Statement by Josh Tulkin, Maryland Sierra Club Director
Friday June 30th, at press conference in opposition to proposed Potomac Pipeline.
More info coming soon.
Good morning everyone! My name is Josh Tulkin and I’m the Director of the Maryland Sierra Club. The Sierra Club has worked to protect our natural places across the country for 125 years. In Maryland we have worked with over 50,000 residents in recent years to protect waterways from dangerous development, deploy clean clean energy to displace coal plant pollution, and protect our beautiful state from the ravages of fracking. We have started, together, on a path to a cleaner, more sustainable state. But -- this proposed pipeline that drills through the heart of one of our most important rivers is a both a direct and symbolic threat to everything we have worked to achieved.
Maryland is making important strides towards a renewable energy economy. We are, in theory, not a state that turns a blind eye to the dangers of climate change. Yet this pipeline is literally an investment in fossil-fuel infrastructure that will lock our region into a tremendous amount of climate pollution for decades to come. At a time when Maryland and other states need to be investing in wind and solar, this pipeline will open the floodgates for years and years of continued pollution. How, after banning fracking and setting an aggressive climate change goal of reducing greenhouse gases 40% by 2030, can we turn around and approve a pipeline transporting fracked gas through our state?
But if you’re not sold on the climate-change dangers of this pipeline, just look at the near-term environmental and public health threats we face with this single project. Like any fossil fuel, this pipeline will not just affect this community. Potential surface water contamination from a spill would harm Western Maryland, but it will not be confined to this immediate area. It will spread throughout the watershed.
Gas pipelines like this one pose a direct threat to our communities. The very same concerns we raised about fracking are still in play from this pipeline. Contamination of air, water, and our natural spaces that we hold dear. This pipeline would directly threaten this treasure, the Potomac River which flows across the region starting in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia and running through Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. to the Chesapeake Bay and finally into the Atlantic Ocean. With 3/4s of our region’s drinking water coming from the Potomac, we need to be extremely protective of this valuable resource, not expose it to more risk.
Allowing this project would make us complicit in the expansion of a system that we decided was too dangerous for our own state and the climate as a whole. The Sierra Club is ready to stand with Western Maryland residents and continue to fight for protecting our state from fossil fuels.
We urge Governor Hogan to reject this pipeline for the health and safety of Maryland and our neighboring states.