Chuck Collins: In New England and elsewhere, anti-gas-pipeline activism picks up
Thousands of Native Americans at Standing Rock in North Dakota are protesting a pipeline project that puts their water supply at risk, threatens to plow up their sacred sites, and would worsen climate change.
Their rallying echoes hundreds of local struggles across the U.S. that question the prudence, safety, and necessity of thousands of new gas pipeline projects.
The gas industry tells us these projects promote energy independence and meet local gas needs. But the driving force behind most of these billion dollar infrastructure projects? Gas export.
Big gas is desperate to get their cheap shale gas to global export terminals — and they’ve dug up millions of backyards to do it. Fortunately for the industry, they have a subservient federal agency that grants them the power of eminent domain to take those backyards.
The anti-pipeline movement brings together mayors, state officials, and engaged neighbors concerned about health and safety, unnecessary rate increases, and the environmental irresponsibility of constructing new fossil-fuel infrastructure. They’re fed up with a system that allows the profits of private energy corporations to override local concerns and dictate our future.
Many politicians remain stuck in the “gas as a bridge fuel” perspective. But growing scientific evidence shows that methane from gas extraction and transportation poses a greater short-term climate change risk than burning carbon fuels like coal and oil.
We should be rapidly shifting away from all new fossil-fuel infrastructure projects, and investing in fixing existing gas leaks and using renewable energy like wind, hydroand solar. This shift will create millions of high-paying jobs in the new energy economy.
The anti-pipeline movement is gathering steam. Residents have mobilized to stop pipeline projects in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and have stalled others in Kentucky.
But not all anti-pipeline efforts have been successful.
In the Boston neighborhood of West Roxbury, residents have vigorously opposed a high-pressure pipeline that arcs into the heart of a densely populated neighborhood and terminates across from an active blasting quarry. All of Boston’s elected officials unanimously oppose this project — but big business is still winning.
The Texas-based Spectra Energy sued the city and took their streets by eminent domain. The city of Boston is still trying to block the project in court, but construction is almost complete. In the last year, almost 200 neighbors and religious leaders have been arrested for blocking construction.
How is this possible in a democratic society?
The answer lies with a little-known and unaccountable agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Under the Gas Act of 1938, FERC may grant private corporations the power of eminent domain over local jurisdictions.
Maybe this was necessary in 1938 to build a modern energy system. But today, we need an energy agency that’ll balance a wider set of considerations, not just the interests of a politically powerful gas industry.
In the last few years, FERC has rubber-stamped just about every project the natural gas industry has sought to build. These include high-pressure pipelines running next to nuclear power plants, across fragile water supplies, and across traditional Native American lands.
In the words of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FERC is a “rogue agency.” The U.S. Senate should convene oversight hearings to examine FERC overreach. Congress must modernize the Gas Act to protect communities and reduce carbon and methane emissions. And an independent agency should assess our nation’s real energy needs.
Decisions about our energy future shouldn’t revolve around a self-interested gas industry and investor-owned utilities. For the sake of the planet and our democracy, other voices must be at the table.
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits . He is author of Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home and Committing to the Common Good. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
Llewellyn King: The Nasty Magic of the Market
The late, great neo-classical version of Pennsylvania Station, whose construction was completed in 1910. The grand structure was torn down in 1963, to be replaced by the claustrophobic current version.
As architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote: "One entered the city like a god {with the old Penn Station}. One scuttles in now like a rat.''
The market is a wondrous place. It ensures you can drink Scotch whisky in Cape Town and Moscow, or Washington and Tokyo, if you prefer. It distributes goods and services superbly, and it cannot be improved upon in seeking efficiency.
But it can’t think and it can’t plan; and it’s a cruel exterminator of the weak, the unready or, for that matter, the future.
Yet there are those who believe that the market has wisdom as well as efficiency. Not so.
If it were wise, or forward-looking, or sensitive, Mozart wouldn’t have died a pauper, and one of the greatest — if not the greatest architecturally — railway station ever built, Penn Station, wouldn’t have been demolished in 1963 to make way for the profit that could be squeezed out of the architectural deformity that replaced it: the Madison Square Garden/Penn Station horror in New York City.
Around Washington, Los Angeles and other cities are the traces of the tracks of the railroads and streetcar lines of yore. These were torn up when the market anointed the automobile as the uber-urban transport of the future. As Washington and Los Angeles drown in traffic, many wish the tracks — now mostly bike paths — were still there to carry the commuter trains and streetcars that are so badly needed in the most traffic-clogged cities.
Now the market, with its concentration on the present tense, is about to do another great mischief to the future. An abundance of natural gas is sending the market signals which threaten carbon-free nuclear plants before their life is run out, and before a time when nuclear electricity will again be cheaper than gas-generated electricity. World commodity prices are depressed at present, and no one believes that gas will always be the bargain it is today.
Two nuclear plants, Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt. , and Kewaunee in Carlton, Wis., have already been shuttered, and three plants on the Exelon Corp. system in the Midwest are in jeopardy. They’ve won a temporary reprieve because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says the fact that they have round-the-clock reliability has to be taken into account against wind and solar, which don’t. In a twist, solar and wind have saved some nuclear for the while.
Natural gas, the market distorting fuel of the moment, is a greenhouse gas producer, although less so than coal. However gas, in the final analysis, could be as bad, or worse, than coal when you take into account the habitual losses of the stuff during extraction. Natural gas is almost pure methane. When this gets into the atmosphere, it’s a serious climate pollutant, maybe more so than carbon dioxide, which results when it is burned.
Taken together — methane leaks with the carbon dioxide emissions — and natural gas looks less and less friendly to the environment.
Whatever is said about nuclear, it’s the “Big Green” when it comes to the air. Unlike solar and wind, it’s available 24 hours a day, which is why three Midwest plants got their temporary reprieve by the FERC in August.
When President Obama goes to Paris to plead with the world for action on climate change in December, the market will be undercutting him at home, as more and more electricity is being generated by natural gas for no better reason than it’s cheap.
As with buying clothes or building with lumber, the cost of cheap is very high. The market says, “gas, gas, gas” because it’s cheap – now. The market isn’t responsible for the price tomorrow, or for the non-economic costs like climate change.
But if you want a lot of electricity that disturbs very little of the world’s surface, and doesn’t put any carbon or methane into the air, the answer is nuclear: big, green nuclear.
Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant.
— For InsideSources.com