Andy’s Blog
Thursday, March 9, 2017
by Andy Savitz
Corporate pipeline developers use our money to build costly, unnecessary gas pipeline
Consumers for Sensible Energy (CSE) recently helped underwrite an important report on the Access Northeast Pipeline (ANE) that provides new, important and dramatic information. Entitled New England’s Shrinking Need for Natural Gas, the report, by Synapse Energy Economics Inc., an independent research consulting firm located in Cambridge MA, concludes that the pipeline is:
- TOO COSTLY: the ANE pipeline will cost New England consumers $6.6 billion, not $3.2 billion as the proponents have been claiming. Massachusetts consumers, alone, would be saddled with almost $3 billion in extra costs
- A BURDENSOME CONSUMER EXPENSE: given these enormous costs, the pipeline will not save money as the gas, electric and pipeline companies told us, but will result in utility bill increases; and
- UNNEEDED: several years after the ANE pipeline comes on line (around 2020), environmental and energy laws will require New England’s use of natural gas for electric generation to decrease 27 percent, making all new or expanded pipelines unnecessary.
The pipeline is a bad idea, and appears to be intended to export gas to Canada and Europe. In any case, the developers make money simply by building ANE. Their proposed financing scheme requires you and me to pay the full costs of the pipeline, whether it gets used or not.
Why should the proponents get to use our money to build their pipeline? And what can you do to prevent this blatant and arrogant rip-off?
We need your help, again, to convince the legislature to stop the construction of these fracked gas pipelines that are unneeded, unwanted and completely unaffordable – especially at a price tag of $6.6. billion!
Here’s a link to the Synapse Report. The Executive Summary, at the beginning, tells you everything you need to know.
To paraphrase Smokey the Bear: only YOU can prevent pipelines! Please stay tuned for more information about how to do that to help ensure a safe, healthy and clean environment for us and for our children.
Andy Savitz is Executive Director of Consumers for Sensible Energy, Inc., (CSE). He has over 25 years of hands-on experience assisting corporations to become leaders in sustainability, environmental performance, measurement and reporting. Andy is the author of Talent, Transformation and the Triple Bottom Line (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2013) and The Triple Bottom Line: How the Best Run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social and Environmental Success and How You Can Too (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2006). Andy was a lead partner in PricewaterhouseCooper's global Sustainability Business Services practice. He served as General Counsel in the Massachusetts Office of Environmental Affairs, where he conceived and organized the Commonwealth’s Environmental Crime Strike Force, and the first-in-the-nation workshop on environmental law for state court judges.