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At a Glasgow climate summit in 2021, the Biden administration offered a commitment to the world: The United States would stop the public financing of oil and gas projects. There would be no more American tax dollars for new natural gas pipelines or wells, the White House said

The pledge drew praise from climate change activists. But there was one big problem—it was an empty promise.

In the years since Glasgow, the US has continued to finance fossil fuel projects around the world. The latest example came Thursday, when the US Export-Import Bank finalized a plan to guarantee part of the financing for a $4.2 billion revitalization of natural gas production in the nation of Bahrain. The move—which comes just weeks after the Biden administration triumphantly announced a freeze on the domestic development of new projects designed to export liquified natural gas—will include the construction of dozens of gas wells and 450 new oil wells. It will bring online as much as 5.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or about five years of additional gas production at Bahrain’s current levels.

The ExIm Bank was established by FDR in 1934 to goose exports by lending money to foreign customers who want to buy American goods. While it’s backed the US treasury, it has actually returned a profit over the last two decades—a fact that tends to insulate it from political oversight. In recent years, however, it has become something of a target for fiscal conservatives, drawing fire from tea party-aligned Republicans during the Obama years. It was largely dormant during the Trump administration, before being revived after Biden took office.

Officially, the bank is an independent agency within the executive branch, but it has traditionally been largely compliant with broader US policy—reliably stepping in to finance sales of planes and trucks to Cold War allies and support US manufacturing jobs, for example. That’s what makes the Bahrain deal and other recent oil and gas projects greenlit by the bank so galling to clean energy advocates. And there’s no end in sight. Among the fossil fuel initiatives on the shortlist for ExIm Bank consideration later this year is a liquified natural gas project in Papua New Guinea. That venture, which has struggled to find financial support from European banks, could yield as much as 11 trillion cubic feet of gas if ExIm decides to sign on.

According to the ExIm Bank’s own annual report, of the $34 billion in outstanding obligations currently on its books, $8.1 billion is for oil and gas projects, including both direct financing and loan guarantees. That number has dropped from $10.8 billion in 2021—the year the Biden Administration made its Glasgow commitment—but it still represents more than a quarter of the bank’s total financial exposure. The bank has touted the fact that last year it financed $950 million in green energy or climate-friendly projects (almost all of that was for a single project to build giant solar power plants in Angola), but a tally by one environmental group........

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