One of the rallies over the last eight years opposing the 42” MVP ….

From the Article by Maury Johnson (Monroe County, WV), Common Dreams, 4/26/23

Secretary Granholm’s letter cheerleading the Mountain Valley Pipeline came the day after she promised to meet with me, a landowner impacted by Senator Manchin’s pet fossil fuel project.

I am saddened by the depths that proponents of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) will go to advance a false narrative and spread inaccuracies. This time it is Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm who on Friday, April 21, 2023 wrote a cheerleader’s letter rooting for the MVP, Joe Manchin’s pet project. It is very ironic and even a bit disturbing that she wrote this letter one day after she appeared before the Senate Energy Committee and the very next day after she told me personally that she (or her staff) would meet with me in the next week or two.

I am currently in Washington, D.C. where I attended the Senate Energy Committee meeting on Thursday, April 20. I spoke to the Secretary at the conclusion of the hearing and asked her to meet with me. She indicated that a meeting could be arranged this week or next. But in what appears to be a hastily prepared letter — even possibly dictated by the fossil fuel lobby — she expressed her desire to exert political pressure on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and other federal agencies.

The Secretary apparently decided that she did not need to talk to those most affected by the project or even entertain an opposing viewpoint. Like many agencies, she did not talk with or listen to any affected landowner and totally continued to perpetrate the social, racial, and environmental injustice concerns that President Joe Biden had just a few hours before expressed that his administration would take seriously.

You can’t have it both ways: You either listen to impacted communities or you don’t. This letter appears to be written to appease Senator Manchin and others in the MVP camp. It is also strange that this letter was filed just before Equitrans Midstream Corporation — the company behind the pipeline — had its shareholder meeting on Monday morning, April 24.

You can’t have it both ways: You either listen to impacted communities or you don’t.

The MVP project is not necessary to support the nation’s energy security and energy supply. Just because they say it is so, doesn’t make it true. It actually would do just the opposite. It would lock us into decades of methane and carbon pollution that the nation or the planet can ill afford. As the lead federal agency for the project under the FAST-41 framework, I feel that the FERC has failed in its regulatory duty to be an independent agency by submitting to inappropriate industry-generated political pressure similar to that which is reflected in Secretary Granholm’s letter. It appears to me to be an attempt to intimidate the commission.

In a letter I just completed and sent to the FERC, I requested that they do their job and follow their charter as an independent agency: to evaluate all projects on their merits and with regard to their impact on climate change and to resist the political pressure placed on them by politicians like Senator Manchin, who would build more pipelines, mine more coal, drill for more oil and gas, despite the fact that it would put us on a fast track to total environment destruction.

I do not believe that the MVP project would help ensure the “reliable delivery of energy that heats homes and businesses, and powers electric generators that support the reliability of the electric system,” despite what Secretary Granholm may state in her letter. This is a 42-inch diameter interstate transmission line which is most likely slated to transmit gas for export.

Infrastructure such as MVP destroys communities, pollutes water, harms our environment, and has no role to play in the clean energy transition. Unproven technologies such as “carbon capture” facilitated by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are not something you should rely on to fix our climate emergency. With the severe problems we are facing, these proposals are too little, too late.

No new pipeline infrastructure is needed. The rapid growth of hydrogen as an emissions-free fuel is also a misnomer, especially if the hydrogen is produced as a byproduct of more drilling. The transport of carbon dioxide through a pipeline might be the most dangerous thing we could ever do. I believe Secretary Granholm herself knows better than what she stated in her April 21 letter.

As extreme weather events continue to put strain on the U.S. energy system, we must quickly transition to green energy and continuing to build pipelines cannot be part of that transition. The MVP project would, if completed, lock us into decades of climate-busting greenhouse gas emissions as it destroys communities and property across its entire route.

The MVP project would, if completed, lock us into decades of climate-busting greenhouse gas emissions as it destroys communities and property across its entire route.

Now here is the hardly disguised, hard-hitting core message embedded in a (not so funny part of) Granholm’s letter: “While the Department takes no position regarding the outstanding agency actions required under federal or state law related to the construction of the MVP project, nor on any pending litigation, we submit the view that the MVP project will enhance the Nation’s critical infrastructure for energy and national security. We appreciate the Commission’s prompt actions to fulfill its regulatory responsibilities regarding natural gas infrastructure under the Natural Gas Act, and the interagency coordination it provides as the lead federal agency for the project under FAST-41. We look forward to continuing to work with FERC to ensure consumers have access to reliable, cost-effective, and clean energy.”

That was a very strong armed tactic, if I ever saw one. I believe it is totally inappropriate to write such a letter, especially when just one day before she said she would meet with me and the president issued the Executive Order Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All on the morning before she wrote her letter to the FERC. The president said all executive branch agencies have a duty to pursue environmental justice. Apparently Secretary Granholm did not get the message.

Meanwhile, I am still in Washington D.C. waiting to hear from Secretary Granholm. Personally, I don’t understand her rush to write her letter cheering for the MVP. It is also typical of how most government leaders have treated landowners and other citizens in the path of the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Maury Johnson inspected a section of the plastic coated pipe here

Mt. Storm coal-fired power plant shown with wind turbines on the ridge in Grant County, WV

From an Article by Seth Borenstein, Washington Post, January 31, 2021

[AP] Climate isn’t the only thing changing. What comes next in the nation’s struggle to combat global warming will probably transform how Americans drive, where they get their power and other bits of day-to-day life, both quietly and obviously, experts say. So far the greening of America has been subtle, driven by market forces, technology and voluntary actions.

The Biden administration is about to change that. In a flurry of executive actions in his first eight days in office, the president is trying to steer the U.S. economy from one fueled by fossils to one that no longer puts additional heat-trapping gases into the air by 2050.

The United States is rejoining the international Paris climate accord and is also joining many other nations in setting an ambitious goal that once seemed unattainable: net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury. That means lots of changes designed to fight increasingly costly climate disasters such as wildfires, floods, droughts, storms and heat waves.

Think of the journey to a carbon-less economy as a road trip from Washington, D.C., to California that started about 15 years ago. “We’ve made it through Ohio and up to the Indiana border. But the road has been pretty smooth so far. It gets rougher ahead,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate and energy director at the Breakthrough Institute. “The Biden administration is both stepping on the gas and working to upgrade our vehicle,” Hausfather said.

The end results of some of Biden’s new efforts may still not be noticeable, such as your power eventually coming from ever-cheaper wind and solar energy instead of coal and natural gas that now provides 59% of American power. But when it comes to going from here to there, that you’ll notice.

General Motors announced Thursday that as of 2035 it hopes to go all-electric for its light-duty vehicles, no longer selling gas cars. Experts expect most new cars sold in 2030 to be electric. The Biden administration promised 550,000 charging stations to help with the transition to electric cars.

“You will no longer be going to a gas station, but you will need to charge your vehicle whether at home or on the road,” said Kate Larsen, director of international climate policy research at the Rhodium Group. “It may be a whole new way of thinking about transportation for the average person.”

But it will still be your car, which is why most of the big climate action over the next 10 years won’t be too noticeable, said Princeton University ecologist Stephen Pacala. “The single biggest difference is that because wind and solar is distributed you will see a lot more of it on the landscape,” said Pacala, who leads a decarbonizing America study by the National Academy of Sciences that comes out next week.

Other recent detailed scientific studies show that because of dropping wind, solar and battery prices, Biden’s net-zero carbon goal can be accomplished far cheaper than feared in the past and with health benefits “many, many times’’ outweighing the costs, said Pacala, who was part of one study at Princeton. Those studies agree on what needs to be done for decarbonization, and what Biden has come out with ”is doing the things that everyone now is concluding that we should do,” Pacala said.

These are the type of shifts that don’t cost much — about $1 day per person — and won’t require people to abandon their current cars and furnaces, but replace them with cleaner electric vehicles and heat pumps when it comes time for a new one, said Margaret Torn, a senior scientist at the Department’s of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who co-authored a peer-reviewed study Wednesday.

Part of the problem, said study co-author Ryan Jones, co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, is that for years people have wrongly portrayed the battle against climate change as a “personal morality problem” where individuals have to sacrifice by driving and flying less, turning down the heat and eating less meat.

“Actually, climate change is an industry economy issue where most of the big solutions are happening under the hood or upstream of people’s homes,” Jones said. “It’s a big change in how we produce energy and consume energy. It’s not a change in people’s day-to-day lives or it doesn’t need to be.”

One Biden interim goal — “a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035” — may not be doable that quickly, but can be done by 2050, said study co-author Jim Williams of the University of San Francisco.

Biden’s executive orders featured plans for an all-electric federal fleet of vehicles, conserving 30% of the country’s land and waters, doubling the nation’s offshore wind energy and funding to help communities become more resilient to climate disasters. Republicans and fossil fuel interests objected, calling the actions job-killers.

“Using the incredible leverage of federal government purchases in green electricity, zero-emission cars and new infrastructure will rapidly increase demand for home-grown climate-friendly technologies,” said Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan environmental policy professor.

The next big thing for the administration is to come up with a Paris climate accord goal — called Nationally Determined Contribution — for how much the United States hopes to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It has to be ambitious for the president to reach his ultimate goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but it also has to be doable.

His administration promises to reveal the goal, required by the climate agreement but nonbinding, before its Earth Day climate summit, April 22. That new number “is actually the centrally important activity of the next year,” said University of Maryland environment professor Nate Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal.

Getting to net zero carbon emissions midcentury means about a 43% cut from 2005 levels — the baseline the U.S. government uses — by 2030, said the Rhodium Group’s Larsen. The U.S. can realistically reach a 40% cut by 2030, which is about one-third reduction from what 2020 U.S. carbon emissions would have been without a pandemic, said Williams, the San Francisco professor.

All this work on power and vehicles, that’s easy compared with decarbonizing agriculture with high methane emissions from livestock and high-heat industrial processes such as steel-making, Breakthrough’s Hausfather said. “There’s no silver bullet for agriculture,” Hausfather said. “There’s no solar panels for cows so to speak, apart from meat alternatives, but even there you have challenges around consumer acceptance.”

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See also: America Must Reclaim the Global Lead on Climate Change, Chris Murphy, Foreign Policy, January 19, 2021

Five places to start undoing the Trump administration’s damage and rebuilding U.S. leadership.

Ninety days ago, the Department of Energy assigned a subcommittee of 7 members to study hydraulic fracturing and make regulatory recommendations.  The panel was criticized by 109 organizations and 28 scientists for being biased– six of the seven members were identified as having financial ties to the industry.

When the final 41-page report was released today, several recommendations were made, including:

• Making public all chemicals used in the fracking process
• Careful tracking and proper disposal of fracking wastewater
• Strict emission standards for methane and ozone-forming chemicals, and other pollutants
• More research for cleaner drilling practices
• Baseline water quality tests

The report found no evidence that groundwater can be contaminated through migration of chemicals from the shale layers up, but did note that poor cement jobs in casings could easily leak, and commented that “intensive shale gas development can potentially have serious impacts on public health, the environment and quality of life — even when individual operators conduct their activities in ways that meet and exceed regulatory requirements.”

Read more in the Charleston Gazette…

Department of Energy representatives visiting  Washington & Jefferson College on Monday heard speakers from a raucous and divided crowd for more than four hours.  The meeting was part of the strategy of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s recently created subcommittee, whose responsibility is “to improve the safety of shale gas development” as part of the president’s “Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future.” Drilling opponents, who paid their own way, were outnumbered by drilling supporters, but Energy in Depth, a leading industry lobbying group, offered free meals, hotel rooms and airfare to pro-drilling landowners from northeastern Pennsylvania and New York.

The City Manager of Clarksburg, Martin Howe,  wants to sell effluent water from the city’s wastewater treatment plant to gas drilling companies for the creation of frack water.  Effluent water is wastewater from the city that has been treated, and is normally discharged into the river.  Howe sees this as an opportunity to control withdrawals directly from the stream, and to reserve the city’s treated drinking water for its citizens.  Mercuria Energy America Inc., the fifth-largest independent energy trading company in the world, approached Clarksburg with the effluent water-selling plan.

Residents of Hawkins Run Road in Monongalia county are more than frustrated with the DOH over the condition of their neglected road, which is so riddled with potholes that a gas line is exposed.  The DOH has reportedly told residents that the road is lower on its priority list, which begs the question: Will the drilling industry be sufficiently reimbursing West Virginia for the extra damage that will be done to the roads?