Canopy Loss and the Pipeline Fight

There is a natural gas pipeline battle raging in Chatham County right now.  Enbridge, the big Canadian energy company, who has been granted the right to declare eminent domain by the State of NC, wants to run a pipeline from Siler City to Moncure.

Instead of running it through existing utility corridors, they want to run it through private properties.  That way they can get the good people of western and southeast Chatham to subsidize the building costs.  Once again, Big Fossil is dependent on externalizing its true costs to maximize its profits.

This is nothing new.  Big Oil doesn’t pay for the cost of the war.  Taxpayers do, presumably to keep down the price at the pump.  Big Coal didn’t pay for asthma and respiratory problems.  Healthcare consumers picked up the tab on that one, presumably to keep those monthly electric bills low.

When you don’t have to pay for environmental destruction, when you can pollute the air, the river, and the soil for free, you can send bigger dividend checks to your shareholders. 

It’s also true if you can take private land in the name of the “public good,” instead of upgrading infrastructure on existing utility easements.

While transparency is not a hallmark of Enbridge, or Duke Energy, or of any Big Money, perhaps I should say that I’m a Canadian.  That lives in Moncure.

Until now the Tree Museum has stayed out of this fight.  I didn’t think it was germane to the mission of our little Tree Non-Profit. That is, until I read Steve Jenisch’s recent Situational Analysis: Enbridge’s Chatham County System Expansion Project.

He pointed out that the data center developers behind this project are the same folks that are developing Chatham Park, and he included a paragraph that caught my eye:

“Chatham Park is a massive 7,100 to 8,000-acre master-planned development that according to its Planned Unit Development guidelines aims to retain approximately 30% to 35% tree canopy coverage across tree coverage planning areas, open spaces, and buffers. That translates to 4,600 to 5,300 acres of forest permanently cleared, or up to 25% of total Chatham County tree loss over the next 20 years.”

Got it.  I believe the Tree Museum was inspired by canopy loss in Pittsboro.  And I believe that routing the pipeline through private property rather than easements which have already been cleared will result in a continuation of the current ecological disaster in which we live.

Therefore, fighting the pipeline is “on mission.”

I think reading Jenisch’s Situational Analysis is an excellent start point.

One time in Moncure we stopped Big Trash from building the largest landfill on the eastern seaboard.  Time now to stop Big Data…