Editor’s note: Charlotte resident Rebecca Foster is a member of the town’s energy committee and writes a column for The Citizen, a weekly newspaper for Charlotte and Hinesburg.
My son gets it. If the Yanomami people hunt all of the red brocket deer in the Amazon rainforest there won’t be any left the next time they are hungry. Even a third grader can understand that restraint is essential to the tribe’s survival. Perhaps our tribe of modern civilization could learn a thing or two about self-discipline from the Yanomami.
The debate about living within the earth’s capacity goes back to early societal collapses, such as using the last tree on Easter Island to make a totem rather than a fishing boat, ensuring the civilization’s starvation. Conventional wisdom these days tells us ingenuity will overcome any problem, even the global systemic breakdown known as climate change. Will we seed atmospheric clouds the size of continents to reflect the sun’s rays? Colonize a different space rock? Just make do by moving north to Canada?
Canada as a safe haven might be the most far-fetched idea. After a history of environmental stewardship, the country has gone increasingly mad for oil and gas exploitation. Environmental protection laws have been eroded, and those remaining are routinely ignored and rarely enforced. Evidently, once you discover shale oil (the “tar sands” for the Keystone XL Pipeline) comparable to the world’s proven conventional oil reserves, you lose your mind, or at least your principles.
The energy- and resource-intensive process of tar sands extraction is massive and toxic, and the oil companies’ goal when they have taken all they can take is to have re-landscaped an area the size of Florida. Only, there won’t be neat rows of mulched rhododendrons when they are done. Already, there are 65 square miles of toxic waste lakes in the western province of Alberta, which leach into the Athabasca River and watershed.
The Beaver Lake Cree Nation lives there, in the midst of the world’s largest industrial project. For thousands of years they have fished, hunted, and foraged from the boreal forests. They took care not to take too much, and in turn the land took care of them. In fact, the boreal takes care of the earth, too, by sinking more of the world’s carbon per acre than the rainforest.
Last month, in a public document to the Addison County Regional Planning Commission, VGS confessed that it has spent well over half a million dollars on advertising to, in its own words, “help ensure that Vermont Gas achieves the customer conversions it projects.” In other words, it will spend whatever it takes to acquire customers, but apparently not to compensate for land or to assure safety.
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But at the University of Vermont recently Crystal Lameman described the reality for her tribe today: The fish have cancer; the moose have subcutaneous pus bubbles; people need to time their showers to end before their skin gets burned by the water; and a significant number are developing rare cancers. “Every major oil company is in our traditional hunting territory,” explained Lameman, thanks to over 20,000 permits granted by the government. They can no longer live safely off the land, and so the tribe is taking legal action against the government.
Vermont, it turns out, has a special connection to Alberta.
Alberta is the source for the methane gas that the Canadian company Gaz Metro sends through more than 2,500 miles of TransCanada’s pipeline to get here. Enbridge, of Keystone XL fame, is an owner of Gaz Metro, and Vermont Gas Systems (VGS) does Gaz Metro’s business on this side of the border. The “Vermont” in VGS’s name might lead the innocent to believe that the company is locally owned.
Since the Public Service Board (PSB) issued a permit for Phase 1 of a high-volume transmission pipeline through Addison County in late December, VGS has been emboldened, apparently, to threaten eminent domain to people who own land that stands between it and their customer, International Paper (IP) in New York state. IP would receive the vast majority (70 percent) of the fuel. Landowners in Monkton have said they would like to negotiate a fair price for their land that would be used in perpetuity for IP and VGS profits. Instead, VGS is offering some landowners a choice to accept below-market compensation or watch as their land is condemned for a laughable sum.
Coincidentally, news broke 10 days ago that VGS construction workers were arrested for producing methamphetamine, and some in the case claim welders were using it on the job. Just as this news was sinking in, a huge explosion on a TransCanada gas transmission pipeline occurred in Winnipeg. The juxtaposition makes one wonder if the welder on that pipeline was impaired by illegal drugs. It’s also got me wondering what caused the massive tar oil spill brought to us by Enbridge in the Kalamazoo River in 2010 that continues to devastate the area. We don’t like to admit it, but pipelines — high-pressure with toxic contents — are dangerous infrastructure that regularly goes wrong.
At the PSB technical hearings last fall, John Heintz, the project manager for the Addison pipeline, was asked if he would reduce construction workers’ workday from 12 hours to eight. But that would add 30 percent more to the overall cost of the project, he said. Wow, I guess VGS is too strapped to invest in proper safety oversight or reduced work hours for its construction workers. But, wait! Last month, in a public document to the Addison County Regional Planning Commission, VGS confessed that it has spent well over half a million dollars on advertising to, in its own words, “help ensure that Vermont Gas achieves the customer conversions it projects.” In other words, it will spend whatever it takes to acquire customers, but apparently not to compensate for land or to assure safety.
By giving the green light to the pipeline, the PSB is compelling landowners to take on the personal risk of industrial infrastructure in their backyard. They must now also worry that construction workers high on meth will be working on their property. And because the PSB put the heavy stick of eminent domain in VGS’s hand, landowners are not likely to get much compensation for their sacrifices.
“Our dependence on natural gas and on Canada,” wrote Meredith Angwin of the Ethan Allen Institute, “sets us up for a perfect storm of increased power prices,” from which, we should add, VGS will profit handsomely while the environment and people at both ends of the pipeline are imperiled.