(The Center Square) – Texans are praising this week's ruling halting a partial liquified natural gas (LNG) ban imposed by the Biden administration.

Judge James Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Energy's partial LNG export ban in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of states led by Louisiana and Texas, the Gulf states that lead the U.S. in LNG exports.

Cain said the ban was implemented “completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy.”

The states argue the ban was unconstitutional and a political ploy in an election year after U.S. LNG exports and domestic natural gas consumption broke records, The Center Square reported.

Texas leads the U.S. in oil and natural gas production and in LNG exports, providing a lifeline to European countries previously dependent on Russian oil, The Center Square first reported. A senior advisor to the president, John Podesta, recently acknowledged the critical role of U.S. LNG exports earlier this year.

“The US is now the number one producer of oil and gas in the world, the number one exporter of natural gas, and that's a good thing, because following the illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the need that Europe had to rely on different sources rather than Russia fossils, it was important that the US could step up and supply a good deal of that need,” he told The Guardian.

But after the administration implemented the ban, LNG exports declined, causing concern in the industry.

While the court's decision “is certainly something to celebrate, how the Biden administration responds will be even more critical because we're already seeing impacts from the LNG pause,” Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association (TIPRO), told The Center Square.

“The Administration's pause caused global uncertainty in America's ability to supply reliable, affordable energy, leading to a 15% drop in LNG Sale and Purchase Agreements in the first half of 2024, compared to the same time period in 2023. This enabled suppliers in Asia and Canada to step in and acquire larger market shares, and Russia to once again become the largest natural gas supplier to Europe,” he said.

Pointing to the administration aggressively halting lease sales on federal land and offshore, he said, “As we saw with the stay on the federal oil and gas leasing pause at the beginning of this administration, court orders don't necessarily translate into immediate action from the Biden administration. And that's what we need right now – real and immediate evidence that the administration will review permits expeditiously to reduce the uncertainty in the markets.”

The court ruling “means Biden's illegal ban does not prevent Texas natural gas from reaching market while the lawsuit continues … producers can take their natural gas to market instead of flaring it. This will protect Texas jobs and keep our critical energy industry running,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said.

It also “achieves the right result,” Texas Oil & Gas Association president Todd Staples said. “U.S. natural gas has ushered in a new era of energy security by providing for needs here at home and to allies around the globe.”

The Biden administration implemented the ban claiming LNG exports increased domestic energy costs and methane emissions, contradicting federal data, The Center Square reported.

In contrast to the administration's approach, Texas' governor, legislature and voters supported creating a new $5 billion Texas Energy Fund to primarily advance natural gas development and infrastructure.

On the same day as the court ruling, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick issued a joint statement saying they were prioritizing fast-tracking building more dispatchable energy, seeking to expand the program by another $10 billion.

“Texas has already received notice of intent to apply for $39 billion in loans [through the Texas Energy Fund], making the program nearly eight times oversubscribed. With the new projections for 2030, we will seek to expand the program to $10 billion to build more new plants as soon as possible,” they said.

They're referring to a recent projection that Texas is expected to need nearly double the energy to power its grid by 2030. The need is due to several factors, including more residents and businesses relocating to Texas, Texas being the energy capital of the U.S., and record demand for domestic natural gas consumption largely made possible by Texas producers.

(The Center Square) – A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration's ban on new exports of liquified natural gas exports to non-free trade agreement countries.

Judge James Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Energy's partial LNG export ban after more than a dozen states sued, arguing the ban was illegal.

“It appears that the DOE's decision to halt the permit approval process for entities to export LNG to non-FTA countries is completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy,” Cain wrote in his ruling.

The ban was put in place, according to the Biden administration, because the exports “no longer adequately account for considerations like potential energy cost increases for American consumers and manufacturers beyond current authorizations or the latest assessment of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.”

After the Department of Energy announced the ban in January, 16 states filed suit, including Louisiana.

“This is great news for Louisiana, our 16 state partners in this fight, and the entire country,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement following the judge's decision. “As Judge Cain mentioned in his ruling, there is roughly $61 billion dollars of pending infrastructure at risk to our state from this illegal pause. LNG has an enormous and positive impact on Louisiana, supplying clean energy for the entire world, and providing good jobs here at home.”

Louisiana was joined by Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming in the lawsuit. 

(The Center Square) – The U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a ruling but unanimously vacated the judgments of and remanded a set of cases regarding social media moderation and algorithms back to federal appellate courts. The court also ordered lower courts to more closely examine the laws' application beyond curated feeds and suggested they explore how the laws could still apply to other features, such as direct messaging.

Florida and Texas both passed laws limiting social media content moderation and algorithmic sorting — which the court says was in response to a feeling “feeds [were] skewed against politically conservative voices” — and requiring notification detailing exactly why any posts are in violation of content moderation rules. District courts, following suits by trade association NetChoice, issued injunctions against both, with the Eleventh Circuit Court upholding the injunction against Florida's law, and the Fifth Circuit Court — which ruled social media companies are “common carriers” like mobile phone service providers that can't discriminate — reversing the injunction against Texas' law.

By remanding and vacating both the appellate courts' decisions, the Supreme Court did not definitely rule on the matter, but suggested, especially with regard to the Fifth Circuit, how the lower courts should move forward this time around. 

“This Court has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to “un-bias” what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in the court's opinion. “Contrary to what the Fifth Circuit thought, the current record indicates that the Texas law does regulate speech.” 

The court then went on to say the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit Courts should more broadly consider First Amendment implications of Florida and Texas rules in social media beyond the content feeds, such as in direct messaging or determining the order in which online reviews are shown to consumers. 

“Curating a feed and transmitting direct messages, one might think, involve different levels of editorial choice, so that the one creates an expressive product and the other does not,” wrote Kagan. “If so, regulation of those diverse activities could well fall on different sides of the constitutional line.” 

This means lower courts could expand consumers' speech protections to less-curated products such as direct messages, but free speech legal experts say it's unlikely.

“Having attended the oral argument in the NetChoice cases, I think the court was more really just trying to explore how regulations would apply to different functions,” said Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Parsing out direct messages where the platform doesn't have any involvement in the message from others could be used as part of that argument, but I don't think you can reach that conclusion just from that one off-hand remark from Kagan.”

The cases now go back to the Fifth and Eleventh District Courts for new rulings under the Supreme Court's instructions.