Earlier this month, the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company announced its intention to build the South’s largest gas pipeline in more than a decade. The Southeast Supply Enhancement project, as the company calls it, would run from Virginia down through the Carolinas and Georgia before swinging west to Alabama, right through the heart of the American South.
This was not astonishing news to anyone whose light bill comes from a Southern utility.
A renewable energy revolution is unfolding across the globe faster than anyone dared to hope, but Southern officials, many of whom cut their political teeth on coal, have been cussedly resistant to it. Nobody loves a fossil-fuel expansion project more than a red-state politician loves a fossil-fuel expansion project.
In the same way that “clean coal” is a ridiculous rebranding of the dirtiest energy source we have, “natural” gas is a misnomer used by politicians and industry officials eager to obscure its true identity. The Union of Concerned Scientists instead uses “methane,” “fossil gas” and “gas” as interchangeable terms for this greenhouse gas which, in its first 20 years of reaching the atmosphere, has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. “Even though CO2 has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term,” according to the Environmental Defense Fund.
The problem with gas is not simply that it’s a fossil fuel or that gas pipelines routinely leak and can explode. And it’s not simply that gas is a human health and environmental nightmare. Perhaps the most damaging problem with gas pipelines is that they permit the construction of new gas-fired power plants that will be in service for decades. Just as the planet hurtles toward an irreversible climate tipping point, these plants will lock the South into reliance on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
You’d think such facts would give state officials pause before permitting the extension of gas pipelines through communities whose safety they are charged with protecting. But this reality has no impact at all in states controlled by a Republican supermajority.
Let’s take the Tennessee General Assembly as a case in point. As in other red states, our legislature has taken misinformation rebranding to new levels, legally defining methane as “clean energy.” It has passed pre-emptive legislation that prevents local governments from rejecting a pipeline or even regulating its safety. In Tennessee, anyone who disrupts the construction of a pipeline has committed a Class C felony.
