Branding natural gas as a bridge fuel to a renewable energy future is one of the great fossil fuel scams of our times.
The natural gas “bridge” is solely a bridge to climate disaster, given that new natural gas plants and infrastructure, such as the defeated Kinder Morgan pipeline through western Massachusetts and New Hampshire to Dracut on the coast, have a 40-year life-span. But the world — with more frequent deluges like southern Louisiana’s recent 2 feet of rain in two days, longer-lasting and larger wildfires, more extreme drought, and sea level rise that threatens all coastal cities — does not have 40 years to spare.
In her book, “Frackopoly: The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment,” Wenonah Hauter documents the corruption and risk-driven practices of oil and gas fracking corporations, which go in and out of bankruptcy recklessly. She also describes tenacious grassroots campaigns to leave fossil fuels in the ground, with some remarkable victories.
Among these are a detailed case study of the uphill victory to ban fracking in New York state and an overview from coast to coast of the ban movement, grounded in the environmental and health harms of fracking for oil and gas.
These harms include immense water use (up to 9 million gallons per gas well) even in arid regions; contaminated drinking water aquifers and wells; earthquakes induced by deep well injection of fracking wastewater; methane leaks at all points of production, transportation, storage and use and respiratory, neurological and reproductive health impacts on nearby residents.
Government subsidies and tax policy made all early fossil fuel and nuclear energy transitions possible and continue to sustain them, whereas government support for emerging renewables pales in comparison.
Further, the costs from fossil fuel pollution — which include an estimated $7.3 trillion spent on patrolling the Persian Gulf oil shipments since the late ’70s, climate change disaster and 7,500 premature deaths from air pollution annually in the United States — are not borne by the industry. We citizens foot the bill.
With 2.5 million miles of oil and gas pipelines currently crisscrossing the country, east to west, north to south, and 19 now-pending pipeline projects planned for the whole Appalachian Basin on the East Coast, why does Hauter envisage the hundreds of steadfast actions nationwide to stop new pipelines as a titanic challenge to both the industry and government policy?
The answer is perhaps best given by Mark Trahant of The Standing Rock Sioux fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline being constructed from Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to oil refineries in Illinois.
He points to the power of people using social media to mobilize thousands of Native and grass-roots protesters, which by September 2016 included the historic support of 189 tribal governments. Protectors (as those gathered prefer to be known) have the moral high ground, he says, in their campaigns to protect their water, ancestral territories and sacred sites.
And, further, this is “The Moment” to stop pipelines and keep fossil fuels in the ground. Why now? A rising chorus of investment companies, among them the prominent global stock market index company MSCI, are warning investors to get out of fossil fuels before they become “stranded assets,” due to price volatility and competition from renewables. Moreover, portfolios that have divested from fossil fuels over the past five years are outperforming those that haven’t.
Sobering analysis from the Post Carbon Institute, though, counterbalances the “moment is now” surety. For example, “oil is essential to the modern world” because local, national and global transport of goods by heavy trucks, airplanes and container ships (carrying food, raw materials and manufactured goods, including solar panels and wind turbine parts) relies on oil.
Moreover, these means of industrial cargo transport have no current energy substitute (unlike cars and trains which can be solar-powered). The revolution in solar and wind energy has focused largely on renewably generated electricity for domestic and commercial light, heat and appliances, while transportation consumes an estimated 30 percent of fossil fuels used in the United States.
Transitioning to renewable, non-oil fuels will take two or more decades and has been “woefully insufficient,” while we are rapidly running out of time to keep rising temperatures below the accepted critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. In building a renewable future, we must rapidly transition to local economies to produce and transport goods locally and regionally.
Meanwhile, cities and towns, including Austin, Texas, Sacramento, Calif., Burlington, Vt., and recently, Cambridge, are adopting net zero energy building codes for new residential and commercial buildings. A net zero energy building is one in which the amount of energy used in the buildings is equal to the amount of renewable energy created on site.
Locally, Village Hill co-housing in Northampton is a proposed 85-unit housing development designed as net zero energy with solar panels providing the renewable energy for the highly insulated, all-electric homes.
Adopting net zero energy building codes — something all cities and towns can do — is a bridge to our renewable energy future, while hazard-ridden fracked gas and oil foreclose on it.
Patricia Hynes, a retired environmental engineer and professor of Environmental Health, directs the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice.