Earlier this month, the Transcontinental Gasoline Pipe Line Firm introduced its intention to construct the South’s largest fuel pipeline in additional than a decade. The Southeast Supply Enhancement project, as the corporate calls it, would run from Virginia down via the Carolinas and Georgia earlier than swinging west to Alabama, proper via the center of the American South.
This was not astonishing information to anybody whose gentle invoice comes from a Southern utility.
A renewable vitality revolution is unfolding throughout the globe faster than anyone dared to hope, however Southern officers, lots of whom reduce their political tooth on coal, have been cussedly immune to it. No person loves a fossil-fuel enlargement challenge greater than a red-state politician loves a fossil-fuel enlargement challenge.
In the identical method that “clear coal” is a ridiculous rebranding of the dirtiest energy source we have, “pure” fuel is a misnomer utilized by politicians and trade officers desperate to obscure its true id. The Union of Involved Scientists as a substitute uses “methane,” “fossil gas” and “gas” as interchangeable phrases for this greenhouse fuel which, in its first 20 years of reaching the ambiance, has greater than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. “Though CO2 has a longer-lasting impact, methane units the tempo for warming within the close to time period,” according to the Environmental Defense Fund.
The issue with fuel just isn’t merely that it’s a fossil gasoline or that fuel pipelines routinely leak and can explode. And it’s not merely that fuel is a human health and environmental nightmare. Maybe essentially the most damaging downside with fuel pipelines is that they allow the development of latest gas-fired energy crops that will probably be in service for many years. Simply because the planet hurtles towards an irreversible climate tipping point, these crops will lock the South into reliance on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
You’d suppose such details would give state officers pause earlier than allowing the extension of fuel pipelines via communities whose security they’re charged with defending. However this actuality has no impression in any respect in states managed by a Republican supermajority.
Let’s take the Tennessee Common Meeting as a living proof. As in other red states, our legislature has taken misinformation rebranding to new ranges, legally defining methane as “clear vitality.” It has handed pre-emptive laws that stops native governments from rejecting a pipeline or even regulating its safety. In Tennessee, anybody who disrupts the development of a pipeline has committed a Class C felony.
“The gas-fired fever dream gripping the South is totally at odds with the necessity to decarbonize how we get our vitality,” said the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Greg Buppert. “Pure fuel — methane — isn’t some local weather elixir. It’s simply one other soiled fossil gasoline that pollutes communities and heats up the planet.”
The so-called Southeast Provide Enhancement pipeline received’t attain Tennessee, however that doesn’t imply we’re secure from the hazards and destructions of pipeline and methane-plant building. As WPLN’s atmosphere reporter Caroline Eggers reported in December, the Tennessee Valley Authority — which gives electrical energy to most of Tennessee and elements of six different Southern states — has constructed or authorised eight new fuel crops just in the last three years. The T.V.A. is constructing out more new methane-power infrastructure than some other utility in the USA and has locked most of the local utility companies it serves into 20-year contracts.
We don’t have time for political obfuscation. We don’t have time for our utilities’ cussed reliance on fossil fuels, regardless of their risks. We actually don’t have time for state officers to disregard their constituents’ decisions relating to vitality sources in their very own communities. We don’t have time, and everybody, together with red-state residents, is aware of that.
In the event you don’t consider me, watch what occurs every time the T.V.A. proclaims the route of a brand new fuel pipeline or the development of a brand new fuel energy plant.
Final summer time, right here in Tennessee, each the Cheatham County Fee and the Ashland Metropolis Council voted to reject the T.V.A.’s proposed fuel energy plant and 12 miles of pipeline in Cheatham County. “Each citizen I’ve spoken to and each elected official I’ve spoken to is against this,” Gerald Greer, the vice mayor of Ashland Metropolis, told WZTV in Nashville.
“Constituents we help don’t want this facility in Cheatham County due to noise air pollution, doable contamination of consuming water, results on wildlife, the checklist goes on and on,” mentioned the Fourth District commissioner, Invoice Powers. “We’re going to strive, tooth and nail, to battle this 100%.”
Final week, representatives from the T.V.A. have been back in Cheatham County to listen to residents’ issues at a public assembly. Primed by Preserve Cheatham County, a brand new advocacy group with an active Facebook group, in addition to by long-established local-community Fb teams that may disseminate data shortly, the bipartisan, standing-room-only crowd was greater than merely involved. Significantly extra. Stomps and whistles and cheers broke out when two residents unfurled an enormous drop material painted with the phrases “Not Welcome” and held it up earlier than T.V.A. representatives.
Cheatham County is a largely bucolic a part of Center Tennessee, with small cities and farms that return for generations. Politically, it’s a very pink a part of the state. However it is usually the location of a 20,000-acre state wildlife administration space, and the brand new neighborhoods popping up across the interstates have gotten what quantities to suburbs of Nashville.
The coalition opposing the T.V.A.’s plans is motivated by a number of issues, not all of them environmental. “We’ve been capable of come collectively no matter why we’re preventing,” Stephanie Henry, one of many founding members of Protect Cheatham County, instructed me. “There are such a lot of viewpoints, however we’re all capable of come collectively and make a united stand.”
Ms. Henry understands the lengthy odds her group is preventing. “Legally we’ve obtained nothing,” she mentioned. “It’s an uphill battle, and our possibilities could also be slim, but when we don’t strive, then our likelihood is none.”
Given the extraordinary indifference with which Republicans within the Tennessee Common Meeting routinely regard their very own voters and the best way the T.V.A. has doubled down on fossil fuels, the residents of Cheatham County — like so many different communities fighting methane expansion in our region — are engaged in nothing lower than a David-and-Goliath battle.
As at all times in such battles, the chances are closely stacked in favor of the large. But it surely’s price remembering how that historic story truly ends.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion author, is the creator of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”