WE DID IT!

Dear Friends,

We’re writing to ask you to do something hard but important: come to Washington DC in the middle of this winter, to join a demonstration and, if you can, risk arrest in a large-scale civil disobedience action. We know it’s a lot: we wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t both important, and potentially effective.

What’s at stake is the largest fossil fuel buildout in the world. As is so often the case, local frontline groups on the Gulf Coast have been warning about the massive buildout of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure for years. They’ve seen the pollution, health impacts, and environmental injustice of these facilities first hand. Now we’re building as broad a coalition as we can. 

It’s time to convince the Department of Energy to stop licensing new export terminals for Liquefied Natural Gas. 

Time after time they’ve approved these proposals, so the U.S. is now the biggest exporter of gas on earth—and that volume could quadruple if the industry has its way. There’s no bigger climate bomb left on planet earth.

Because this fracked gas leaks methane, and then turns to carbon when it's burned, LNG is as bad as coal for the climate, and once it’s been shipped around the world it’s even worse. But who cares about coal? The real comparison is with sun and wind, which now provide the cheapest power on planet earth, and which we must turn to if we have any hope of heading off the worst of the climate crisis.

President Biden, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, has a legitimate claim to doing more than any president on the clean energy side of the climate crisis—and indeed, the DOE has played a key role in helping build out renewable energy. But for Biden to claim credit for also slowing dirty energy, he needs good information from the DOE to inform his decisions, and here the department has been providing him with antiquated analysis. 

We need the administration to stop CP2—the next big facility up for approval—and all other facilities by committing to a serious pause to rework the criteria for public interest designation, incorporating the latest science and economics, before any such facility is permitted. 

We need the DOE to tell the president the truth: expanding LNG damages our climate, and economy, and the communities forced to live alongside these facilities. That includes the land, water, and air in Louisiana and Texas, where most of these facilities are built—it’s why some of us have fought on the front lines for years. We’ve rushed kids with asthma attacks to the hospital, seen our fishing spots and beaches polluted with chemicals, and breathe air filled with poisons everyday. We know what’s at stake. 

We also know there’s no real argument for building these facilities, besides lining the pocket of oil and gas CEOs. Exporting all this fuel will drive up the cost of gas Americans use for cooking, heating, and electricity, in some places by as much as 42%. Officials have used the war in Ukraine to justify the expansion, but there is already more than enough infrastructure to replace Russian gas; the vast majority of new exports are destined for China and the global markets, with any new expansion just locks in decades and decades of environmental destruction.

So far, the DOE has refused to listen to thousands of letters and ignored petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people. So we need to go to DC to drive home how serious this crisis is.

We will conduct a highly-civil civil disobedience action over three days in mid-February, peacefully blocking the entrance to the department.

We know this action isn’t for everyone, and we know that everyone can’t travel to DC—some of us will be joining instead in solidarity actions nearer our homes. For those of who do head to Washington, we agree to keep this action peaceful in word, mood, and action; if your level of frustration is too high to insure that, please stay home and think of other ways to help. We are committed to calm, to dignity, and to giving the Biden administration every possible chance to prove that they are climate leaders on the dirty energy side of the climate crisis as well as the clean.

If you plan on coming, we hope you will sign up here, picking one of the three days to participate. You’ll need to undergo some online training, and then another session the night before you plan to risk arrest.

2023 saw the hottest weather on this planet in at least 125,000 years; we think it is an honor to rise in defense of the planet we love, and the places where we live. Thank you for considering joining in.

In solidarity,