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A conflict with Obama's trade pledge
President Barack Obama speaks during the the Export-Import Bank's Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
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Kai Ryssdal: The mismatch between how much stuff we buy from overseas and how much less stuff we sell abroad got smaller in January. Today's report on the federal trade deficit was smaller overall, actually. There simply isn't as much trade happening after the Great Recession.
The president took that report as a cue to make a pitch for his trade policy this morning. He's promising to double American exports with tough enforcement of our trade agreements. He figures that'll help create some of the new jobs that the economy so desperately needs.
But Marketplace's John Dimsdale reminds us that nothing in Washington comes without compromise.
JOHN DIMSDALE: President Obama said export promotion is one path out of the economic doldrums.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: In a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative.
To sell American products overseas, the president is backing financing for the Export-Import Bank, which lends money to potential exporters. But last year the Ex-Im Bank backed the exports of oil, gas, and mining technology and power plants. That represents a tripling of the pollution from the previous year's underwriting.
Doug Norlen with Pacific Environment says these export policies are undermining Obama's goal of cutting greenhouse gas pollution.
DOUG NORLEN: The Export-Import Bank is operating at cross purposes financing an exploding, a skyrocketing portfolio of fossil fuel projects.
But the chairman of the Ex-Im Bank, Fred Hochberg, says you can't double exports and grow jobs if you only promote alternative energy projects.
FRED HOCHBERG: No. There's not nearly enough of those clean energy exports to do that.
He says the Ex-Im Bank is supporting more solar power, too. But Pacific Environment's Doug Norlen says the U.S. has been urging other countries to stop subsidizing oil, coal and gas.
NORLEN: And if we don't do it ourselves, and in fact, if we do the opposite in financing an ever increasing amount of fossil fuel projects, we will appear hypocritical, and we won't succeed in our climate change goals.
In Washington, I'm John Dimsdale for Marketplace.
As I've said before, it is disingenous at best to use the phrase "greenhouse gas pollution." First, human carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, are dwarfed by the amount emitted by non-human sources. Second, the evidence does not at present conclusively support the contention that human-produced greenhouse gasses are the driving force behind recent warming. Calling CO2 a pollutant, as only the far left does deliberately, is akin to calling oxygen a pollutant and advocating the razing of a majority of forests because without oxygen house fires would not occur, or banning water because of its role in the overwhelming majority of drowning deaths.
It's worse than this. The Ex-Im Bank is funding projects to IMPORT foreign fossil fuel. They just approved a $3 billion subsidy to an ExxonMobil liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Papua New Guinea that could supply proposed import terminals on the U.S. west coast. This project is not only environmental damaging, including impacts on critically engangered leatherback turtles, but it supports production and importation of LNG--which is estimated to have 30% greater carbon impact than our very ample supply of domestic natural gas. This undermines both energy independence and efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions to bring us a fuel for which we have no need. Lose-lose-lose.
