We’ve all heard the news: Wednesday afternoon Kinder Morgan released a statement announcing that it and its subsidiary the Tennessee Gas Pipeline had suspended all activity on the Northeast Energy Direct project.
When I received the first email, I almost cried. Then the phones started lighting up and the emails flying. After a year and a half, it seemed too good to be true. An enormous weight lifted off the backs of towns and residents from New York to New Hampshire.
Then the second wave of communications began.
Don’t stop the fight! Don’t let down your guard! They’ll be back – you wait and see! The official word from KM was the suspension was due to “inadequate capacity commitments from prospective customers.” And that’s very likely true – or at least part of the truth. But the company was being harried throughout New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire by citizen activists who just wouldn’t quit throwing up speed bumps and road blocks in its path.
KM will never admit how much voters’ pressure on elected officials, citizens initiatives, lobbying of lawmakers in state houses and pressure and demonstrations at the Federal Regulatory Commission increased the difficulty of the process. Nor will it admit these activities may even have educated the local gas and electric companies about actual need and different ways of meeting it. But we can’t help feel in our bones that all this played a significant role in stopping the project. And that’s a heady feeling.
What I really want to communicate here is profound admiration for the citizen activists who for 18 months in southern New Hampshire organized and researched and motivated and kept spirits up and efforts going forward.
My own town of Mason would have had a pipeline T slashed not only west to east but north to south through the entire length of the town. Our pipeline committee focused our helpless anger to bring pressure to bear in the important places. Temple, Greenville and New Ipswich were facing a compressor station of grotesque impact, but they visibly refused to give up. Towns all along the southern border of the state pushed back relentlessly, though I don’t know their specific details.
The point is this experience has taught us what we can do, that citizens can have an effect on local government and make things difficult for the standard NYSE corporations’ business as usual, and if – or more likely when – the next large company greedy for market share comes along, we’ll be ready to do it.
(Katharine Gregg lives in Mason.)