as we export oil and gas to them.”

The US’s hydrocarbon dominance, coming as experts have warned there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to avoid climate breakdown, challenges conventional assumptions about what makes a “petrostate.” While the vast, diverse US economy doesn’t hinge upon oil and gas like Libya’s and Kuwait’s economies do, some regions have become hooked on industry incomes, research shows.

“The US has become a petrostate and is still, even under President Biden, permitting new drilling,” said John Sterman, a climate policy expert at MIT.

Nationally, though, it’s been a mostly unheralded ascension. “I bet if you asked 10 people in the US which country was the world’s biggest oil producer, most would say Saudi Arabia,” said Dismukes. “That narrative is so imprinted now. I’m not sure many would even mention the US.”

Yet it is wealthy countries such as the US that have spearheaded oil and gas expansions in recent years even as they vowed to restrain dangerous global heating, data shared with the Guardian has shown. Without the US, global gas production would have actually declined over the past two years.

“The United States can’t preach temperance from a barstool,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a proponent of the Green New Deal. “We can’t tell other countries to reduce greenhouse gases as we export oil and gas to them.”

“When the crude oil export ban was lifted, over my opposition,” he said, “the US prioritized Big Oil over the planet. Everything I warned in 2015 has come true and it will only get worse as the years go by and oil companies rush fossil fuels to the highest bidders.”

That such a boom has occurred during Joe Biden’s presidency is not only inconvenient for Biden, who has called the climate crisis an “existential threat” and offered a now-broken promise of “no more drilling on federal lands, period,” but also Donald Trump, who has pledged to “drill, baby, drill” if he returns to the White House and has lambasted Biden, falsely, for supposedly shutting down US energy production.

It’s therefore not politically expedient for either Democrats or Republicans to fully extol how the US has become the world’s leading oil and gas dealer, even as processing plants, pipelines and shipping terminals are unfurled at a galloping pace along the Gulf coast. US gas export capacity has tripled since 2018 and will double again in the next three years, with a pause placed by Biden on new gas export licenses tossed aside by a Trump-appointed judge this month.

The center of this frenzy of activity is a slice of the Gulf coast barely 50 miles long on either side of the Louisiana and Texas border. This small stretch, rapidly chewed away by some of the fastest rising seas in the world, has 11 LNG plants at various stages of operation and construction that, at capacity, will export more gas than Australia and Qatar, the next two largest LNG exporters after the US, combined.

“What sustained us for generations has gone; it’s like an alien invasion. CP2 will be the nail in the coffin, it will finish everything off. But we are going to keep fighting it.”

Heralded by the gas industry and even the Biden administration as a way to bolster European allies roiled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or to help wean Asian countries off dirtier coal, LNG has its own, huge, climate cost. Drilling, transporting, cooling, shipping, and then ultimately burning this gas expels so much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that the planet-heating emissions of all 18 current and proposed US export projects could equal the entire current carbon pollution of Europe.

Venture Global, an oil and gas operator, is at the vanguard, welcomed by the state with tax breaks and responsible for the Calcasieu Pass facility near Allaire’s property in Cameron, which started operation in 2022 but, according to green groups, already has more than 2,000 violations of its air quality permits through the release of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and other pollutants.

A planned $10 billion extension, called Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), would shift about 20 million tons of LNG at capacity, single-handedly boosting US gas exports by a fifth and causing planet-heating pollution equal to 46 coal-fired power plants. Venture Global has hired two lobbying firms, one headed by former Biden aide Chris Putala, to tout the jobs and investment flowing from the project, but this has not stemmed a furious backlash from environmental groups that have labeled it “climate vandalism.”

There are fears of mounting localized impacts, too, with poorer communities and people of color long bearing the brunt of industrial pollution along the Gulf coast. “Approving CP2 would be signing our death certificate,” said Roishetta Ozane, head of an environmental justice organization in nearby Lake Charles. “Our air smells like rotten eggs, our water is polluted, our children are sick, our family members are dying of cancer. We can’t take any more—enough is enough.”

Ozane’s family has twice been displaced by hurricanes, which are being made fiercer by rising global temperatures. Others here, too, have suffered anguish from both the climate crisis and its cause—Travis Dardar, a shrimper, had to flee his home in low-lying Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, because sea level rise was swamping it, only to end up trying to ply the fisheries off Cameron, a place that became a global LNG industry hotspot.

There’s little evidence this is a region with billions of dollars of investment gushing into it, with a single food truck serving Cameron’s desolate town center of tumbledown homes.

“This used to be a beautiful place, but all the docks are now gone, the shrimp and crab have been poisoned and killed by all the dredging,” Dardar said. “What sustained us for generations has gone; it’s like an alien invasion. CP2 will be the nail in the coffin, it will finish everything off. But we are going to keep fighting it.”

Dardar, Ozane and Allaire are part of a loose-knit coalition trying to halt the stampede of gas, with Allaire acting as a sort of frontline general, his trailer festooned with maps, photos and documents of the industry’s ills, a truck with a sticker reading “Stop LNG!” sitting outside. This coalition has traveled to protests in New York City and Washington DC, filed complaints, implored the Biden administration to do more. The actor Jane Fonda—“a hugger,” according to Allaire—has visited in support.

“I’ve been a huge pain in the backside for them,” said Allaire of Venture Global and Commonwealth, the company that wants to build the latest gas plant next door. He estimates his complaints have cost the developer millions of dollars to remedy the dumping of sludgy waste and to preserve local sand dunes.

Still, the weight of power firmly remains with the industry. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has never denied a permit to a major gas project, approved CP2, despite one of the body’s three commissioners objecting that it will cause “particularly disturbing” levels of air pollution to the surrounding community. CP2 will go ahead should it get an export license, and Trump has said, if elected, he will provide a rubber stamp “on day one.”

Just a few hundred people remain in the town of Cameron itself, a once bustling community of several thousand that was ravaged by a parade of hurricanes, most recently Hurricane Laura in 2020.

There’s little evidence this is a region with billions of dollars of investment gushing into it, with a single food truck serving a desolate town center of tumbledown homes. Some local parks and fishing spots have been swallowed up by the gas industry. Nearby, a couple of steel-hulled boats, swept far ashore like toys by Hurricane Rita in 2005, lie rusting in the sun.

It’s uncertain that all of the proposed new plants will go ahead, locking in decades of further fossil fuel use, but that’s mostly because the markets are already shifting—Europe needs less gas than was previously thought and there’s evidence that even a global glut of gas won’t displace much coal in China.

“If the projects are left stranded because the world changes—well, that happens, much like what happened with the whaling industry,” said Dismukes. “But if you kill these projects, what happens then? You have people working for six-figure salaries in the industry—who else will pay them that, Uber?

“It’s not like Microsoft and Dell are going to suddenly come in. There is no new thing, there is no plan in Louisiana. That’s the sad thing.”

A spokesperson for Venture Global said the company had confidence “in the ultimate demand for US LNG, including our CP2 project, which is already contracted to supply countries like Germany, Japan, and Ukraine and strengthen energy security.

“The few highly paid activists who oppose economic development and job creation in Louisiana are bankrolled by the environmental lobby and their Sierra Club-backed shell organizations are not representative of the local community,” the spokesperson said, adding that Venture Global followed all environmental regulations and had invested in Cameron via a training program and a new development that includes a market, marina and RV park.

If you can ignore the gargantuan gas storage tanks nearby, Allaire’s small patch of beach is bucolic. It sits amid marshland that is a riot of wildlife, with Allaire often breaking off to point out a brown pelican, or a snowy egret, or to talk about seeing some turtles the other night.

This small haven is shrinking, however. Allaire estimates he has lost about 30 or 40 acres of the property since buying it in 1989, eroded away by the relentless rising seas. Stalks of tall grass and withered trees poke up from the surf offshore—remarkably, they were on solid land just six months ago.

Should Commonwealth build its LNG plant next door, complete with a towering wall to keep the Gulf at bay just long enough to make a few billion dollars, Allaire said he will concede defeat and move. Until then, he hopes to at least slow things down a bit.

“Once it’s all over, these LNG guys will just walk away and what will be left behind?” he said. “We’re left with a mess, the area permanently destroyed. It’s all bullshit, if you ask me.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

When Donald Trump embarked upon a lengthy complaint at a recent rally about how long it takes to wash his “beautiful luxuriant hair” due to his shower’s low water pressure, he highlighted the expanding assault he and Republicans are launching against even the most obscure environmental policies—a push that’s starting to influence voters.

In his bid to return to the White House, Trump has branded Joe Biden’s attempt to advance electric cars in the US “lunacy,” claiming such vehicles do not work in the cold and that their supporters should “rot in hell.” He’s called offshore wind turbines “horrible,” falsely linking them to the death of whales, while promising to scrap incentives for both wind and electric cars.

But the former US president and convicted felon, who has openly solicited donations from oil and gas executives in order to follow industry-friendly priorities if re-elected, has also spearheaded a much broader attack on a range of mundane rules and technologies that enable water and energy efficiency.

At a June rally in Philadelphia, Trump claimed Americans are suffering from “no water in your faucets” when attempting to wash their hands or hair. “You turn on the water and it goes drip, drip,” he said. “You can’t get [the soap] off your hand. So you keep it running for about 10 times longer.” Trump complained it takes 45 minutes to wash his “beautiful luxuriant hair” and that dishwashers don’t work because “they don’t want you to have any water.”

Trump’s niche fixation is not new—while in office he complained about having to flush a toilet 10 times and that newer, energy-efficient lightbulbs made him look “orange.” His administration subsequently rolled back efficiency standards for toilets, showers, and lightbulbs, rules that Biden subsequently restored.

But Republicans in Congress are now following Trump’s lead, introducing a flurry of recent bills in the House of Representatives targeting energy efficiency standards for home appliances. The bills—with names such as the “Liberty in Laundry Act,” “Refrigerator Freedom Act,” and the “Clothes Dryers Reliability Act”—follow a conservative furore over a confected, baseless claim the Biden administration was banning gas stoves, which prompted further GOP legislation.

“No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda, yet that is exactly what we have seen under the Biden administration,” said Debbie Lasko, a Republican Congressman and sponsor of the ‘Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act’, which restricts new efficiency rules on appliances and passed the House in May. These bills have no chance of agreement in the Democratic-held senate.

Bipartisan support for renewables is weakening in the wake of Trump’s strange and misleading attacks on things like wind power, electric cars, and efficiency standards.

“We are seeing a lot of these advances, like clean cars and more efficient appliances, being swept up into the culture wars,” said Ed Maibach, an expert in public health and climate communication at George Mason University.

“Most Americans’ instincts are that these are good things to have, but it’s clear that Donald Trump and others think there’s political gain in persuading people this isn’t the case. These voters are being fed a story by people they shouldn’t really trust.”

There has been a sharp political divide over the climate crisis for several years in the US, with Trump calling global heating a “hoax” and dismissing its mounting devastation. “It basically means you’ll have a little more beachfront property,” the former president said of the impact of sea level rise last month.

During last week’s presidential debate, Trump boasted, baselessly, he achieved the “best environmental numbers ever” when president and called the Paris climate accords a “ripoff” and a “disaster.” Biden rebuked his rival, saying he didn’t do a “damn thing” about the climate crisis.

Despite this split, there has long been strong bipartisan support across all voters for renewables such as solar and wind, with most of the clean energy jobs and investment unleashed by Biden’s major climate bill flowing to rural, Republican districts. But this is beginning to weaken in the wake of Trump’s attacks, research by Maibach and colleagues has found.

A new poll, released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday, underscored this trend—support for new solar farms has slumped to 78 percent across all Americans, down from 90 percent just four years ago. Backing for expanding wind power has dropped by a similar amount, while interest in buying an electric vehicle is significantly lower than a year ago, with just 29 percent of people saying they would consider an EV, down from 38 percent in 2023.

This change is being driven by a drop in support among Republican voters, Maibach said, with clean energy and cars on track to become as contentious as global heating is now to many conservatives. “That support for clean energy has been there across Republicans and Democrats for a long time but it is starting to erode,” he said.

“It’s a trend that has been developing for at least the past five years. There is a tug of war going on between what people’s instincts are telling them, and what voices in their trusted community are telling them.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

When Donald Trump embarked upon a lengthy complaint at a recent rally about how long it takes to wash his “beautiful luxuriant hair” due to his shower’s low water pressure, he highlighted the expanding assault he and Republicans are launching against even the most obscure environmental policies—a push that’s starting to influence voters.

In his bid to return to the White House, Trump has branded Joe Biden’s attempt to advance electric cars in the US “lunacy,” claiming such vehicles do not work in the cold and that their supporters should “rot in hell.” He’s called offshore wind turbines “horrible,” falsely linking them to the death of whales, while promising to scrap incentives for both wind and electric cars.

But the former US president and convicted felon, who has openly solicited donations from oil and gas executives in order to follow industry-friendly priorities if re-elected, has also spearheaded a much broader attack on a range of mundane rules and technologies that enable water and energy efficiency.

At a June rally in Philadelphia, Trump claimed Americans are suffering from “no water in your faucets” when attempting to wash their hands or hair. “You turn on the water and it goes drip, drip,” he said. “You can’t get [the soap] off your hand. So you keep it running for about 10 times longer.” Trump complained it takes 45 minutes to wash his “beautiful luxuriant hair” and that dishwashers don’t work because “they don’t want you to have any water.”

Trump’s niche fixation is not new—while in office he complained about having to flush a toilet 10 times and that newer, energy-efficient lightbulbs made him look “orange.” His administration subsequently rolled back efficiency standards for toilets, showers, and lightbulbs, rules that Biden subsequently restored.

But Republicans in Congress are now following Trump’s lead, introducing a flurry of recent bills in the House of Representatives targeting energy efficiency standards for home appliances. The bills—with names such as the “Liberty in Laundry Act,” “Refrigerator Freedom Act,” and the “Clothes Dryers Reliability Act”—follow a conservative furore over a confected, baseless claim the Biden administration was banning gas stoves, which prompted further GOP legislation.

“No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda, yet that is exactly what we have seen under the Biden administration,” said Debbie Lasko, a Republican Congressman and sponsor of the ‘Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act’, which restricts new efficiency rules on appliances and passed the House in May. These bills have no chance of agreement in the Democratic-held senate.

Bipartisan support for renewables is weakening in the wake of Trump’s strange and misleading attacks on things like wind power, electric cars, and efficiency standards.

“We are seeing a lot of these advances, like clean cars and more efficient appliances, being swept up into the culture wars,” said Ed Maibach, an expert in public health and climate communication at George Mason University.

“Most Americans’ instincts are that these are good things to have, but it’s clear that Donald Trump and others think there’s political gain in persuading people this isn’t the case. These voters are being fed a story by people they shouldn’t really trust.”

There has been a sharp political divide over the climate crisis for several years in the US, with Trump calling global heating a “hoax” and dismissing its mounting devastation. “It basically means you’ll have a little more beachfront property,” the former president said of the impact of sea level rise last month.

During last week’s presidential debate, Trump boasted, baselessly, he achieved the “best environmental numbers ever” when president and called the Paris climate accords a “ripoff” and a “disaster.” Biden rebuked his rival, saying he didn’t do a “damn thing” about the climate crisis.

Despite this split, there has long been strong bipartisan support across all voters for renewables such as solar and wind, with most of the clean energy jobs and investment unleashed by Biden’s major climate bill flowing to rural, Republican districts. But this is beginning to weaken in the wake of Trump’s attacks, research by Maibach and colleagues has found.

A new poll, released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday, underscored this trend—support for new solar farms has slumped to 78 percent across all Americans, down from 90 percent just four years ago. Backing for expanding wind power has dropped by a similar amount, while interest in buying an electric vehicle is significantly lower than a year ago, with just 29 percent of people saying they would consider an EV, down from 38 percent in 2023.

This change is being driven by a drop in support among Republican voters, Maibach said, with clean energy and cars on track to become as contentious as global heating is now to many conservatives. “That support for clean energy has been there across Republicans and Democrats for a long time but it is starting to erode,” he said.

“It’s a trend that has been developing for at least the past five years. There is a tug of war going on between what people’s instincts are telling them, and what voices in their trusted community are telling them.”