Baker: Silence like a cancer grows
Last week the state gave its final approval to the Weymouth gas compressor, which will shoot fracked natural gas into Canada for export to Europe via LNG. For all we’ve heard about our ballyhooed gas shortage, it turns out that our local utilities say that they don’t actually need the gas. Rather, the South Shore communities around this compressor facility are being asked to shoulder environmental damage so that gas companies can make a buck moving a hazardous product through their neighborhood. There will be lawsuits.
To recap: The air compressor will emit methane, 86 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. Methane kills trees and creates smog. The facility will also emit carcinogens such as formaldehyde, in an area that is already polluted. There’s a lot of harm associated with the compressor — and to what benefit? (Is anything worth getting cancer over?)
Furthermore, it pretty much scotches the Baker administration’s chance at meeting our goals under the 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act, as this masterful history of the approval process by Joe LaRusso points out (read the whole thing):
To put that in perspective, that amount of CO2 equals ~19% of the annual CO2 emissions produced by all of Mass.’s power plants, or ~8% of all NE power plants (per CO2 totals for 2017 reported in @isonewengland’s most recent emissions report—bit.ly/2m).
Since there are many people who seem to think that the Baker administration is kind of OK on environment and climate, and since they try to look busy, let’s step back and look at the context of this negligence:
Read more: http://bluemassgroup.com/2019/11/baker-silence-like-a-cancer-grows/