Dear Citizens and Elected Officials, Governor Larry Hogan and Maryland Department of the Environment Secretary, Benjamin Grumbles:
I attended the public hearing on December 19, 2017 in Hancock, Maryland, a small rural town in Washington County. It was in a local school auditorium, and there were 200-300 citizens in the audience, a great turnout given the problematic time of the year. Under most circumstances, another gas pipeline crossing the Potomac — there are 23 others (including under the North Branch of the river) — would not draw so much attention, and passion. But context is all. The 3.6 mile, 8” proposed pipeline would not serve Maryland’s economic needs; it is aimed at the West Virginia region called the Panhandle, and the case for its economic necessity was not made: the Panhandle, compared to the rest of West Virginia, was said to be doing well and other public speakers asserted the line is redundant. However, because the line would pass through Maryland and under the Potomac, 114’ under it, disturb wetlands, flood plains and streams, it needs Maryland environmental permits, as well as those from the Army Corps of Engineers’ (ACOE) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In other words, the administrative process for the project is a complex regulatory dance reflective of American governmental federalism - or bureaucratic red tape if you are an energy company.
The regulatory game being played is a subtle one, so bear with me. In general, when a powerful corporate applicant — here Columbia Gas Transmission, LLC, which is the pipeline company bought out by parent and more famous, or infamous, TransCanada in 2016 - wants to simplify — or gloss over, sensitive environmental impacts, they go for a “General Permit,” and that’s the way the Army Corps of Engineers seems to be leaning; the question being whether Maryland will object to that and insist on the more rigorous process of fact finding and determination under their powers — to say yes or no under a 401 Water Quality Certification (under the Clean Water Act, if my memory serves me correctly) , a state vested “check-mate” power that NY State has used in similar circumstances. The potential of a Governor Larry Hogan veto is making the Corps, the companies and FERC uneasy, it seems to me, and helping to confuse the public.
Therefore, much of the detailed environmental testimony from our side – from the River Keepers and Annie Bristow, was focused on the cumulative environmental reasons why this is not just another pipeline river crossing, especially honed-in on the unknowns for the subsurface hydrology of the region, specifically its karst limestone-sinkhole geology, which would serve to magnify the risks-impacts in case of a spill or explosion.
I’ve been through some similar dynamics during my environmental career in New Jersey, 1988-2001. The greens in New Jersey were trying to nominate portions of the Delaware River north of Trenton as a Wild and Scenic River stretch and the word on what was stalling the bill in Congress was the power of the gas companies, worried about higher regulatory hoops to jump through from the pending designation for their river crossing pipelines, NJ being a major conduit state. Senator Bill Bradley was said to be the problem, sympathetic to the gas pipeline companies’ worries. We should not underestimate the power of this type of symbolism here too in Maryland, the pressure on Governor Hogan. It should be an easy call: the requested line doesn’t serve Maryland, why should our state take the risk to our drinking water, even of small magnitude? Well, in my estimation, it’s a big symbolic move for a governor, to “check-mate” the gas powers via the 401 Water Quality Certification “veto.” Think of it this way: this permit application is a more localized version of “Globalization,” which argues for the ease of crossing political boundaries, of nations, states or local jurisdictions. Will Governor Hogan risk “getting in the way?”
Second, I saw firsthand how Ocean Spray Cranberry growers operated in New Jersey to maneuver around the nation’s toughest freshwater wetlands’ law by requesting a special “General Permit” with less scrutiny than the “individual permit” the very new and original law said they needed to convert 5-10 acres of existing wetlands to monoculture cranberries. (By the way, Ocean Spray was a co-operative founded in the 1930’s, but behaved like a Fortune 500 company.) What I see in writing from the Maryland Department of the Environment’s fact sheet/hand-out from Tuesday night raises the same worries: one can see the MDE wavering about whether to go with the Corps weaker general permit direction or stick with the more rigorous 401 process, the potential Maryland check-mate. Do they want to occupy the hot seat?
When I spoke at the hearing, I outlined only a portion of this analysis, skipping the NJ history, being limited to 3 minutes. But I said there was something else going on here with the tremendous citizen turn-out, 75% or more opposed, and the passion of so many of the testimonies against the line. I said there was another dimension to this permit, another whole level: the hour is late, and the science on natural gas/ fracked gas and the enormous infrastructure that the industry is still building out — needed or not — is based on obsolete science: natural gas, including fracked gas, is not the bridge to the future, it is rather a dead-end policy choice that our climate cannot afford if we are to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius and meet the targets set by the Paris accords. The billions of dollars in investment capital by the private sector being poured into the obsolete gas infrastructure needed instead to go to solar energy generation, supplemented by wind so that seasonal troubles and peak loading time demands can be met in a re-designed national grid.
As I said, hinted at the hearing, I think Secretary Benjamin Grumbles and his staff know this, but the web of legal and regulatory strictures they must follow don’t allow them to embrace the findings of the best contemporary science. They can’t make it the turning point of their decision making process, these legal strictures having been laid down in a different historical era with different assumptions of risk and environmental consequence. Perhaps I’m missing something in the “findings” sections of the laws or some footnote to the regulations, but so far, if I am, I haven’t seen any legal eagles on our side make that point. So we are forced to call upon our public officials, especially Secretary Grumbles and Governor Hogan, to make their decision based upon what appears to me to be very adequate “good cause” under the old, outdated system.
Now when I consider the very tight timelines we humans are subject to, to reign in carbon dioxide and methane emissions to keep temperatures in a non-catastrophic climate scenario, I turn to scientist Kevin Anderson for guidance. He’s the Enstrom Professor in Climate Change Leadership at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden (which goes back to the late 15th century) and also the Chair of Energy and Climate Change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of Manchester in Britain. And isn’t that a historical irony: one of the urban foundation stones of the Industrial Revolution now hosting someone trying to deal with its ecological consequences? Why do I choose him? Because Anderson gets into the very heart of the equations which make the projections from the IPCC (the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change), the world consensus of scientists that work on the issue, which are then brought before the COPS, the Conferences of the Parties, the major institutional players on the world stage of preventing drastic changes in climate, of slowing down the rate of global warming. Or not. And he shreds their rosy assumptions and unstated, unproven mechanisms which help us “get there” in time.
Anderson has coined some sharp phrases in his career to cut through the bull issued by these institutions: “’the shameful litany of technocratic scams’” and “’offsetting is paying a poor person to diet for us.’’’ Here, in November 2017 interviews with Amy Goodman, he explains the dead-ends of the European and American fixation on natural gas as the supposed savior from coal: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/scientist_kevin_anderson_our_socio_economic and outlines the dramatic changes we need in our economies, and the very way we live: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/scientists_issue_dire_warning_on_climate
And here is the well-known science writer, Elizabeth Kolbert’s take on the desperate situation we are in, relying on assumptions about tools we haven’t invented yet to remove CO2 already in the atmosphere, from the November 20, 2017 issue of the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world
And just arrived in the latest edition (January/February) of the Sierra Club magazine, here is Naomi Klein laying out the blunt news, right in line with Anderson’s take:
A paper from Oxford university that came out during the U.S. presidential campaign, published in the Applied Energy journal, concluded that for humanity to have a fifty-fifty chance of meeting the temperature targets set in the climate accord negotiated in Paris at the end of 2015, every new power plant would have to be zero-carbon starting in 2018.
My challenge to Secretary Grumbles and Governor Hogan on Tuesday night was this: at some point the scientists who work for the state of Maryland must confront the facts that Kevin Anderson and many others lay out for us: we can’t save ourselves, or what’s left of nature, which we are dependent upon, unless we turn our back upon the old fossil fuels and their very expensive infrastructures, and start doing it now. And that especially includes our natural gas and fracking illusions which are gobbling up, wasting billions in capital that are slowing down the emergency transition to alternative energy forms.
That’s what was really on the decision table, the policy table Tuesday night; the best and most passionate speakers against the pipeline spoke eloquently to this aspect, the one underneath the old permitting system, threatening to make the regulators and Governor Hogan “complicit” in the destruction of life as we know it, “facilitators” in its slow demolition, as another put it, choosing their words from the vocabulary of the day’s women’s revolt.
And finally, how can I not comment on the union workers, the blue collar guys and the women who were sitting with them, out of Morgantown, West Virginia and Cumberland, Maryland, there on Tuesday evening in Hancock. They told me before the hearing got started that they belonged to the Laborers International Union of North America, and they were wearing orange tee shirts over their formidable human frames, emblazoned with this logo http://www.liuna.org/
They were of course in favor of the project, and once again, our side, the environmental side, didn’t do such a great job, Mike Tabor excepted (a local organic farmer whom I knew from my Montgomery County political days) in offering constructive job alternatives. Tough to do, to address the project and bridge one of the ancient divides in American reform movements, going back to the time of John Muir in the 1890’s. Sure, if solar generation could come to energize all of the town of Frostburg, and the college, and Cumberland, the solar companies might hire and train them, but I don’t believe there is in any clear pathway that would connect the two. I’m constantly pushing a WPA/CCC program for our region; in fact, I’m pushing the right to a job for the nation as a whole via FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, but I envision many of those to be jobs at $15 dollars an hour plus benefits, probably a two-thirds pay reduction for these workers in orange from the “liuna.”
For my entire environmental career, spanning many decades, I’ve been looking at divides like this, reflective of our terrible division of labor, class and gender in the various movements, and race as well (they were all white workers) and the ideology of our Neoliberal capitalist system, which has a primordial fear of tampering with labor markets, no matter how many people they leave out, and behind, and the woeful imbalances in our current income and wealth distribution.
It’s an old and painful divide going back to the glory days of the founding of the environmental movement, and the early days of the modern labor movement, in the late 19th century. Here’s how the formidable environmental historian Donald Worster presents the dilemma in his wonderful biography of John Muir, A Passion for Nature:
Committed conservationists like Muir, therefore, tended to stand apart from the industrial battleground, leading to harsh charges of elitism, indifference, or obstructionism from the polar extremes. They denounced business greed over and over but did not throw much support to workers trying to organize themselves into labor unions, although unionization offered significant hope for economic democracy, and potentially, a powerful check on the corporate assault on nature. Although critical of capitalists, conservationists did not trust radicals like Debs to care about a nonhuman world beyond the factory or railway yard. Thus, two separate movements, one to reform relations with nature and the other to reform the distribution of power within a capitalist system, grew up in the late nineteenth century. Independently, they attacked different sides of an impregnable citadel. Both armies fought for reform, both worried about the incorporation of America, both believed in democracy, but they could not agree on a common strategy of attack.
Now much has changed in the economic world, and the nature of unions in America since Muir’s day. Are the unions still reformist in nature? But the gap between these camps has not been narrowed. At the Democratic Party’s “Unity Dinner” in the late spring of 2016, after the contentious primaries, I sat at a table, by pure chance, with a number of union workers and their leaders from the Western Maryland region, steelworkers and sheet metal workers I remember, in particular. I told them I wrote about the economy, and handed them my writer’s card which says “for a green New Deal.” I told them I would be more than happy to come and talk to their locals about how a modern day Civilian Conservation Corps might help our struggling region, and how that might fit in with their organizations. But I never heard back from them. Later, at one of the public hearings in Garrett County on the fracking issue, I saw I face I knew I had seen but couldn’t place: sure it enough, after about ten minutes of concentration, it was the sheet metal worker union officer I had sat across from a few months earlier. Of course, his union testified for fracking and the hoped for jobs.
One would think that the Democratic Party itself could facilitate talks to bring greens and unions together to iron out their differences. But, as I’ve written before at the Daily Kos, the party is very afraid to even dip their toe into the swift currents of labor markets. And there will be little progress as long as the party, and the workers themselves, their union leaders, believe that “only the private sector can create jobs” and just as important, that only the private sector can “define” the work that needs to be done.
I have a very different vision in my head, one that empowers citizens and scientists – and unions, if they will - to jointly define the work of restoration that needs to be done, and unions, if they think clearly about it, can help and directly benefit from that great reconfiguration, which sooner or later, as Naomi Klein has told us, we are going to have to face if we hope to “get there in time.” It’s “the moral equivalent of war,” but for a better purpose: a mobilization to save the planet and give everyone work to do to accomplish the goal. A glimpse of a “unifier” that Muir’s age couldn’t quite see or get to.
Some citizens of the state of West Virginia get that idea, were there to oppose the pipeline, and knew what the greater stakes were that evening, even as their state as a whole drifts further and further to the Right politically. I’m thinking of the Eastern Panhandle Protectors. Somehow, despite all the talk-show conservative-libertarian propaganda, they’ve fought through the fog and can see the outlines of a better future. Here at http://easternpanhandleprotectors.com/about-us/
I hope this brief essay helps sort out some of the confusion. If it does, please feel free to send you comments in to Paul Busam at paul.busam@maryland.gov and referencing the case number 201760592/17-NT-3089, addressed to the Water and Science Administration, Wetlands and Waterways Program. Comments due by January 16, 2018. And here is the contact page for Governor Hogan: http://governor.maryland.gov/contact-the-governors-office/
And, if you’d like to come out and testify yourself, there will be another public hearing on Tuesday, January 9, 2018, at the Berkeley Springs High School, 6:00-8:00 PM.
Best to you all for the holidays,
BillofRights
Frostburg, MD