By Rebekah Hinojosa, Texas Sierra Club Conservation Organizer
Note: This blog was intitally published as a guest column in The Monitor on Nov. 5, 2017.
Three fossil fuel companies plan to build polluting liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal projects in our area: Rio Grande LNG, Texas LNG, and Annova LNG. Altogether they would span almost 3,000 acres of untouched land next door to Port Isabel and surrounding communities. Last month, Cameron County ignored their Port Isabel and South Padre Island constituents and granted a 10-year tax break to the company seeking to build NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG project. Days later, the Texas LNG project lost public support from its one and only financial advisor, BNP Paribas, because the international bank determined that LNG is a bad business practice because it relies on fracked gas, which is a danger to the climate and pollutes communities.
BNP’s decision is a huge setback for Texas LNG. The company will have to spend time and money to find another large bank willing to take the risk. It’s also a huge reality check for NextDecade and their bank Societe Generale, whose project would be six times larger than Texas LNG, and is being peddled as a “clean energy transition.”
BNP’s decision is part of its commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Trump short-sightedly decided to take the United States out of earlier this year. The 8th largest bank in the world understands that LNG is an unethical business practice more-so than our Cameron County officials who happily endorsed the Rio Grande LNG project at the expense of their own communities. The Cameron County officials are essentially siding with Trump on climate and trapping the Valley into 20+ years with the dirty fossil fuel industry.
Looking at the specifics of what NextDecade has promised with Rio Grande LNG and what we’re actually getting, the project is a bad deal. NextDecade’s tax break guarantees an unknown number of permanent jobs for people who have lived within a 100-mile radius of the LNG terminal for six months prior to being hired or born within that radius. That means they could hire someone as far away as Falfurrias, TX, or someone who just moved into the area recently, and it counts as a “local” hire. Meanwhile, many people’s jobs could actually be at risk if LNG is built - our shrimpers, dolphin watch boaters, and others involved in ecotourism who rely on a clean environment and access to the ship channel. These local businesses employ thousands of people without releasing massive amounts of air pollution into our communities, building flammable pipelines through wetlands, and shutting down the ship channel for LNG tanker ships. And if built, this would all happen off the backs of Cameron County taxpayers.
Volunteers with the Lower Rio Grande Sierra Club group, Save the RGV from LNG, and community members gathered together for a Defend the Sacred Site Boat Tour (March 2017)
Valley residents have made it loud and clear they don’t want LNG. Every single community that would have to face the impacts of the polluting LNG terminals has banded together to pass resolutions to officially oppose LNG. The Point Isabel School District weighed the costs twice and refused to give NextDecade and Annova LNG handouts. The local Laguna Madre water district refused public water for the LNG projects. Two people representing the Valley, including me, even traveled to France to meet with the banks that finance LNG projects, shareholders, and French President Emmanuel Macron’s advisors and demand they drop Texas LNG and Rio Grande LNG. Valley communities have all been, and will continue to be, extremely vocal about preserving our local ecosystem and keeping our beaches clean. We refuse to become another Gulf Coast town with an industrial landscape.
LNG is not a done deal. Valley residents should keep submitting comments and demand answers from regulatory agencies. It’s up to people in the community to ask the hard questions and make our voices heard when our state and county elected officials and federal regulatory agencies don’t have the people’s interests in mind.