We back Bill McKibben’s call for more of the sort of leadership recently shown by President Joe Biden in pausing new liquified natural gas export terminals (Joe Biden just did the rarest thing in US politics: he stood up to the oil industry, 7 February). Biden has another opportunity to curb the fossil fuel industry’s relentless expansionist agenda and affirm his climate credentials in this election year at an upcoming meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
At Cop26, the UN climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, 34 governments, including the US, pledged to end international public finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. Despite this, in the last year alone, the US has provided more than $2.2bn to oil and gas projects around the world via its export credit agency, the US Export-Import Bank, and its development finance institution. These include a large oil refinery in Indonesia, an oil project in the Bahamas, and gas turbines in Iraq.
