The Case for Natural Gas Exports

As more U.S. companies apply for permission to export LNG to countries without special free trade agreements, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Michael Levi expresses his view in a New York Times opinion piece that exports should be allowed. In a recent Hamilton Project paper, Levi proposed a framework for assessing the merits of allowing LNG exports along six dimensions: macroeconomic (including output, jobs, and balance of trade), distributional, oil security, climate change, foreign and trade policy, and local environment. After evaluating exports on all six dimensions, Levi found that the benefits of allowing exports outweighs the cost of constraining them. Read Levi's full paper here.