Personal Column – 1st Place
Pipelines are webs of denial
Last year I attended a workshop that demonstrated a free phone app called “Frac Tracker.” The instructor explained this app was started by a nonprofit organization of the same name. Its purpose was to share maps, data and analysis related to the oil and gas industry in an effort to educate the public.
Once the app was loaded, anyone could examine the location around their home to see what types of oil and gas infrastructure might be located nearby. It was a shock to most people in the audience, including me, to see just how many drill pads, pipelines and compressor stations are located close to our homes.
Pipeline construction projects have for many become a constant reminder of how little control local citizens have over what happens on their property. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has the main responsibility of approving most permit applications for pipelines.
The most recently approved pipeline in our area was the Falcon pipeline, a 97-mile pipeline with one leg running from Ohio and West Virginia into Beaver County and another from Washington and Allegheny counties into Beaver County.
Its main purpose is to transfer ethane from fracked gas from areas in Belmont and Harrison counties as well as counties in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to Shell’s plastic manufacturing ethane cracker plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania.
Many local citizens attended the Ohio EPA public hearing for the Falcon pipeline in Cadiz this past May. They expressed concerns over threats to existing wetlands, endangered species, possible damage to the pipeline from mine subsidence and the proximity of the Ambridge Water Reservoir, the source of drinking water for more than 30,000 people.
As is the case in most instances, these concerns were dismissed with the usual rhetoric that all construction would be done in a safe manner. This is no surprise as pretty much every single pipeline that has sought out approval from FERC has in fact received approval regardless of the amount of public comments against them or the environmental concerns.
Out of approximately 400 pipeline applications, only two have been denied in the past 20 years, according to the DeSmog- Blog website. Because FERC has the appearance of “rubber stamping” any pipeline application, the agency announced on their webpage that they plan on reviewing their permitting procedures, which have remained unchanged since 1999.
Another point of contention with FERC is the often questionable backgrounds of many FERC appointees. According to the Energy and Policy Institute, the 2017 FERC appointment of Neil Chatterjee is another case with conflicts of interests. Chatterjee “spearheaded the Republican push for Senate approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.”
The most recently approved member to be confirmed for FERC was Bernard McNamee. His approval by the Senate was along party lines 50-49. He has a reputation of fighting against renewable energy while fighting for protection of the fossil fuel industry and their subsidies.
Rob Cowin, director of Government Affairs for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said of McNamee, “His bias so clearly favors fossil fuels and is against renewables and should disqualify him for this position.” Many of our federal regulatory agencies such as the EPA, Bureau of Land Management and Department of Interior (those in charge of protecting our resources) are run by former executives from the very industries they are supposed to be regulating, like the fox watching the hen house.
In desperation to save their property, citizens including Native Americans have tried to halt pipeline construction using tactics involving protests, tree-sits and legal actions. Unfortunately these actions have been met with a strong, often militarized-like pushback from private as well as public law enforcement and lengthy, expensive court battles.
Citizen concerns are certainly legitimate, as a recently released Reuters report in November 2018 said, “Energy Transfer LP and its Sunoco pipeline subsidiary have racked up more than 800 state and federal permit violations” while building pipelines that cross Ohio and Pennsylvania. These violations included “spills of drilling fluid, sinkholes in backyards and improper disposal of hazardous wastes and other trash. Fines topped $15 million.”
We in Ohio are well acquainted with the 713-mile, $4.2 billion Rover pipeline. A letter from FERC to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation acknowledged Energy Transfer Partners had demolished the historic 1843 Stoneman House west of Leesville, Ohio without notifying FERC or the Ohio State Historical Preservation Office.
They also were responsible for a spill of 2 million gallons of drilling fluids laced with chemicals into wetlands near the Tuscarawas River in April 2017. One of the most notable pipeline protests occurred during winter 2016 at the Dakota Access pipeline site near the Standing Rock Reservation. Hundreds of Native Americans, ordinary citizens, and American veterans from all over the country came together to try to defend sacred burial sites and the drinking water source of 17 million people.
Unlike the seven armed activists including brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon in 2016, these unarmed protesters at the DAPL site were surrounded by police with tanks and riot gear, maced, pepper sprayed, shot at with rubber bullets, and sprayed with water cannons.
In addition the difference between the judicial treatment between the heavily armed white militia leaders who were on federal land and the indigenous protesters on Native Land was strikingly different. Ammon and Ryan Bundy were found “not guilty” by a jury. Many protesters arrested at Standing Rock faced criminal charges. Most were dismissed, but a few will serve up to three years in prison.
It was obvious that moneyed interests had sought to make an example of the indigenous people in order to halt future resistance to pipelines. Ohio’s SB 250, which seeks to “turn the state’s misdemeanor criminal trespass law into a felony if it involves knowingly entering a critical infrastructure site and increases organizational fines tenfold,” is a similar strong arm tactic supported by the oil and gas industry. It is becoming increasingly hard to view our nation as a democracy when the interests of fossil fuels are regularly placed ahead of human health, the environment and citizens’ rights.
We are in a man-made crisis and it is not up for debate
A few days ago Greta Thunberg departed England to attend and speak at the United Nations climate talks. She is traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States using a zero-emissions mode of transportation. Unwilling to board a plane and incur the responsibility of adding carbon dioxide emissions to our atmosphere, Greta chose to accept a “ride” on the Malizia II racing yacht.
A documentary filmmaker, Nathan Grossman, is making the 14-day trip too. The racing yacht is a 60-foot open-cockpit monohull that has been fitted with solar panels to power the equipment. There is a bucket for a toilet and a headlamp for her reading light. There is a tiny desalination machine on board for drinking water and freeze-dried foods but no shower facilities.
Greta’s goal is to bring attention and hopefully incite actions to address the climate crisis. This has not been an easy task even though thousands of scientists worldwide have evidence the unprecedented rising level of carbon dioxide in the troposphere is not from natural occurrences but is mostly man-made.
Scientists point to three major pieces of evidence: satellite data showing the upper atmosphere of the planet is cooling, the temperature of the surface is heating and the carbon in atmospheric carbon dioxide is not from recent carbon sources but rather from “millions-years-old” carbon sources.
The last piece of data is analyzed by looking at the carbon isotopes. “Geological materials like coal, oil and methane are so old they no longer have any carbon-14,” the type found in recent carbon sources. The carbon they are seeing in the atmosphere is not from a plant source but from a fossil fuel source.
Even with all the data, studies, models and scientific consensus, many people do not believe in climate change or that it is driven by man-made sources. I experience this denial almost daily. People with little to no science background want to “debate” me on the validity of climate science. Even more troubling is the way this topic gets tagged as being a “political topic” when it is pure science; chemistry and physics underlie climate change science.
According to a recently released report co-sponsored by Yale Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, about 73 percent of Americans think global warming is happening and 62 percent understand it is mostly due to man-made emissions. These same percentages also think their local areas are being affected, especially by extreme heat conditions.
While the number of Americans who feel climate change is a threat has grown, this has not been true across party lines. About 27 percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning individuals feel it is a threat, compared to 83 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning individuals.
You might say this could be due to a lack of knowledge. However, a survey by Pew Research showed that looking at all levels of education from high school to a terminal degree, those Republicans with the highest level of education only believe in man-made climate change slightly more than their less educated (high school only) counterparts, an increase from 19-23 percent believing in man-made induced climate change. More education increases Democrats’ belief from 49-93 percent believing in man-made induced climate change.
Why is this divide among climate change deniers and believers mainly along political lines? Why are physics and chemistry principles treated as opinion? How is the fossil fuel industry using various tactics to keep us in a state of confusion when it comes to the climate crisis?
For sure, the fossil fuel industry has taken many of its methods from the tobacco industry’s playbook. Their job is to manufacture doubt when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change. In a world where the media can make or break a story, climate scientists grapple with ways to communicate the seriousness of this crisis. After many studies, some tactics used to sway public opinion and direct the discourse have been identified by psychologists and scientists.
One technique is called “fake experts.” The fossil fuel industry will find one or two scientists who are willing to disagree with the majority. They will attach enormous amounts of time and money to these scientists to give credence to their contradictory opinions.
These “experts” are not actually experts at all, and most have never published their studies in peer-reviewed journals. A real expert will have a doctorate degree in the field and will have many publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Another technique is called “cherry picking data.” Someone might point out a piece of data that supports their claim while ignoring another piece of data that does not. Donald Trump did this when he used the example of a snow storm last winter to show how climate change was not happening. Yes, it was a large snow event, but more importantly it was caused by a climate change- related polar vortex. Climate change causes many of the extreme weather patterns we see today.
Even the new face of the climate crisis fight, Greta Thunberg, is being used to divert the focus of the crisis away from the issues. This was evident when a former member of the Trump transition team described Greta on Twitter as “the ignorant teenage climate puppet.”
There is a 97 percent consensus among doctoral-degree climate scientists that we are in a crisis caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This is not up for debate.
We need to act as the lungs of the planet are burning
A significant portion of the Amazon rain forest is currently on fire. A National Geographic article stated, “The Amazon rain forest is the greatest expression of life on Earth. It is home to about a third of our planet’s terrestrial life forms, cycles about one-quarter of the Earth’s freshwater, and plays a key role in absorbing carbon and moderating climate.”
France 24, a French stateowned international news network, said there are more than 72,000 fires in the region. A Brazil space research center, the National Institute for Space Research, said the fires are the worst since their recordkeeping started in 2013.
The recently elected president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is no friend of the Amazon rain forest. Often during his election campaign, he spoke harshly about indigenous people and their rights to inhabit the Amazon. Currently about 13 percent of Brazil’s Amazon territory is recognized as belonging to indigenous tribes.
While campaigning last year, he promised to open indigenous lands to mining, do away with the Ministry of the Environment, relax environmental laws and licensing, and ban international groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund from entering Brazil.
He has become so notorious for his anti-environmental stances on logging, mining and ranching that he has been dubbed “Trump of the Tropics.” He ran on a slogan that said, “Brazil before everything,” so it is not hard to believe he initially ignored offers of aid, $22 million from the world’s seven largest economies to help fight the Amazon fires. He has, as of Aug. 27, accepted $12 million to help deploy 44,000 troops and to use warplanes to douse flames.
On Aug. 4 Bolsonaro fired Ricardo Galvao, physicist and the director of the National Institute for Space Research. The firing occurred after the two had an argument where Bolsonaro called the institute’s findings of deforestation increasing since he took office a lie. According to data from the INPE, the number of fires in the Amazon has increased by 80 percent since Bolsonaro took office. Brazil has a system called Real-time Deforestation Detection System to detect illegal deforestation.
This destruction, burning forests to clear land for grazing cattle and farming soybeans, is being driven by JBS, the biggest supplier of beef in the world and one of the companies at the center of a huge scandal.
Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef with a record 1.64 million tons sent to its top markets in China, Egypt and the European Union in 2018, according to the Brazilian Beef Exporters Association.
The top-three companies responsible for the beef production are JBS, Minerva and Marfrig. It was reported of the cleared land, 65 percent was being used for grazing. A smaller portion of the land is used for growing soybeans, and these are used to feed poultry and pigs. China is the largest importer of Brazilian soybeans, but the United States also imports some of the crop.
A 2015 report from the Woods Hole Research Center discussed the importance of stopping deforestation of tropical forests. We know that forests, no matter where they are, are a big carbon sink for our carbon-dioxide emissions. While it is hard to calculate how much carbon might be in those forests, we know burning them releases enormous amounts of carbon back into our atmosphere and oceans.
“Drawdown,” a newly released book that compiles researchers, scientists and policy makers’ solutions to climate change, listed adopting a plantrich diet rather than a meatcentric one as the fourth best way to combat climate change. Unfortunately countries like China are seeking to emulate the Western meat-based diet, which will drive the world’s heavily subsidized meat production even higher.
The book states, “If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s thirdlargest emitter of greenhouse gases.” A 2016 report said we could save $1 trillion in annual health-care costs and lost productivity by adopting a vegetarian diet. Just by avoiding the additional greenhouse gas emissions from cattle and stopping deforestation, we could reduce our emissions by 66 gigatons.
The inhabitants of the rain forests, the insects, animals and plants, also are being destroyed as these fires burn. An excellent article displays several INPE graphs that show the grave situation now going on as fires eat away at millions of acres. By the end of July this year, the deforestation was at 1,103,350 acres during the seven months while 2018’s was 704,000 acres in seven months.
You might ask why should I care? You should care because this forest provides over 20 percent of the world’s oxygen. The Amazon affects rainfall patterns as far away as the United States.
The Amazon, which has approximately 16,000 species of trees, is home to 427 mammal species, 1,300 bird species, 378 species of reptiles and more than 400 species of amphibians. Some of the animals that live in the Amazon rain forest include jaguars, sloths, river dolphins, macaws and anacondas. The forest provides a canopy to approximately 80,000 species of plants, many of which are used in modern medicine today.
Stopping these fires in the Amazon should be the world’s top priority. Whether we adopt personal actions or demand our politicians engage in a global initiative, we cannot watch while the lungs of the planet burn.
Dr. Randi Pokladnik earned an associate degree in Environmental Engineering, a BA in Chemistry, MA and PhD in Environmental Studies. She is certified in hazardous materials regulations and holds a teaching license in science and math. Her opinions are her own.
