Surprise, Surprise - Conservative Landowners In LA, SC, TX, Pissed Off By Pipeline Plans

[hatrack]

Goose, gander, etc.

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Driving through dusty back roads, Tonya Bonitatibus is flanked by black swamplands filled with jagged trunks and the knobbled knees of thousand-year-old cypress trees. “This is absolutely where our heritage lies. This is us,” says Bonitatibus, the Savannah Riverkeeper who has led the anti-pipeline movement here. The briny water is corrosive — a bad combination for steel and lead piping, she says. And the marshes are especially crucial because they form the river’s lymphatic system, as Bonitatibus explains — the liver and kidneys that clean out the toxins of a waterway streaming into countless communities along its 300-mile route.

Kinder Morgan revealed plans for the Palmetto Pipeline in late 2014. Soon after, the Texas company’s surveyors began roaming South Carolina swamps and Georgia woods like these, promising the project would increase competition and lower utility costs. At first, their presence barely registered, and in April 2015 the company stated confidently it would be pumping millions of gallons of gas down to the Sunshine State as early as July 2017. But as spring gave way to the summer swelter, the billion-dollar pet project incensed locals, particularly after Kinder Morgan employees who were caught trespassing on the family land of conservative media mogul Billy Morris boasted to police: “You can’t stop the pipeline. They have enough money to push the pipeline right through the country.”

The backlash was fierce, despite the company’s public apology (and a $30,000 donation to a local school). Republican Gov. Nathan Deal and state House Majority Leader Jon Burns, who owned property along the pipeline’s route, spoke forcefully against the project, and the Georgia Department of Transportation rejected the Palmetto Pipeline proposal, claiming that it demonstrated neither a “public convenience or necessity.” And in South Carolina, where eminent domain laws were less clear, the attorney general weighed in with an opinion granting pipeline companies the right to eminent domain for “natural gas, water and electricity” — but, crucially, not oil, and not necessarily for businesses that serve private customers.

Property rights, rather than environmental ones, are increasingly forming the brunt of such arguments against pipelines — and not just in Georgia and South Carolina, which have recently passed laws backing landowners. Just three days before the crucial New Hampshire presidential primary last year, the Union Leader reported that 627 of 836 property owners in the Granite State had denied Kinder Morgan access to their land for a planned natural gas line. Two statehouse bills soon followed (ultimately, they failed). Similar concerns have spread from west Texas to Arkansas and Tennessee, and are much more common “over the last few years, as pipeline takings have grown in importance since the fracking boom began,” Somin says.

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http://www.ozy.com/politics-and-power/the-pipeline-fight-launched-from-the-right/77073

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[elleng]

2. 'Property rights, rather than environmental ones, are increasingly forming the brunt

of such arguments against pipelines — and not just in Georgia and South Carolina, which have recently passed laws backing landowners.'