Misguided Boston Globe and PIPELINES

FROM BLUE MASS GROUP:

Globe, put down the pipe

March 6, 2018 By Charley on the MTA Leave a Comment

Even yet still another baffling, curdled-milk editorial endorsing more gas pipeline infrastructure, torching (see what I did there) us anti-pipeline “faddists”; and going so far as to flame Sens. Jamie Eldridge and Marc Pacheco and AG Healey, the Little Red Hens of renewable energy expansion and climate readiness.

No. This is Orwellian and silly on the face of it. You cannot say “renewable energy is certainly the region’s future” while at the same time arguing for permanent fossil fuel infrastructure that lasts a generation (30-40 years), certainly crowding out renewables. LNG tankers, rail and trucks; oil-fueled peaker plants are a lot of things — maybe worse in the very short term — but none are permanent.

Furthermore, Eldridge, Pacheco, and Healey are hardly “sitting on their hands” as the Globe preposterously accuses; they are pulling the weight, hastening a clean energy present. If anyone deserves credit and praise, not condemnation, it is them. What’s the motivation for tearing them down, just as they have produced a tremendously positive, visionary piece of legislation? (Head to your phone right now, call 617-722-2000, and tell your state rep to support, nay demand, Eldridge and Pacheco’s S.2302, An Act to Promote a Clean Energy Future).

Who is “sitting on their hands?” Surely our “combo platter” Governor; and our feckless Speaker of the House, who wants to slow-roll climate readiness even after two historic flooding Nor’easters in a season (maybe on the cusp of a third); and even as he lives on a peninsula in the Atlantic Ocean. And the legacy stakeholders — the utilities, power companies, and gas producers — are perfectly happy to continue feeding us more of the same. They haven’t demonstrated an interest in a “renewable energy future”.

Something stinks about this; I don’t know where the Globe is getting their talking points, but until they put their arguments into math and charts, they’re adding nothing to the public knowledge:

• By all means, let’s talk about the actual GHG production of oil peaker plants for those few days that we need them. Let’s talk about the marginal GHG difference between LNG, train- and truck-transported gas and pipelined, fracked gas — again, for such time as we need them.  Add those to a variety of clean energy conversion scenarios, including a realistically ambitious schedule for clean energy conversion: Game out the possibilities of S.2302, say.
• … and then compare those scenarios to continued reliance on a powerful greenhouse gas, whose transport involves environmental degradation and public danger its entire journey, and whose permanent infrastructure and easy access will definitely crowd out the uptake of actual clean energy.

Show us the math, Globe. There are people in this state that can do that kind of work; do you need some recommendations?

I’m sure we’ll hear more on this soon.