The climate crisis is going to be hard enough to solve if everyone acts in good faith; right now, a crucial arm of the federal government is deliberately using bad data to bolster the single most dangerous expansion of fossil fuel in the world.

Here’s the story. Last Tuesday, a bevy of elected officials, led by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, joined environmental activists like me for a press conference calling for a halt to LNG exports based in part on new research findings on methane. That may sound like a topic too arcane to interest politicians, but in fact it couldn’t be more crucial. Robert Howarth, a Cornell professor and the dean of methane science, last month released a new paper showing that America’s growing exports of liquefied natural gas represent a grave climate danger. Between the carbon released when the LNG is burned, the methane that leaks along the way, and the energy that it takes to ship it, he found that exported LNG is much worse for the climate even than burning coal—in many cases, twice as bad. This is huge news—and it builds on the superb work that frontline groups have been doing along the Gulf, from Port Arthur to Lake Charles, documenting the damage that these enormous export terminals are doing.

You’d think that would interest the Department of Energy, which is in charge of granting export licenses for LNG plants—indeed it’s licensed seven that are already up and running, certifying that they were in “the public interest” and in the process making America the largest natural gas exporter on Earth. But industry has proposed 20 more of these giant terminals; if it gets its way, in a few years America’s exports of natural gas will produce about as much greenhouse gas as everything that happens in Europe—every car and house and factory. This LNG expansion is the largest fossil fuel growth plan on planet earth. It matters more than any single other thing to our climate future.

But instead of immediately halting new approvals for export facilities, or even asking Howarth for more details, the DOE issued a statement saying, “Both [a] 2014 and 2019 analysis concluded that that the use of US LNG exports for electricity generation in European and Asian markets will not increase GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from a life cycle perspective, when compared to regional coal extraction and consumption for electricity generation.”

To translate: Don’t bother us with new facts; we like the old ones.

But here’s what’s happened since 2014 (when even the old analysis showed that this LNG was little better than coal).

1. We’ve got a far more precise handle on methane leakage, which is Howarth’s specialty. There are now hundreds of studies showing that the gas seeps out of the process at every turn, and when it does it traps heat with extraordinary efficiency; his newest twist is examining the giant ships carrying this dangerous cargo.

2. We’ve watched the price of renewable energy plunge by 90 percent. It no longer makes sense to compare gas with coal anyway: The proper comparison is with sun and wind and batteries, which now provide the cheapest power for most of the world.

3. We’ve watched the temperature of the earth soar. It’s almost unbelievable that the DOE is sticking to its ancient science in 2023, a year when we’ve seen the highest temperatures in 125,000 years on this plant, with all the attendant destruction.

It’s especially depressing to watch DOE take this fingers-in-ears stand because, in other parts of its D.C. headquarters, officials are presiding over truly revolutionary change. They’re figuring out how to take the hundreds of billions the Inflation Reduction Act provides for clean energy, and use it to jump-start revolutions in everything from transportation to home heating. Renewables scientists and engineers are on the bleeding edge of the technology.