A group of kids—many from Oregon—who’re suing the Obama administration for continuing to burn fossil fuels and generally screw up the planet cited a proposed liquid natural gas pipeline planned for development in Coos Bay as one of their main concerns. If completed, the Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline and Jordan Cove Energy Project, which would be the first LNG pipeline in Oregon, will be the largest producer of CO2 in the state by 2020.
This Saturday, August 22, a group of activists who also oppose the LNG plant are starting a nearly month-long, 232-mile hike in protest along the proposed pipeline route. ‘Hike the Pipe’ starts Malin—a tiny town located southeast of Klamath Falls, just north of the Oregon-California border—and crosses the state to Coos Bay, with events planned along the way. A core group of five to 10 hikers will participate in the full hike, with opportunities to join them for day hikes and kayaking protests along the way.
Sarah Westover, who’s organizing an event at the hike’s stop in Shady Cove on the Rogue River, says the pipeline will cross over or through 400 water bodies.
“The plan is to drill under the river so they can put in the pipeline,” she says. “This will have a tremendous impact on the environment, including affecting salmon populations, causing deforestation and increasing sediment in the water.”
Scientists Jerry Havens and James Venart warned federal regulations officials that the proposed project “presents far more serious public safety hazards than regulators have analyzed and deemed acceptable,” according to an anti-LNG exports web page.
And those dangers are in a best-case scenario. A worst-case scenario—an explosion—could cause wildfires in the rural areas the pipeline will traverse. The company responsible for building the project, pipeline operator Williams Cos., operates more than 26,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines. The company in 2014 was the subject of a safety probe following a fire in a Wyoming natural gas plant that led to the evacuation of nearby Opal, Wyoming.
Williams Co. was also under investigation in June 2013 following a June 2013 blast at a chemical plant in Louisiana that killed one person and injured 73 others.
Alex Harris, who grew up in Southern Oregon, is the lead organizer for Hike the Pipe. He says he chose to do the hike because it’s an original response that will get the attention of policymakers who could stop the project. He says more than 60 percent of the proposed pipeline would cut through privately-owned property, so organizing the hike gave the protesters opportunity to interact with a lot of landowners who would be directly affected by the construction and possible catastrophic consequences.
“I see a huge need for people to know that this isn’t just 232 miles; that’s just a number. I need people to know that this is real land, this is real territory, these are real people, these are real ecosystems,” Harris says. “And there are stories attached to that 232 mile stretch of land… The hike is not merely a protest, it’s a means of interaction between urban centers and rural areas… and know what’s at stake.”
Lions, Tigers, and Bears – Oh My!!!
If everyone was using this relatively clean and safe form of fuel, there wouldn’t be anything on the scale of Global Warming we are experiencing now.
I have the strong impression that some folk just want to protest any damn thing, merely as a lifestyle.
Yeah, totally.
Pipeline is safer than trucking it or sending it by rail.
It won’t only be kids, some of us older folks will also be hiking. 🙂
Re “clean” natural gas – alas no, it turns out that because of methane leaks while extracting and transporting natural gas it’s as bad as coal, or even worse. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/us/study-finds-methane-leaks-negate-climate-benefits-of-natural-gas.html Compressing it to liquid form for export (which is the goal with this project) means even more leaks.
We don’t have to choose between pipelines, trucks, and rail. We can start winding down fossil fuels altogether by expanding our conservation efforts – most of us consume lots of crap we don’t need anyway. And we can speed up deployment of wind and solar, and our development of geothermal and wave energy technologies. The alternative is to continue to produce nature- and job-killing projects like this one, and having the climate crisis ruin everyone’s lives. One of the nice things about solar, and even wind in some areas, is that neighborhoods can supply most or all of their own energy, and disconnect from the grid. Local power whenever possible avoids a lot of the problems that come with the corruption of power when governments and big corporations get together.
John, when wind and solar power can even come close to supplying just half of the power we use, then you may have a point.
I don’t know where you are getting your EXTREMELY optimistic views on the power consumption of the US vs how we supply it, but I think your information is far, far from what everyone in the Energy field sees as reality.