(The Daily Signal)—As Earth Day approaches on Tuesday, climate activists remind us of the importance of cutting carbon emissions. Yet, one inconvenient truth escapes their green-tinged talking points: The rise of natural gas in our power sector is the No. 1 driver of the reduction of emissions in the United States—not wind or solar.
If we want affordable and reliable power while being responsible stewards of the environment, natural gas is our most significant comparative advantage in the United States.
Between 2005 and 2019, the U.S. reduced carbon dioxide emissions by more than 800 million metric tons. The U.S. Energy Information Administration credits nearly two-thirds of that reduction to natural gas.
Zoom in more closely, and you’ll find the same trend in Pennsylvania. The Keystone State—a powerhouse of energy production thanks to the development of the Marcellus Shale, and the second largest producer of natural gas in the nation—reduced its power-sector carbon emissions by nearly 11% in one year—the most significant year-over-year drop in decades.
Its emissions success story also comes from a market transition from coal to natural gas. Natural gas comprises 60% of Pennsylvania’s power generation, while 31% comes from nuclear, 5% from coal, and 4% from renewables (wind and solar). With this resource mix, Pennsylvania is one of only three states in the region that have successfully reduced emissions while increasing energy production.
Natural gas production in the Marcellus Shale region propelled the United States from being a net importer to the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Today, Pennsylvania is the country’s top exporter of electricity.
Yet top Democrats—and some Republicans—remain duty-bound to the climate agenda and green energy donors. Instead of celebrating natural gas as a boon to both our energy independence and the environment, climate alarmists continue to vilify the industry. And by doing so, Pennsylvania Democrats continue to lash out against the sector that’s been giving Pennsylvania a competitive advantage.
For starters, former Gov. Tom Wolf entered Pennsylvania into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative through an unconstitutional executive order in 2019. The initiative is a multistate cap-and-trade program intended to force states to lower their carbon emissions through a carbon tax placed on energy producers and, ultimately, consumers through increased energy prices. Some estimates suggest the initiative will cost the commonwealth up to 22,000 energy jobs and raise consumers’ electricity bills by a whopping 30%.
Fortunately, good constitutional governance intervened. The Commonwealth Court ruled that Wolf’s actions were illegal, stating clearly that a governor has no authority to unilaterally levy taxes without legislative approval. Gov. Josh Shapiro, Wolf’s successor, took up the torch and appealed the decision. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the legality of Pennsylvania’s entry into the initiative on May 13. The initiative remains dormant while litigation is ongoing.
All litigation aside, the fact remains that Pennsylvania’s participation in a scheme like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is completely unnecessary. The Keystone State already has a proven track record of reducing emissions without causing energy scarcity simply by following the market-led push for natural gas. Greater natural gas development has brought the state greater energy independence, more reliable electricity, stable jobs, and—much to the chagrin of climate activists—fewer carbon emissions.
In fact, Pennsylvania has reduced its emissions more efficiently than states that are already participating in the initiative. Between 2018 and 2023, Pennsylvania’s emissions dropped nine million metric tons. Meanwhile, New York—a member of the initiative and a state with about 6 million more people than Pennsylvania—dropped only 1 million metric tons.
Moreover, states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative are struggling to contain costs. The Department of Environmental Protection in New Jersey, a state that is one of the initiative’s original charter members, noted that “participating RGGI states already have some of the highest retail electricity rates in the nation, with six of the nine states in the top 10, and increased energy costs should be of major concern.” Carbon taxes touch every corner of the economy and raise costs for families and businesses.
To avoid the initiative’s inevitable fallout, some Democrats have tried to cleverly rebrand the scheme. For example, Shapiro rebranded the Democrat’s climate agenda through a series of new green-energy efforts known as the Lightning Plan. Layered inside this plan is the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act, Shapiro’s homegrown, state-specific version of the initiative. His new agenda diminishes the natural gas industry’s role that led the commonwealth toward cleaner, more reliable energy.
But just like every Green New Deal knockoff, Shapiro’s policy package lacks political acumen. All these proposals—which prop up less-reliable energy sources by setting mandates for renewable energy usage and enact burdensome red tape that slows down permitting and production for fuels like oil and natural gas—put energy security at risk and cost Americans in terms of jobs and energy prices.
On Election Day 2024, voters rejected the Left’s climate alarmist agenda in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Those who remained skeptical of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ flip-flop on fracking for oil and natural gas instead embraced President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” strategy.
Natural gas will help usher in a new era of American energy dominance—one that’s more reliable, secure, affordable, and—despite what the alarmists claim—cleaner.
So, if there’s one thing that environmentalists should celebrate this Earth Day, it’s natural gas.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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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.
