Editor’s note: Kathryn Blume is an artist and climate activist from Charlotte.
We had a major seismic event in Vermont recently. You might have felt it right before Christmas, a quake designed to shake us from our fleece-covered heads to the depths of our wooly-socked toes. It wasn’t a disturbance of geologic origin, not the friction-laden sliding of one tectonic plate over another. Rather, it was the soul of the Green Mountain State herself quaking with an excess of irony. It was a friction of policy so profoundly sticky that the rubbing of these political plates together could easily generate enough heat to warm our chilly winter homes for decades.
On the one hand, we had the Department of Public Service releasing the first draft of their Total Energy Assessment. This is a document designed to serve as both a detailed articulation of where we are on our journey to a clean, renewable energy future, as well as the game plan for how we move forward and achieve the goal laid out in our Comprehensive Energy Plan, a goal which can be tidily summed up with the pithy phrase “90 by 2050” — our collectively developed intention to achieve 90 percent renewable energy across all sectors in 36 years.
Ninety percent renewables in three decades and change. It’s a time frame that’s both too short to easily accomplish such a wholesale systems transformation, and too long to effectively respond to the accelerating urgency of climate change and peak oil.
However, it’s also an abundantly necessary goal, and so, hitching up our suspenders and lacing our boots, forward we shall go.
More accurately, natural gas is a leaky barge floating on that famous Egyptian river “Denial.”
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Or, rather, forward we might go, were it not for the other event in this ground-joggling narrative: the quietly released Christmas Eve approval by the Public Service Board of a proposed natural gas pipeline which would run the length of the state, serve the Ticonderoga Paper mill, and, truth be told, seriously upset many of my neighbors in Charlotte, Hinesburg and Monkton who are at risk of being forced to host a pipeline they most assuredly do not want.
Despite how it’s framed in marketing campaigns, there is nothing benign about natural gas. It’s a fossil fuel, obtained at great cost — including permanent groundwater contamination, methane release, and real earthquakes — to the communities from which it’s extracted. While, admittedly, it does burn with fewer emissions than fuel oil or gasoline, the broadly advertised notion that it’s actually a clean energy source is a gross distortion of fact.
Plus, the oft-repeated assertion that it’s a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future is profoundly careless and incorrect. More accurately, natural gas is a leaky barge floating on that famous Egyptian river “Denial.” Natural gas wells have been touted as reliable sources of hundred-year supplies, when in reality, they quickly lose the first flush of their productivity and frequently have to be refracked at a cost of millions of dollars and millions of gallons of groundwater. Not to belabor the point, but just so we’re clear, refrackable does not equal renewable.
So, on the one hand we have the Department of Public Service doing their darndest to chart a course to a clean energy future, and on the other hand, the Public Service Board approving a colossal investment in dirty energy; giving their stamp and seal of approval to an enormously expensive project which is already — before a single length of pipe has been laid — inherently obsolete.
We might also note that Gov. Shumlin, a man who, as president pro tempore of the Senate, spent a great deal of time educating his colleagues about the perils of climate change, a man who shouted climate change from the rooftops following Tropical Storm Irene, a man who serves on President Obama’s nationwide task force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, also happens to wholeheartedly support this pipeline. This seems a confoundedly contradictory stance for a man who has so often positioned himself as a staunch climate champion.
All of us registered to vote in this state took an oath promising that whenever we give our suffrage “touching any matter that concerns the state of Vermont,” we will do so in a way which we feel benefits “the best good of the same.” If we take that oath seriously, then any choices we make — personally or professionally — concerning large scale infrastructure projects should be made in a similarly civic-minded fashion.
Because climate change is the greatest single threat we’ve got to our collective well-being and fossil fuels are the driver of that threat, then every choice we make about those infrastructure projects must be designed to move us away from fossil fuels as fast and thoroughly as possible. A fracked gas pipeline hardly serves that purpose, and clearing a legal pathway for that pipeline hardly serves the public good.
Correction: An earlier version of the commentary referred to Gov. Shumlin as a former Speaker of the House.