The first week of July brought three major victories to fossil fuel pipeline opponents around the U.S. On July 5, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy, companies that had partnered to build the $8 billion, 600-mile long Atlantic Coast pipeline through West Virginia, Virginia and the Carolinas – threw in the towel after the project went billions of dollars over budget and years over its original timeline, due to the dogged opposition of people all along the route.
The next day, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ruled that Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of the Dakota Access pipeline had to drain the pipeline of heavy crude oil from western North Dakota until a thorough Environmental Impact Statement is completed, which will take at least one year. The Dakota Access pipeline had generated global opposition and a stand-off with thousands of indigenous-led opponents in 2016.
Also on July 6, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal judge’s rejection of a crucial permit for the Keystone XL pipeline – which would bring polluting and climate-destroying tar sands oil across the Canadian border to meet an existing pipeline in the Midwest. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Lorne Stockman, senior research analyst with Oil Change International, about these years-long fights, and what might be a turning of the tide. Here, he begins by addressing the now defunct Atlantic Coast pipeline.
LORNE STOCKMAN: In many cases, the companies have pushed ahead, and in some cases have been defeated. But in others not so much, and this is something quite different, where the two huge corporations that have been pushing this thing down people’s throats for the past six years have themselves announced they’re not going to pursue it further. So this is a tremendous, definitive victory against the pipeline. In terms of what this means nationally and for other pipeline fights around the country, and kind of the bigger picture, I think it’s also huge because it’s another case where it’s become clear that federal government agencies – whether it’s the Army Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service in the case of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Fish and Wildlife and numerous other federal and state-level agencies issued permits illegally and erroneously.
And that’s what we’ve just seen with the Dakota Access pipeline – the courts have found the Army Corps did not do what it was mandated to do under the National Environmental Policy Act, and so vacated the permit. With ACP, there were so many permits that were erroneously issued and vacated in the courts that it became insurmountable for the companies to continue. I think this shows that the corporate capture of the regulatory bodies in this country has been very wide indeed, and when the opposition has the resources to take this to court and fight it, we win, because these permits have been wrongly issued. And one shudders to think how many pipelines have been built in the last decade as a result of this fracking boom that were built with permits that should never have been issued, and there just weren’t resources to fight it.
So I think the ACP victory in particular, exposes not only this capture of the regulatory system and how flawed it is and how one-sided it has been, but the other piece also is the rise of renewable energy, clean energy – wind, solar, storage – has now reached a point where the market for gas is shrinking. The writing’s on the wall, the companies are seeing that so they’re weighing the options of spending more money to push this through the courts against the diminishing economic case that has just shrunk over the period in which they’ve been trying to push the project through.
MELINDA TUHUS: Lorne Stockman, when Duke and Dominion announced the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Al Gore and the Rev. Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign – and a North Carolina native – issued a joint statement about the necessity of fighting racism and poverty when people fight fossil fuel projects, in order to win. Do you agree with that?
LORNE STOCKMAN: Oh, absolutely. You know, these projects disproportionately impact communities of color, indigenous communities, low-income communities. There’s a real systemic foundation to that. You rarely see these projects’ routes going through wealthy, middle class suburban areas or other wealthy landowners. The ACP [opposition] has been remarkable in the movement that’s built up around it was very broad. You can’t oppose these projects without building this broad base of opposition across community divides, across class divides, across racial divides. It’s kind of the nature of the beast; those are the communities that are impacted. ACP was interesting because it cut through those communities; it did actually cut through some wealthy or relatively wealthy farms in Augusta County, Virgina. It cut through national forest lands. It kind of connected all kinds of issues in so many
For more information, visit the Oil Change International website at priceofoil.org.
