Even yet still another baffling, curdled-milk editorial endorsing more gas pipeline infrastructure, torching (see what I did there) us anti-pipeline “faddists”; and going so far as to flame Sens. Jamie Eldridge and Marc Pacheco and AG Healey, the Little Red Hens of renewable energy expansion and climate readiness.
No. This is Orwellian and silly on the face of it. You cannot say “renewable energy is certainly the region’s future” while at the same time arguing for permanent fossil fuel infrastructure that lasts a generation (30-40 years), certainly crowding out renewables. LNG tankers, rail and trucks; oil-fueled peaker plants are a lot of things — maybe worse in the very short term — but none are permanent.
Furthermore, Eldridge, Pacheco, and Healey are hardly “sitting on their hands” as the Globe preposterously accuses; they are pulling the weight, hastening a clean energy present. If anyone deserves credit and praise, not condemnation, it is them. What’s the motivation for tearing them down, just as they have produced a tremendously positive, visionary piece of legislation? (Head to your phone right now, call 617-722-2000, and tell your state rep to support, nay demand, Eldridge and Pacheco’s S.2302, An Act to Promote a Clean Energy Future).
Who is “sitting on their hands?” Surely our “combo platter” Governor; and our feckless Speaker of the House, who wants to slow-roll climate readiness even after two historic flooding Nor’easters in a season (maybe on the cusp of a third); and even as he lives on a peninsula in the Atlantic Ocean. And the legacy stakeholders — the utilities, power companies, and gas producers — are perfectly happy to continue feeding us more of the same. They haven’t demonstrated an interest in a “renewable energy future”.
Something stinks about this; I don’t know where the Globe is getting their talking points, but until they put their arguments into math and charts, they’re adding nothing to the public knowledge:
- By all means, let’s talk about the actual GHG production of oil peaker plants for those few days that we need them. Let’s talk about the marginal GHG difference between LNG, train- and truck-transported gas and pipelined, fracked gas — again, for such time as we need them. Add those to a variety of clean energy conversion scenarios, including a realistically ambitious schedule for clean energy conversion: Game out the possibilities of S.2302, say.
- … and then compare those scenarios to continued reliance on a powerful greenhouse gas, whose transport involves environmental degradation and public danger its entire journey, and whose permanent infrastructure and easy access will definitely crowd out the uptake of actual clean energy.
Show us the math, Globe. There are people in this state that can do that kind of work; do you need some recommendations?
I’m sure we’ll hear more on this soon.
Profiles in fecklessness. The Speaker attempts to counter the (very well-documented) notion that the House is dragging its feet on climate change:
“House Speaker Robert DeLeo, whose hometown of Winthrop has been battered by storms, on Monday pushed back on the suggestion that the House has been reluctant to pass climate change adaptation legislation, and said the issue has been that “probably the legislation has been far more encompassing than” simply climate adaptation.
“You’ll probably see us address some of these issues, but probably more piece-by-piece pieces of legislation as opposed to an overall piece,” the speaker said Monday.
He added, “I think that’s going to be one of the things, but I think it’s going to be only one of the things” and said, “we have to talk something more even on a short-term basis as well.””
http://www.telegram.com/news/20180307/destruction-costs-cited-on-beacon-hill-as-climate-bill-pressure-grows
Exaaaaaactly. That very article sums it all up. “Sure, we’re all in existential danger, but let’s not hurry things … ”
As I tweeted: How many people know that the Senate has passed climate readiness legislation *five times* — only to have it die in DeLeo’s House?
Nearly none of my political active friends are working on the kinds of races we need to start running and winning to change our Commonwealth. It is awfully frustrating that the progressive infrastructure in this state is focused on big issue campaigns or bigger ticket races like the Congressional primaries.
There was even a surge of activism at the municipal level last November. Yet the state level is still largely crickets. More primary challengers are emerging, but we need even more to really turn the legislature around. Particularly when they are working hand in glove to rubber stamp the Baker-DeLeo agenda.
I’m about to start a post that will serve as a primary directory. I’d also like to hear about the kinds of issues BMGers would like to push, perhaps as part of a candidate questionnaire. Obviously for me that would include transit and energy/climate. Open to suggestions.
I know BMGers know all this, but to repeat:
* Even if global warming didn’t exist, fracked gas pipelines are incredibly expensive, starting at $1 billion with a b
* Global warming exists and fracked gas is just as bad as coal
* We don’t need the gas – corporate utilities are trying to scare us into paying for their export pipelines
* We should be instead be investing in electrifying home heating
The “fossil fuel infrastructure” we need is to fix gas leaks, more energy efficiency, more mass transit, more electric storage, and a smart grid. More fossil fuel extraction equipment, pipelines, or power plants? Negatory.