A couple of comments posted on DK in response to my piece about the Koch Bros. from 3 weeks ago alerted me to the fact that I have acquired some knowledge over the past few years that may not be commonly understood, and that realization prodded me into sharing some of this acquired knowledge, which relates primarily to recent battles between landowners in various states and the companies that want to build pipelines across the properties of those landowners. Before I get to the relevant details of these struggles, though, as an aside, I do want to acknowledge the reality of actual shooting-and-killing pipeline wars, such as the current conflict in Syria, and to say that I oppose all the Middle East carnage caused by petrochemical greed, but that’s a totally different subject. In the clashes I’ll speak of here, usually no one dies, but plenty of U.S. property owners have their lives destroyed by that same petrochemical greed monster.
A few years ago, at a local presentation by former petrochemical insider Chip Northrup, he happened to share a little piece of industry exec lingo which goes, “You wine ‘em, dine ‘em, and then you pipeline ‘em.” That cute little phrase gives a pretty clear indication that the guys in the top floor offices know exactly what kind of raw deals they dish out to the poor unfortunates who happen to live somewhere along the path of a proposed pipeline project.
Every petrochemical pipeline beast draws its first breath when the pipeline company files an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). As the pipeline wars started heating up a few years ago, I began hearing the phrase, “FERC never met a pipeline it didn’t like.” As far as I know, that had been true up until early March of 2016, when the agency actually did reject a proposal for a pipeline leading to a companion LNG export terminal on the Oregon coast. I personally don’t think it’s coincidental that this rejection occurred only 4 days after a coalition of consumer and environmental groups, including Public Citizen, filed a petition with FERC demanding that the organization create an Office of Public Participation, which it had been directed to do by an act of Congress in 1978, but which it somehow has still not yet done 38 years later.
Once FERC rubber stamps a pipeline application, the pipeline builder receives the power of eminent domain, which it can then bring down on any property owner unlucky enough to own land along the pipeline’s proposed route. In theory, FERC must conclude that the pipeline project sufficiently serves the public interest in order to justify the use of eminent domain, but since the salaries of the FERC commissioners get paid by the industries that it supposedly regulates, the agency sets that bar pretty low. The majority of recent pipeline projects it has rubber-stamped are large, high-pressure natural gas lines designed to facilitate export of the product.
For instance, the 3 new projects designed to cross NYS — the Constitution, NED and AIM — would all connect with an existing line that, of course, stretches up to the Canadian coast. The fact that Canada’s National Energy Board approved 3 Canadian East Coast LNG export terminal applications in September of 2015 also doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me.
Exporting NG doesn’t serve the public interest in any way — in fact, it would undoubtedly lead to higher domestic prices for the gas, which would only serve the wallets of a handful of petrochemical fat cats. The industry knows that the reality can’t justify the use of eminent domain, but it generally must pretend to be answering a domestic public need with every project. However, a serious study of the issue, such as the one MA AG Maura Healey recently commissioned, quickly reveals the lack of domestic need for the new pipelines.
Over the last 2 years, I’ve linked to dozens of pipeline/eminent domain horror stories on a pair of Facebook pages that I handle, so I plan to share a bunch of those as part 2, and perhaps create a part 3, and maybe even a part 4 — I certainly have no shortage of stories about people on the receiving end of that eminent domain hammer from a pipeline company. If you like reading about injustice and petrochemical malfeasance, then stay tuned.