Photo by iStock
For anyone following the proposed Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley fracked gas pipelines, this year has probably felt like a roller coaster ride, with a big dose of emotional whiplash. As the end of the year approaches, though, it’s clear that the tide has turned against these pipelines. If built, they would cause massive destruction through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. In fact, the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) has resulted in hundreds of violations of commonsense water protections. They would also have far-reaching effects for the planet, releasing enormous amounts of the methane gas that contributes to climate change and has even been linked to breathing problems, premature births, and cancer.
Once spoken of as “a done deal,” both the ACP and MVP are indefinitely stalled thanks to years of work by residents, communities and groups like the Sierra Club and our partners fighting to stop these unnecessary pipelines. It’s been a long and arduous journey to get to these victories -- and the struggle is far from over to keep the Southeast safe from greedy fossil fuel interests -- these wins represent what is possible when communities organize and fight to protect their homes and futures. As I take a look at where we’ve been this last year and look to the road ahead, I am overwhelmingly hopeful that all that hard work by so many dedicated people is paying off and neither of these pipelines will ever operate.
After dozens of legal challenges, thousands of public comments, countless protests and volunteer hours, these pipeline developers are being held accountable to the law. This summer, they started to hit roadblocks in losing key permits needed for construction.
In July, the Mountain Valley Pipeline lost permissions to cut through the Jefferson National Forest. The ACP similarly lost two permits in August that would have allowed it to cross the Blue Ridge Parkway and one from the US Fish and Wildlife Service called an “incidental take” permit to harm endangered species along the pipeline route. Both of these were the result of lawsuits in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and resulted in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (which regulates interstate pipelines like these) temporarily halting all construction on the entire pipelines. The Federal agencies responsible for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline permits quickly reissued what were essentially the same permits with the same flaws and dangers to public lands, special places and endangered species.
One of the most egregious ways pipeline developers have been bypassing environmental protections is in convincing the Army Corps of Engineers to allow them to get water permits using a mechanism called Nationwide Permit 12 (NWP12) instead of individual water permits for each stream, river, and wetland crossed. As the Sierra Club and other opponents have argued in court, NWP12 is completely insufficient as it’s designed to be a streamlined way for small projects with no measurable impact on water quality to get permitted faster. Both the ACP and MVP cross hundreds of ecologically sensitive streams, rivers and wetlands in mountainous terrain that’s almost impossible to build in without clogging those waterways with habitat-destroying mud and debris that chokes out endangered mussels, salamanders and other species found nowhere else in the world. And that’s exactly what happened once tree cutting and construction began. Volunteer watchdogs with the Mountain Valley Watch and Pipeline Construction Surveillance Initiative reported hundreds of violations to state regulatory agencies. West Virginia has issued 19 notices of violations for MVP and in December, Virginia’s Attorney General sued MVP for the repeated violations. While this action does give hope of some relief of the relentless environmental destruction MVP has caused since day one of construction, it’s a shame that corrective action wasn’t taken sooner by those at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality who are charged with protecting the state’s lands and waterways.
By December both the ACP and MVP had lost their Nationwide Permit 12s in court, halting all construction in any waterways along their entire routes. It’s unimaginable that the current construction routes could continue with this setback alone, as each pipeline’s proposed path crosses hundreds of streams, rivers and wetlands
Starting on December 7, the ACP was dealt a new round of significant back-to-back blows. For a second time the project lost the permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to harm endangered species along its route. In response to these setbacks, ACP’s developers announced they would halt all construction on the entire pipeline route.
Less than a week later, the court struck down permits from the US Forest Service that would have allowed the pipeline to cross the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests and the Appalachian Trail. In a harshly worded decision the court said the Forest Service had “abdicated its responsibility” by caving to private industry’s demands instead of protecting America’s treasured places. “We trust the United States Forest Service to ‘speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues,’” the ruling said, quoting “The Lorax”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
As the roadblocks standing in the way of these pipelines increase, one thing is certain--as long as the ACP and MVP are still a possibility, the Sierra Club and communities throughout the region will continue to stand in solidarity with communities along the routes to oppose these dirty, dangerous, unnecessary fracked gas pipelines.