(DCNF)—The Biden administration relied on questionable and misleading scientific material to support its decision to pause new approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.
In January, the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on approving new LNG export terminals so that the Department of Energy (DOE) can expand its reviews to include facilities’ climate impacts, a move celebrated by climate activists and slammed by industry groups and elected Republicans alike. In written testimony to Congress earlier in February defending the policy, Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk pointed to billion-dollar disasters (BDDs) as a proxy for the intensity of climate change, and he also cited projections based on a de facto “worst-case” emissions scenario that critics have derided for failing to accurately project emissions in the present, let alone the future; both statistics are misleading and questionable.
Turk’s testimony states that “our understanding of the economic and human impacts from climate change has only sharpened” since 2019, when the agency last published its estimates for the full lifecycle greenhouse gas impacts associated with American LNG exports.
Turk leads off by comparing the number of BDD events recorded in 2019 and 2023, observing that 2019 saw 14 natural disasters that caused damages in excess of $1 billion while there were 28 such instances in 2023. These statistics are sourced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
However, using BDD events as a proxy for meteorological conditions is misleading for several reasons. Primarily, this is because population and asset density has increased in coastal areas susceptible to natural disasters. The increased loss potential in coastal areas means that the same exact hurricane in the same exact place may not have caused $1 billion in damages in 1980 as it might inflict today.
NOAA acknowledges as much, having previously told the DCNF that “the number and cost of disasters are increasing over time due to a combination of three things: increased exposure (i.e., values at risk of possible loss), increased vulnerability (i.e., where we build; how we build) and climate change that is increasing the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion–dollar disasters.”
Put another way, there are several factors that influence the frequency of BDD events other than meteorological conditions and things that are related to climate change. Notably, NOAA does not express natural disaster costs in terms of American gross domestic product (GDP). Roger Pielke Jr. — an academic who writes extensively about politicized science and considers climate change to be a real and serious threat — has conducted his own analysis and found that “North American catastrophe losses as a proportion of U.S. GDP clearly show no upwards trend” over time.
“There is no peer reviewed science that attributes any part of increasing disaster losses to changes in climate,” Pielke previously told the DCNF. “To see evidence of changes in climate, look at climate data, not economic data.”
In addition to the BDD statistics, Turk asserts that climate change could result in an annual loss of $2 trillion in federal government revenues by the year 2100, citing analysis conducted by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
However, the OMB analysis relies on de facto “worst-case-scenario” projections that appear to be predicated on the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. RCP8.5 is essentially the term used by climate scientists to describe a situation in which the world continues to use fossil fuels and produce emissions without adjusting course.
The OMB analysis that Turk cites states that the $2 trillion hit to annual revenues could occur “under a scenario in which climate change reduced U.S. GDP by 10.0 percent compared to a no-further-warming counterfactual, as projected by the Network for Greening the Financial System as the tail risk under current policies.” The Network for Greening the Financial System’s analysis on various climate change scenarios, which the OMB’s analysis cites, was funded by grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the ClimateWorks Foundation, two left-of-center charitable foundations that focus their work on climate change-related initiatives.
The RCP8.5 scenario estimates American GDP loss by 2100 to be 10.52%, according to the International Monetary Fund, putting it on par with the assumptions made by OMB to qualify its claim — cited by Turk in his testimony defending the LNG export terminal approvals pause — that climate change could force a $2 trillion reduction in annual federal revenues by 2100.
However, the RCP8.5 model has serious flaws.
For example, a 2020 paper by two climate scientists published in Nature found that RCP8.5 should not be treated as a reference or baseline case for potential outcomes related to climate change, in part because global carbon dioxide emissions are lower than the levels projected by RCP8.5. The paper argues that the bifurcation between reality and RCP8.5 projections will only intensify over time, referencing the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2019 projections for emissions assuming continuity of current energy policy to make this point.
“RCP8.5 projects to 2100 a six-fold growth in global coal consumption per capita, while the International Energy Agency and other energy forecasting groups collectively agree that coal consumption has already or will soon peak. Also, RCP8.5 foresees carbon dioxide emissions growing rapidly to at least the year 2300 when Earth reaches more than 2,000 [parts per million] of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations,” Pielke wrote in a 2021 analysis that he coauthored with Justin Ritchie, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “But again, according to the IEA and other groups, fossil energy emissions have likely plateaued, and it is plausible to achieve net-zero emissions before the end of the century, if not much sooner. Today, projections that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels will increase dramatically for the next 50, 100, or 300 years are simply implausible.”
Setting aside the credibility of the statistics Turk cited in his testimony, energy sector experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the decision will fail to reduce global emissions while also empowering foreign production in places like Russia and Qatar. Would-be importers of American LNG will not scrap longer-term plans to import because the Biden administration has altered timelines for new export capacity, so they will lean on Russian and Qatari LNG that is not produced as cleanly as American gas to plug the gap, the experts told the DCNF.
The Department of Energy and the White House did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
