
Opponents of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline won a reprieve Monday when a federal court issued a stay on key permits that the pipeline needs to cross streams and rivers.
The project, which would carry fracked natural gas through around 300 miles of Virginia and West Virginia, was given a go-ahead in October by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to restart construction along most of its route following years of legal challenges. The pipeline has already racked up at least 350 environmental regulations and $2.26 million in fines. The environmental groups behind the suit noted that the pipeline operators had told investors they wanted to blast through "critical" streams "as quickly as possible before anything is challenged," the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) reported in a press release emailed to EcoWatch.
"Communities along the pipeline route have been on edge these past several weeks as the company has moved in heavy equipment and started doing work, so we're very glad the court pressed pause on this permit while the water-crossing issues are reviewed further," Peter Anderson, Virginia program manager at Appalachian Voices, said in the press release.
CBD and Appalachian Voices are two of the groups behind the lawsuit, along with Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Indian Creek Watershed Association, Sierra Club, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, West Virginia Rivers Coalition and Wild Virginia. The coalition was represented by Appalachian Mountain Advocates.
The stay is part of a larger challenge brought by the groups to permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers in September that would allow the pipeline to cross around 1,000 streams, rivers, wetlands and other waterways. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the first two Army Corps permits in 2018, and pipeline opponents hope it will reject the second pair as well.
The court issued an emergency stay of the permits Oct. 16. Monday's stay will last until the court can make a definitive ruling on the new permits. The environmental groups argue that the new permits violate the Army Corps' responsibility to protect endangered species, Bloomberg Law reported.
"This decision will help ensure the pipeline doesn't keep posing catastrophic threats to waterways that people and imperiled species depend on to survive," CBD senior attorney Jared Margolis said in the press release. "Despite the project's clear failure to comply with the law, Mountain Valley keeps pushing this climate-killing menace. We'll continue working to ensure this destructive pipeline doesn't poison waters and threaten communities along its route."
The pipeline is being built by Equitrans, NextEra Energy, Consolidated Edison Inc, AltaGas Ltd and RGC Resources Inc, according to Reuters. Equitrans spokeswoman Natalie Cox said that the stay was disappointing, but that construction would continue along other parts of the route.
"We are hopeful and expect that once the case is reviewed on the merits of the arguments there will be a different conclusion," Cox told Reuters.
However, Wild Virginia Conservation Director David Sligh said the stay was a good sign for the pipeline's opponents.
"Convincing a court to stay an agency decision requires plaintiffs to convince the judges that they have a good chance to prove their case after full review," Sligh noted in the press release. "Now, we look forward to doing just that — to show conclusively that the Corps of Engineers abdicated its duty to protect us and our resources."
Reuters noted that the Mountain Valley Pipeline is one of several fossil fuel pipelines that has been granted approval by the Trump administration only to run into delays as environmental and community groups bring legal challenges. When construction on the pipeline began in Feb. 2018, Equitrans estimated it would cost around $3.5 billion and be completed by the end of the year. The price tag has now nearly doubled to as much as $6 billion.
Another pipeline in the same region, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, was canceled by its owners in July following similar opposition and delays.
"The MVP has already doubled its timeline and budget, and it's not even close to being finished," Joan Walker, senior campaign representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign, said in the press release. "If they were smart, they would quit throwing good money after bad and walk away from this fracked gas disaster like Duke Energy and Dominion Energy did with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline."
- With Treetop Protest, 61-Year-Old Red Terry Leads Fight Against ... ›
- FERC Releases 'Utterly Insufficient Review' for Mountain Valley ... ›
- FERC Halts Work on Mountain Valley Pipeline - EcoWatch ›
- Court Orders Controversial Pipeline to Halt Construction Over West ... ›
New fossils uncovered in Argentina may belong to one of the largest animals to have walked on Earth.
- Groundbreaking Fossil Shows Prehistoric 15-Foot Reptile Tried to ... ›
- Skull of Smallest Known Dinosaur Found in 99-Million-Year Old Amber ›
- Giant 'Toothed' Birds Flew Over Antarctica 40 Million Years Ago ... ›
- World's Second-Largest Egg Found in Antarctica Probably Hatched ... ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
A federal court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration's rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
- Pruitt Guts the Clean Power Plan: How Weak Will the New EPA ... ›
- It's Official: Trump Administration to Repeal Clean Power Plan ... ›
- 'Deadly' Clean Power Plan Replacement ›
Trending
By Jonathan Runstadler and Kaitlin Sawatzki
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have found coronavirus infections in pet cats and dogs and in multiple zoo animals, including big cats and gorillas. These infections have even happened when staff were using personal protective equipment.
Gorillas have been affected by human viruses in the past and are susceptible to the coronavirus. Thomas Fuhrmann via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
- Gorillas in San Diego Test Positive for Coronavirus - EcoWatch ›
- Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Overwhelmed During the Pandemic. In ... ›
- Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's ... ›
- Utah Mink Becomes First Wild Animal to Test Positive for Coronavirus ›
By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
- Biden Announces $2 Trillion Climate and Green Recovery Plan ... ›
- How Biden and Kerry Can Rebuild America's Climate Leadership ... ›
- Biden's EPA Pick Michael Regan Urged to Address Environmental ... ›
- How Joe Biden's Climate Plan Compares to the Green New Deal ... ›