Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[A]bout this dispute over Vermont Gas trying to extend its natural gas pipeline down into Addison County, the one against which people are chaining themselves to buildings and blocking Montpelier traffic.
It’s complicated.
Worse, it’s too complicated.
Too complicated for whom?
Start with the news.
News accounts can’t take too much time on the air or too much space in print. Even online, where in theory there are no limits, reporters know that after so many words, a reader’s eyes glaze over. So accounts of demonstrations against the pipeline project tend to quote one side saying it’s a good idea, quote the other side saying it isn’t, and then the closing pithy quote, such as Avery Pittman of anti-pipeline Rising Tide Vermont saying, “The state administration wants to make it easier to destroy our future rather than representing the people.”
And Avery Pittman speaks for the people?
Probably not. There having been no polling on the subject, no one has the slightest idea where “the people” stand on the pipeline. Most of the people probably don’t care one way or the other. If asked, at least a plurality would most likely approve. By and large, Americans favor more energy infrastructure. Right or wrong, they consider it progress. Just check the polls about the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But even if the anti-pipeline forces speak for a minority, it is a very intense minority, one which detests Vermont Gas and the Public Service Board so much that some folks are delighted to chain themselves to the outside of the PSB headquarters or try to block earth-movers working on the pipeline.
Do either the company or the board deserve this opprobrium?
Maybe. Vermont Gas appears to be trying to imitate Entergy Corp., whose behavior in the matter of its Vermont Yankee nuclear plant could provide material for a chapter in a marketing/public relations textbook about what not to do. Unlike their counterparts at Entergy, Vermont Gas officials have not given false testimony under oath. But introducing a project at a price tag of $86 million and then later acknowledging that it’s actually going to cost $154 million is not the way to reassure the public that you know how to count.
Every public policy question deserves to be considered in light of what someone once called the “Henny Youngman Corollary,” named for the great comedian’s celebrated line: his answer to the question: “How’s your wife?” “Compared to what?” he said.
The PSB is guilty of no similarly confusing computations. It does what it is supposed to do, which is not to make policy but to decide – on the basis of policy established by the Legislature and the governor – whether a proposed project will benefit the public.
But the board is politically tone deaf. Otherwise it would not so bluntly tell towns that it does not care whether they want huge wind towers on their ridgelines or hundreds of solar panels on their fields. By law, it does not have to care. But a public agency might be well advised not to go out of its way to infuriate the public.
Aside from the property owners who quite understandably don’t want their back yards ripped up and underlain with pipes carrying yucky stuff, there are two objections to the pipeline. One is that the cost of it will largely be paid by the ratepayers, not the stockholders of Vermont Gas, a subsidiary of Gaz Metro, the Quebec firm which also owns Green Mountain Power.
According to Greg Marchildon, the Vermont state director of AARP, many of those ratepayers are “retired, living on fixed incomes, some on Social Security and really nothing more.” Many, Marchildon said, “won’t be alive to see the completion of the pipeline,” and should not be required to pay higher heating bills for a “badly designed and poorly regulated project.”
“There is no greater good to be served here,” he said.
That’s not the view of Christopher Recchia, the commissioner of the Public Service Department (not to be confused with the Public Service Board; the board regulates; the department administers). The pipeline extension, Recchia said, will enable thousands of customers to heat their homes “with lower carbon (emissions) and lower costs,” amounting to a “substantial public benefit.”
Whether the “public benefit” is substantial enough to outweigh the cost or other undesirable impacts is the kind of dispute the PSB exists to resolve.
But it is worth noting that utility company customers almost always pay for new or expanded facilities. Construction of new power plants or transmission lines is commonly paid for by the utility’s ratepayers. It’s how the regulated utility system in this country usually works. Perhaps it should not. But that’s up to the Legislature.
As to how much this project will cost Vermont Gas’ customers, let the argument begin.
At least 15 percent, says the AARP, pointing to testimony before the PSB on June 23.
No more than 2 percent, at least for a while, says Vermont Gas spokesperson Beth Parent, who also pointed out that the company’s rates are 15 percent lower than they were in 2012.
Best bet is that nobody knows what the rate increase will be (no one denies that there will be one) unless and until the entire 41-mile extension is finished and Vermont Gas files a proposed rate schedule, complete with actual data.
But it is not money that animates the fiercest opposition to the pipeline. It is global warming, and the fear that extending the pipeline “will keep Vermonters using fossil fuels for decades,” in the words of Sandra Levine, an attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation, the environmental group opposing the project.
But wait a minute? Didn’t Chris Recchia say the pipeline would reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions?
It would, Levine acknowledged, but the reduction would be “negligible.”
It certainly would be small. The company’s own claim is that by switching from oil to gas heat, it’s few thousand (it says 4,000; opponents say 3,000) new customers in Addison County would produce perhaps 17,000 fewer metric tons of greenhouse gases per year.
In 2010, Vermont produced 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Still, anything that does some good does some good.
In this case, the question is what should that small savings of carbon spew (and of money; natural gas is cheaper than oil) should be compared to: the status quo or to some alternative vision.
Levine has an alternative, a Vermont in which many more people heat their homes with heat pumps powered by even more wind and solar projects.
That’s conjecture. In fact, it’s somewhere between hopeful conjecture and the kind of utopian optimism that inspired Dorothy Parker to proclaim, “And I am Marie of Romania.”
Not to mention that it would require the PSB to approve many more wind and solar projects, some of them, if the past and present are any guide, over the fierce objections of the folks in the neighborhood.
But even utopian does not mean impossible. For years, most climate activists have followed a “demand side” approach, seeking to reduce the demand for fossil fuels via a carbon tax and subsidies for non-polluting energy. Now more of them are pondering the “supply side” line of attack – shutting down production or blocking transportation of the fuels that create greenhouse gases. That’s the motivating force behind the foes of the Vermont Gas pipeline extension. President Obama effectively endorsed it Friday when he rejected the Keystone XL pipeline.
But the president does make policy. The PSB – a quasi-judicial regulatory body — does not. The pipeline foes are asking it to do the Legislature’s job.
