United States exports of fuels have soared under President Obama, canceling out some of the greenhouse gas reductions he has shepherded.
The Associated Press reports that although the United States cut its domestic carbon pollution by about 475 tons between 2008 and 2013, the gasoline and diesel it sold abroad more than made up for the cuts.
{mosads}The AP estimated that fuel exports in those years grew by 1 billion gallons.
The exports help Obama politically, since they help the economy and take carbon emissions off the United States’ books. But they can still warm the planet.
Panama’s fuel imports from the United States have quadrupled in the most recent five years, and that country is now the largest recipient.
But the fuels are dirtier than what would be used in the United States, and car owners rarely conduct the required emissions tests for their vehicles, AP said.
“It’s a false image,” Onel Masardule of the Indigenous People’s Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative, a Peru-based environmental group, told AP. “In reality, the U.S is still contaminating.”
The White House told AP that it is working to incorporate greenhouse gas emissions provisions into trade agreements and lower tariffs for technologies that reduce pollution.
Officials also maintain that the United States is not increasing emissions abroad, because the fuel is just replacing fuel that would have been burned anyway.