Theater of the AbsurDEP

[Editor’s note: I was at the Weymouth Compressor appeal hearing this morning; it was truly a catalogue of absurdity. Nothing makes sense. Gov. Baker has fallen back on process arguments for standing by and watching this very unpopular project be granted a permit — his hands are tied, etc. But a process has to be transparent and credible, or that argument falls flat. It hasn’t been. Given that we’re already hearing about Baker’s ambitions for a third term, the hostility he’s evoking on the South Shore it’s worth watching.

Andrea Honoré has been all over this issue since the beginning, famously staging a daily sit-in at Governor Baker’s office. Below, her story. — Charley]

{Author Update: Newest story about yesterday’s hearing}

It’s the day of the second Weymouth gas transmission compressor MassDEP air quality plan hearing, and I’m pissed.

I’m pissed at a Governor who shaves his head for cancer research every year but has no problem allowing polluters to increase ambient cancer-causing air toxins by handing environmental permits out like candy at a parade.

I’m pissed at a Governor who won’t acknowledge the over-polluted Fore River Basin and invests in fracking but gets awards for being a “climate leader.”

I am well and truly pissed off none of the malfeasance regarding the compressor “cover-up” has stuck to The Big Boss Baker.

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Perhaps you’ve read about the Weymouth compressor project on this blog but may not know the background? You can start by reading this most excellent piece in the Globe by Aimee Ortiz.

Weymouth is the city that calls itself a town that’s been fighting an Enbridge gas transmission compressor for four years. FOUR. YEARS. And, by the way, this is not a NIMBY situation.

There’s a little 4-acre parcel at the base of the brand new Fore River Bridge, on the Weymouth side, that wanted nothing more than to live up to its TIF Agreement to provide a mutually agreeable use for the land between the landowner at the time, Calpine, and the town of Weymouth. How tiny and verdant is the 4-acre plot of land, despite being covered in toxic coal ash and saturated with 11 million gallons of (oops) released Sprague oil. LOL.

This parcel, known locally as The North Parcel, became property of Spectra Energy, now Enbridge, for an exorbitant amount of dollars in 2016. I don’t have to tell you that this arrangement was not mutually agreeable with the town. Weymouth is not an affluent town, so going after Calpine for selling to Spectra was not in the cards when Weymouth was busy spending money fighting the DEP.

SIDEBAR: Weymouth has now spent well over $1.3m in legal fees to fight this compressor project. I mean, hell, we could use that money for so many things around town. Anyway… the town isn’t the only entity fighting this disaster of a project.

The Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station (FRRACS) has been holding the fort on the citizen level for four years. If not for Alice Arena’s intrepid leadership and the unreal members of the FRRACS board, this damned compressor would be built already. To hold off a gas project putting shovels in the ground for this long is almost unheard of. Quincy is helping pay some of the citizen legal fees as well as Hingham Residents Against the Compressor Station, I cannot let that go unspoken.

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This compressor is part of a multi-state project called Atlantic Bridge—the name itself making export plans obvious—that would set a precedent for siting gas transmission compressors the United States. If the compressor is built, it would pave the way for other compressors to go in tiny, tiny plots of land surrounded by really dense population. There is no such gas transmission compressor in existence that is sited as such, especially in a hurricane inundation zone prone to flooding.

SIDEBAR: gas compressors are usually sited on 50-100 acres of land, often with many acres of trees as buffer to residents. NOTE TO YOURSELVES: new gas compressors belong nowhere with renewables undercutting fossil fuel costs right and left and methane being 86x worse for the environment than burning coal. Please just fix those last two facts into your consciousness forever.

I didn’t know what a gas compressor—as part of interstate gas transmission—was until a little over three years ago. Gas compressors make it possible to push gas in pipelines to locations across long distances. The gas for the “un-manned” Enbridge compressor proposal would come from the supposedly still gas-rich Marcellus Shale region in Pennsylvania. Why would Enbridge want to push gas from the Marcellus to MA? To cheapen our gas prices? To help ease supply in times if bitter cold? Nope.

MA would share less than 20% of the gas running through the compressor with Connecticut. The gas has been sold in advance to only one plant in MA: the Everett electric generator. That beast is due to decommission in 2024, further leaving MA with no benefit from becoming a highway for gas export. Maine gets some gas for electricity, and then around 50% is for export to Canada! Why is this thing being built if there isn’t any benefit for Massachusetts? Another blog post lives in that question, but not today, Satan.

Not only would the Weymouth compressor set a new and dangerous US siting precedent, not bring jobs to MA, and not provide gas bill relief, it would ruin the Mi’kmaq tribe of Nova Scotia as Alton Gas is just waiting with dollar signs in their eyes to get the gas pushed north from the Weymouth Atlantic Bridge compressor. The Mi’kmaq tribe have been waiting and fighting as long as we have, with some very physically exhausting tactics being used to retain the purity, safety, and sovereignty of their land.

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Many scary things rest on this compressor (toxins, explosions, death, cancers, the possibility of MORE gas infrastructure, etc) and one of the worst things is that it will lock New England into using fracked gas for decades. We know that’s a bad idea, right? There are so many bad aspects of this project that have been ignored by Governor Baker. As Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPC) put it: “What, NO WAY, Bad idea. SUCH A BAAAD idea to put a compressor there.”

But didn’t the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) tell us it would all be OK?

Heh, if you use Enbridge’s numbers for your HIA, which no one has double-checked, of course it will look like everything is OK. The public safety and coastal resiliency site studies promised by Baker are but a dream to us here in Weymouth.

So… why am I so pissed at Governor Charles Duane Baker? Heavy sigh. Baker is The Only One in elected office supporting the compressor. Electeds from the South Shore and beyond are firmly against it. Baker friends like Mayors Hedlund, Koch, and Sullivan are even like, WTF, man? Rep. Lynch got the Mayors and Baker in a room together in March of this year and I’m not entirely sure anything of use came out of it.

Our man CDB has been steadfast in his (publicly unspoken) support of the Weymouth compressor project so far. He likes to say he’s neither for nor against it, but as my homeboy Howard Zinn says: you cannot be neutral on a moving train. The CDB Express train is heading to Compressorland. Gov. Baker has not done a damned thing to follow the existing MA laws that would prohibit such a facility from being built on this site. Not. One. Thing. I won’t even get started on the Atlantic Bridge-as-Trojan-horse for Access Northeast.

Gov Baker repeatedly and incorrectly says of the compressor: “It’s a Federal issue” or “My hands are tied.” Pardon me while I LMFAO. Why bother having a permit process? States don’t have rights, how silly of me! Maybe it’s all the big corporations and big money influencing Baker to just chill out and let this thing be built?

I feel a Dear Gov. Baker letter coming on, I’ve written them before.

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Dear Gov. Baker:

Dude, you are either the weakest governor in all MA history, or you want this compressor built.

Both?

Tell me, though, why does MA have multiple environmental State permit processes, including MA Coastal Zone Management (which has Federal-level, final answer power)? Why does MA bother with the theater of these costly DEP hearings when all your agencies know you want this bad idea to be built?

I know you want this compressor built. You are the boss of all this, one flick of an eyebrow toward stopping the compressor and the process would grind to a halt. Heck, even some members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would agree with your decision to stop this project on the basis of environmental impact alone.

How in the world do you get out being held responsible for DEP bungling this whole process, and exposing its regulatory capture to us all?

How do you get to skate through all of this and get invited to speak in DC about climate change prevention?

How do you get invited to local environmental events to be a keynote speaker and get environmental awards when you not only push(ed) gas new infrastructure on MA, but you wanted us to help pay for it as well? Why tie us to fossil fuels when literally the whole world is in protest against such things?

You invest in frackers, for feck’s sake! FRACKERS. The worst of the worst companies.

SIDEBAR: I can tell you from personal experience that your fracking investments are buying human rights abuses via absurdly hurtful gag orders on citizens of the Marcellus Shale area of Pennsylvania. If you chose to fight the gas and oil companies, you get a life of misery even if you’re lucky enough to get away with your health. In almost all cases, these folks cannot drink, cook with, or bathe in their own water. It’s impossible to sell their houses due to the fracking wells poisoning their land. I’d love for you to meet Ray Kemble and he’ll tell you how your investment in Cabot Oil & Gas sits with him. Ray is tall, too.

Gov. Baker, YOUR money is enabling the continuing ruination of our environment through your investments and your (in)actions regarding the compressor. No amount of wind power is going to cancel out the harm caused by your decisions. No amount of hairs shaved off of your head will change the harm you will cause if you do not use MA’s environmental laws to stop this compressor.

I’ll take a passage from Alice Arena’s letter to Gov. Baker in April of 2017:

You (Gov. Baker) took an oath of office that stated:

I,_______________________, do solemnly swear that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and will support the Constitution thereof. So help me, God.

Article 97 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts states:
The people shall have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment; and the protection of the people in their right to the conservation, development and utilization of the agricultural, mineral, forest, water, air and other natural resources is hereby declared to be a public purpose.

How can you uphold that oath while ignoring Environmental Justice communities and not doing anything to stop 5 NEW gas infrastructure projects in MA? Does the MA Global Warming Solutions Act of 2008 (GWSA) mean anything to you? The GWSA is the law!

The gas projects proposed in MA right now, and any ONE of them would blow our GWSA goals:

• • Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP)’s “261 Upgrade Projects” to expand Agawam compressor & add loop to Lateral
  • Weymouth compressor
  • Columbia Gas “Reliability Plan” for Greater Springfield Service Area since impacts West Springfield, Springfield, Agawam and Longmeadow
  • Lowell modernization
  • Charlton LNG facility, Liberty Energy Trust

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I often think about the free time we would all have if Jay Gonzalez had gotten elected.

All compressor permits would have been lawfully denied.

We’d Have Maura Healey defending the state against Enbridge’s inevitable lawsuits.

And we would have won.

Instead we have to attend these DEP hearings of the absurd, and watch all logic and reason go down the drain.

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Catch you on Twitter?

Supplemental linkage:
• We Need Some Milk Podcast had me on a couple of months ago, and it got truth-heavy.
• Doing my part, day after day. See you around 1:15pm? #SitWithAndrea