That’s just the way it is/some things will never change
– Bruce HornsbyAnd did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
– William Blake
Weymouth resident Doug Smock has written a truly remarkable letter to the Patriot-Ledger regarding the Weymouth gas compressor, now under construction. It’s historically informed, eloquent, and humane — plain old good writing, and I encourage everyone to click through and read it in full. Smock is a former resident of Pittsburgh, and links the devastation wrought by the steel industry there to what’s happening here.
I visited the site one morning last month, slapped on a No Compressor sticker, and joined, albeit weakly, the fight. I live about a mile away. I moved to North Weymouth just seven years ago, but I grew up in the Monongahela Valley southeast of Pittsburgh, an area where coke ovens belched toxic fumes with no pollution controls into densely populated neighborhoods that are now even more blighted than the Fore River shipyard. These are the neighborhoods that won the world wars, but are now discarded waste like the Chernobyl zone. The morning I visited the compressor site, people walked up to tell me their touching and tragic stories. And they made it clear they will never give up.
… What’s happening in The Fore River basin is worth noting for a couple reasons. For one, it’s interesting how this town has changed—just like the towns in the Mon Valley around Pittsburgh, and other towns like it all over America. We’ve had enough. You walked all over us while protecting towns where the executives of companies like Enbridge and Bethlehem Steel live. For another, the compressor station is one last outrageous symptom of North America’s no longer tenable love affair with fossil fuels. Massachusetts utilities don’t even need, nor want, this gas. Boston used to be the end of the pipeline. Now it’s being extended to who knows where.
If people around the country aren’t rooting for us to win this battle, they should be.
The Patriot-Ledger also recently profiled Weymouth resident Lisa Jennings, one of the first people arrested at the construction site. This is literally a fight for her life.
She sits back down. “What do you do next?” she says. Her life is a juggling act of caring for her adult daughter, advocating for people with disabilities and, these days, fighting construction of a new natural gas compressor station not far from her house. It’s all advocacy. It is — and isn’t — a full-time job.
“I don’t know. That’s why I got arrested,” she says. “I don’t know what to do next.”
… “At base I’m just a mom trying to make a decision for our health,” Jennings said. “How do I stop it?”
The emotional strain is real, and soaks into every moment of being:
Today I let all of those tears flow. Been trying so hard to push off the things that destroy my heart. Every day I am trying to make impossible decisions. Panic attacks in angry waves all day. Patient and loving friends abound. #imOK #panicattacks #caringforMonica https://t.co/XPaB834RT7
— LisaJ (@ljennings32) December 24, 2019
Why do we make people endure these things, shortening their lives two ways: By taking up their days on earth having to fight, as well as with the threat of disease? Is this the only way?
Like the governor Pontius Pilate, Charlie Baker has tried to wash his hands of a deadly crime, pleading helplessness before a process that was charitably described as “bungled”; or more accurately, Kafka-esque, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, rigged. (I saw it; I was there.)
Coincidentally, just yesterday I heard of a man who found meaning in his own death from industrial pollutants:
Cassidy thinks back to his father, who worked in the steel mills upriver for 40 years, breathing in smoke from the coke furnaces.
“And he ultimately died of emphysema, probably because of that. That’s a typical story,” Cassidy says. “My dad liked to say on his final illness, when he was dying, he said, ‘Son, I earned my sickness.’ That’s the way he looked at it.”
Life is made to seem inevitably cheap. Our own American-capitalist fatalism is as thick and pervasive as in any Russian novel. The climate emergency shows us that the sacrifices we make for “progress” or “industry” or “the economy” or “necessity”, are in fact total. We give up literally everything — our own health, our time, our children, our longevity, our nurturing Earth — to feed into the Moloch’s maw of business, markets, jobs, profit.
So it is a signal thing when people refuse to participate, when they refuse to value their own lives cheaply, as collateral damage in just the way it is.
A few days ago I participated in a disruption of a public appearance by Governor Baker. He thought he would have an easy photo-op, ringing bells for the Salvation Army outside the Macy’s at Downtown Crossing. Well, bells were rung, of a sort. This video, shot with my phone in my freezing hands, is not pretty. The sentiments we expressed are not eloquent — they are blunt. This was a cancellation of his supposed lay-up photo-op.
So I make no plea for my own “civility” here. We are creating tension — or more properly, revealing it, and taking it straight to the Governor — so as to create the conditions for dialogue. Andrea Honoré took time out of her day and sat outside his office for 211 days, hoping for exactly such constructive dialogue regarding the gas compressor. The Governor pointedly and nastily ignored her, every time. What should a proper response be?
I heard from an esteemed member of the press corps that they are getting sick of the disruptions to the Governor’s public appearances — that reporters aren’t getting a chance to ask him questions, and hold him accountable themselves. I deeply appreciate the work of our free and professional press; but that tells us that the disruptions are working.
As Doug Smock says, “they made it clear they will never give up.” This will follow Charlie Baker wherever he goes — metaphorically, but also with jarring literalness.
Count on it, Governor.
nopolitician says
I found the article to be 90% NIMBY rhetoric coupled with 10% climate change absolutism, devoid of the “why” the compressor shouldn’t be there, other than “because we don’t want it there” and “we’re going to fight it”.
The piece brought up many unrelated points (like “I grew up in the Monongahela Valley southeast of Pittsburgh, an area where coke ovens belched toxic fumes with no pollution controls into densely populated neighborhoods that are now even more blighted than the Fore River shipyard.”) as a “guilt by association” technique. I’m fairly sure that no one is proposing a coke oven at this site, right? So why mention it?
The article makes unsubstantiated/misleading and fear-based statements like this:
> Massachusetts utilities don’t even need, nor want, this gas [no citation, and also misleading by making it seem like no one wants this gas when utilities in other states presumably do]. Boston used to be the end of the pipeline. Now it’s being extended to who knows where. [Who knows where? OMG! Unknown! Fear!]
I’m sorry, I can’t get on board with this effort because the people fighting it are benefiting from the same infrastructure in someone else’s community, which means they are writing checks with someone else’s account while ardently defending their own status. I find that kind of thing offensive. If Everett wants to stop people further down the pipeline from getting gas, then they should be prepared to disconnect their own supply and pass it along to someone else, and not just say “we’re OK with _our_ use of gas, we’re just opposed to _others_ using it”.
Charley on the MTA says
Well, this is very argumentative. Your “presumably” is doing a lot of work, since you could have googled this for yourself, but it is very well substantiated that we don’t need the gas:
https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2019/11/01/weymouth-compressor-demand-national-grid-eversource
I’ve linked to that article before, probably several times.
Charley on the MTA says
Gas compressors and pipelines do indeed create ground level ozone, formaldehyde, and particulates — no, it’s not coke, but it’s bad.
https://www.albany.edu/about/assets/Complete_report.pdf
Charley on the MTA says
And then there’s the arsenic, coal ash, and thick-as-peanut butter diesel fuel already on site.
https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2019/12/06/weymouth-compressor-contamination-cleanup
Charley on the MTA says
And specifically to your concern, it’s going to be sent off to Europe in the form of LNG. No, I don’t think it’s South Shore residents’ obligation to sacrifice their own health for someone else’s profit. I suppose we just disagree about that.
nopolitician says
That article says “not needed for Eversource and National Grid”, but it says the project is to deliver natural gas to New England and Canada. So while the compressor station isn’t necessary for Weymouth, it is necessary for communities up the pipeline, just like a compressor station somewhere else is allowing Weymouth to have natural gas.
This is classic “pull up the ladder” politics.
SomervilleTom says
@guilt by association:
This is like characterizing a survivor of Jim Crow Mississippi, who observes the same racism in pristine New England towns, as invoking guilt by association.
The point of that letter is that wealthy and powerful mill owners ensured that the little boroughs where they lived were kept clean, secure, and downwind of the toxins while pumping tons of toxic waste into the ground, water, and air of the working-class neighborhoods that surrounded the mills.
The same contempt for the not-wealthy is on full display in Weymouth, and is explicitly identified in the thread-starter. So your assertion that the reference to the Mon Valley coke ovens is “unrelated” and “guilt by association” is, well, unfounded.
Charley has already shown that the complaint in your last paragraph is factually incorrect.
Nobody should be ok with our use of gas — nobody in Weymouth, Everett, Somerville, or anywhere else. That’s why it is dangerously insane to be expanding fossil fuel infrastructure in order to sell it somewhere else.
Whatever funds are contemplated for this monstrosity are better invested in building out additional wind, solar, or geothermal generating capacity.
Christopher says
Um, if there’s one context where NIMBY is justified it would seem to be environmental concerns.
jconway says
I think the wider narrative this fits in, at least with Charleys posts on the subject, is that we will not break our addiction to fossil fuels if we continue to invest in fossil fuels. Full stop.
NP is usually a very astute commentator on areas where his city and part of the state gets screwed over by state policy makers and I welcome that contribution. I can see how this fits into that jaundiced view of how state policy usually works. If it’s not gonna end up there it will end up in some other coastal community without as much clout, maybe New Bedford or Fall River which are desperate for the jobs and investments this might provide.
I think the wider movement, which the Weymouth based activists I’ve talked to endorse, is that no community should have to put up with the costs of these fuels. In the long run, our whole ecosystem is threatened by their use. To a person, the folks I’ve talked to view victory as cancelling the contract entirely and ending this state investment. Moving the plant to a different community is not a victory condition.
Christopher says
Yes, I meant to add that this isn’t so much “not in my backyard” as “not in ANYBODY’S back yard”.
nopolitician says
This almost describes the point I’m trying to get across. I think that what is being missed here is that although fossil fuels are bad environmentally, they have a narrow economic benefit in that they are currently much cheaper than the alternatives – gas heat is about half as expensive as electric heat. That is pretty significant.
I understand that expanding fossil fuel use is bad for the environment, but what people aren’t addressing is that blocking the expansion does not make life any different for people who are already plugged into the infrastructure. It only makes life less convenient/more expensive for “others”, i.e. those who want to plug into the infrastructure the way everyone else is. That is my major criticism here. People protesting this aren’t protesting fossil fuels. They’re protesting other people being able to use fossil fuels while being mostly quiet about using them themselves.
My secondary criticism is that I truly do believe that this is a NIMBY issue being disguised as an environmental issue. No one wants a gas compressor station in their community, yet these stations are necessary for people to use natural gas. I do not believe that 98% of the people fighting this fight would do the same if the station was being proposed in Brockton, or even Quincy. I also suspect that if someone was trying to build wind turbines on this site, 80% of the people opposing it would oppose those too. That makes it classic NIMBYism.
Christopher says
I guess it’s fair and obvious to note that the people closest have the more urgent incentives to protest. It just means that if the proposal were for Brockton or Quincy, those residents would likely take the lead rather than residents of Weymouth. The easiest way to wean off of something is to say at very least let’s start by not creating any more of whatever is causing the problem.
Charley on the MTA says
Just to re-state what Christopher says: Would it be *right* to put it in Brockton, and have that community absorb pollutants? No?
And is more gas infrastructure absolutely necessary? Or are there other, better, healthier and affordable options?
We leak gas *everywhere* in Greater Boston. This has been the work of Mothers Out Front and Rep Lori Ehrlich, to find and repair major leaks. For all our ballyhooed efficiency in MA, we are just scratching the surface. Let’s use what we have, better.
By the way, electric heat pumps are nowhere near 2x as expensive as gas, particularly not ground-source (geothermal) heat pumps. They’re pretty comparable.
SomervilleTom says
For the record, we installed split-cycle AC with a heat pump that works for both heating and cooling. The heat pump is designed to provide space heating in outside air temps as low at 15 deg F (it might be lower than that).
I spend my computer time in an insulated and enclosed second-floor front porch. As much as I love the space, it has no central heating.
The new system is MUCH more efficient than a window AC unit for cooling. Sadly, it is much LESS efficient than a conventional electric space heater for heating.
At least in my case, the trade-off is between conventional electric space heaters and the heat pump. At the moment, my heaters are the clear winner. These are fluid-filled units that look like an old-fashioned radiator. The electric heating element transfers heat to the fluid that then circulates through the radiator fins to heat the space. It heats very well and has no exposed heating elements to catch draperies or paper or whatever on fire.
When this system was new, I used it instead of the space heater for the first few months of the first heating season. Our electric bill was MUCH larger than typical for that time of year. As soon as I went back to the conventional heater, the electric bill went back to normal.
My takeaway is that even with solar panels installed, it looks to me as though conventional space heaters are more efficient than heat pumps like mine.
nopolitician says
I’m not sure that people understand that the cost of standard electric heat (i.e. baseboards or space heaters) is a lot more than gas heat. Electricity is 14 cents/kWH in Springfield. Natural gas is $16.31/1000 cubic feet. For 100,000 BTUs, it would cost you $4.10 for electric heat, $1.98 for natural gas. Electric heat is over 2x more expensive than gas.
This “no more fossil fuels” strategy is “social benefit (less greenhouse gases) paid for by a few people (the people who didn’t happen to have fossil fuel heat)”. That is a morally lousy strategy – we should have social benefits paid for by society, or at the very least, those who can afford to pay for them.
One thing that astounds me is that the “green new deal” suggests putting electric heat/water heater/appliances in public housing. Sounds like a good strategy, right? Until you realize that you’re asking poor people to pay 2x as much to heat things.
Although heat pumps are a slightly different way to use electricity to cool and heat, they do not work very well to heat houses in Massachusetts, because they use electricity to transfer heat from one place to another – which means that when it is cold outside (like under freezing point), they need to create heat just like an electric baseboard system does, via resistance. That brings them into the “more than twice as expensive as gas” range.
SomervilleTom says
Well … a few points here.
Unlike natural gas, electric heat is FREE when it uses locally-generated solar electricity or when the power company buys back locally-generated solar electricity using a reverse meter.
The “no more fossil fuels” strategy uses market mechanisms to drive demand for solar power. That is a perfectly defensible moral stance.
It seems to me that public housing should also be required to install local solar panels or something similar. I think this is the premise of seeking “net zero” construction. I agree that installing electric heat and hot water without some means for generating electricity is bad public policy.
Just a quibble about your last paragraph. The threshold for “cold” is not the freezing point. The heat pump is able to remove heat from its medium whenever that medium is above absolute zero (or something close to that). The threshold is determined by the amount of energy required to extract that heat. When it takes more energy to extract the heat than the amount of heat extracted, then it doesn’t make sense to use it. As heat pump technology improves, that threshold gets colder and colder. For current air-sourced heat pumps, it’s about 10-15 deg F.
Christopher says
Ideally we’d extend your comment about public housing and solar panels to include ALL new housing (and other buildings for that matter) IMO.
SomervilleTom says
@extend:
I think that’s the intent of the new Brookline ordinance prohibiting the installation of ANY fossil fuel infrastructure (natural gas service, oil tank, etc).
Charley on the MTA says
Bro. I am heating my house with heat pumps right now. They are 76% efficient even at minus 13 degrees.
https://www.masscec.com/learn-about-air-source-heat-pumps
SomervilleTom says
@ heating my house with heat pumps:
No doubt. I’m just sharing my experience with mine.
It does make me curious about the efficiency of conventional space heaters. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to find data about it on the web.
Efficiency is generally calculated as a ratio of useful work done to total power consumed. A conventional space heater is a somewhat anomalous special case, since its “useful work” is producing heat. Since the device is typically already in the room being heated, pretty much all the electricity it consumes is “useful work”. I suspect, therefore, that the efficiency of a conventional space heater approaches 100%.
The difference I saw might well be explained by that 24% lost in the mechanics of a heat pump.
SomervilleTom says
I did some more research. The “local efficiency” of a conventional space heater is, as it turns out, nearly 100%. That’s the amount of “useful work” performed by the space heater divided by the total power delivered to the space heater.
The total efficiency of the space heater is therefore determined by the efficiency of the original (Eversource or whatever) power source.
The useful work of a heat pump is transferring the heat from its original source (such as outside air) into the dwelling space. Since the outside unit uses electronics, motors, and so on, and since those are all outside where their heat is dissipated back to the atmosphere, the local efficiency of a heat pump is less than 100%.
I’m not sure what the “76%” is measuring. The Mitsubishi unit I have seems to have an HPSF of about 12-13. I don’t have a good handle on how to convert that to “efficiency”.
petr says
Electric heat is much more efficient than natural gas and a forced air furnace (the default with natural gas), besides the efficiency loss, is worse for your health and is variable with respect to comfort.
The $4.10 you pay for electricity gives you $4.10 worth of electricity which means, near as no never mind, $4.10 worth of heat. The $1.98 for natural gas will not translate into $1.98 worth of heat. In fact, much much less. You will have to pay very much more than 2x $1.98 to heat your house with natural gas to get the same heat as $4.10 worth of electric.
Trickle up says
Charley on the MTA says
Nice — yours?
Trickle up says
Originally about another energy boondoggle that provoked a public uprising—yes, mine.