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Environmentalists are hopping mad about the Biden administration’s recent decision to approve construction of an oil export terminal off the coast of Texas. The government approved the $1.8 billion Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners project that will be the largest of its kind in the U.S., according to The Associated Press.

The facility will be capable of filling two supertankers at once and export up to 2 million barrels per day. It comes after five years of consultation with at least 20 federal, state and local agencies.

Environmentalists say it’s not only bad for the climate, but represents “incoherent politics.” They say moving forward with the project will create greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 90 coal-fired power plants.

Some things are above electoral politics, and it could be argued that this is one of them. This is the second oil-related project the administration has approved in the last year that has angered environmentalists.

The first was Conoco’s Willow oil project on the Alaska North Slope that sits on acreage initially leased during the Clinton administration.

Kelsey Crane, senior policy advocate at Earthworks, says, “The best way to protect the public and the climate from the harms of oil is to keep it in the ground.”

But that’s not a realistic view of the world. The oil is not staying in the ground until it’s too expensive to get out of the ground. The world needs energy.

From a national security standpoint, if it ever becomes necessary to keep it all on U.S. shores, it’s far easier to simply pause exports than navigate the intensely complex process of exploring, drilling, producing, transporting and refining the Texas tea into fuel.

Oil also provides the lion’s share of the revenue that supports Russia’s national budget. And not propping up Russia’s take on the world market probably saves Ukrainian lives.

Politically, at least for the Biden camp, the approval of the oil terminal may help mute some of the misinformation coming from the Trump campaign, which has pushed the idea that President Biden wants to outlaw oil drilling in the United States. (The fact is, at no point in history has any country produced as much oil as is produced right now in the United States. Further, if the industry believed drilling was being outlawed, why would it invest $1.8 billion in a project that allows domestic oil to be sold overseas?)

As far as the concern about emissions produced in the actual construction of the project, let’s not forget that trucks, cranes and other industrial equipment are also used in the development of wind and solar farms. All energy sources leave a carbon footprint of some kind.

As we’ve said many times before, reducing pollution of any kind is a good thing. But so is living in a modern world. And that modern world, at least for now, still depends on oil and gas.

The oil and gas industry won’t go away overnight. No matter how many people want the oil to stay in the ground.