EPISODE 20: Put Peaker Plants in the Past w/Rosemary Wessel of No Fracked Gas in Mass

Welcome to Audible Café!


Today’s show features Rosemary Wessel, Program Director
of No Fracked Gas in Mass, a program of the Berkshire
Environmental Action Team, or BEAT. No Fracked Gas in Mass
started as a passion project originally created by Rose and
others to stop the now-defeated Kinder Morgan Northeast Energy
Direct pipeline, a huge fracked gas pipeline project that would
have brought fracked gas from Pennsylvania across New York, the
full length of Massachusetts, up to New England, and eventually
out for export.


Rose and her team at No Fracked Gas in Mass continue to work to
stop the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Northeast
states and to promote energy efficiency and sustainable,
renewable sources of energy and local, permanent jobs in a clean
energy economy. 


We talked about a new initiative to shut down the
obsolete and polluting “peaker plants” in Pittsfield,
MA, as the first step a regional effort to do the same
across New England. Peaker plants provide energy in those rare
times when demand exceeds the usually steady supply of power
available to people. As you will learn, there are other, cleaner
and sustainable sources of power for those high-demand hours that
are usually experienced during heat waves and similar situations.


After my interview with Rose, I also discuss another tar
sands pipeline being constructed by Enbridge out in northern
Minnesota that rivals the Dakota Access Pipeline that
brought so much pain and conflict to indigenous people out there.
So here it’s happening again. I’m hoping to bring you interviews
from the front lines of that opposition next week, but meanwhile,
construction has begun on the pipeline known as Line 3
after 7 years of opposition, while lawsuits are pending in
court. 


Construction began in December after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s
administration signed off on final water permits in November.


The pipeline is planned to cross Anishinaabe treaty
lands, and threatens clean water at 21 water crossings
where the company will use horizontal drilling techniques to bore
under streams, rivers, and lakes, including the Mississippi River
and dozens of its tributaries. Line 3 would cross two
“Restricted Outstanding Resource Value Waters,” according to the
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). 


However, there is a great divide within at least on of the
agencies: twelve out of 17 members of the Minnesota
Pollution Control Agency (MPCA)’s Environmental Justice Advisory
Group resigned in protest over the
agency’s decision to bestow river crossing permits on Enbridge.
They wrote in a letter to MPCA Commissioner Laura Bishop that “we
cannot continue to legitimize and provide cover for the MPCA’s
war on Black and brown people.”


The people who will suffer most from this project are, once
again, indigenous people from the Red Lake Band of
Chippewa and the White Earth Band of
Ojibwe. Together with the Sierra Club and the Indigenous
environmental group Honor the Earth, the tribes have brought suit
against Enbridge.


This is a devastatingly destructive project on
numerous levels, and as the most recent of the wide and lasting
legacy of Trump’s four years of environmental abuses, it’s more
than worthy of strong opposition.


So stay tuned for more on that, but in the meantime, you can
visit:


welcomewaterprotectors.com


Honor the Earth


Thanks for listening to Audible Café. See you next week!


This show originally aired on WBCR-lp Great Barrington 97.7FM.
Visit berkshireradio.org to find out about the station or make a
much-needed and much appreciated donation!


SHOW RESOURCES


No Fracked Gas in Mass - Peakers Project page


BURNED: Is Biomass the New Coal?


New climate bill:  (S.2995) “An Act Creating a
Next-Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy“


Old Stone Mill in Adams, MA, a Zero Waste Maker Space


Welcome Water Protectors


Honor the Earth


SHOW THEME MUSIC by Brian Eddy