Earlier this month, the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company announced its intention to build the South’s largest gas pipeline in more than a decade. The Southeast Supply Enhancement project, as the company calls it, would run from Virginia down through the Carolinas and Georgia before swinging west to Alabama, right through the heart of the American South.
This was not astonishing news to anyone whose light bill comes from a Southern utility.
A renewable energy revolution is unfolding across the globe faster than anyone dared to hope, but Southern officials, many of whom cut their political teeth on coal, have been cussedly resistant to it. Nobody loves a fossil-fuel expansion project more than a red-state politician loves a fossil-fuel expansion project.
In the same way that “clean coal” is a ridiculous rebranding of the dirtiest energy source we have, “natural” gas is a misnomer used by politicians and industry officials eager to obscure its true identity. The Union of Concerned Scientists instead uses “methane,” “fossil gas” and “gas” as interchangeable terms for this greenhouse gas which, in its first 20 years of reaching the atmosphere, has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. “Even though CO2 has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term,” according to the Environmental Defense Fund.
The problem with gas is not simply that it’s a fossil fuel or that gas pipelines routinely leak and can explode. And it’s not simply that gas is a human health and environmental nightmare. Perhaps the most damaging problem with gas pipelines is that they permit the construction of new gas-fired power plants that will be in service for decades. Just as the planet hurtles toward an irreversible climate tipping point, these plants will lock the South into reliance on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
You’d think such facts would give state officials pause before permitting the extension of gas pipelines through communities whose safety they are charged with protecting. But this reality has no impact at all in states controlled by a Republican supermajority.
Let’s take the Tennessee General Assembly as a case in point. As in other red states, our legislature has taken misinformation rebranding to new levels, legally defining methane as “clean energy.” It has passed pre-emptive legislation that prevents local governments from rejecting a pipeline or even regulating its safety. In Tennessee, anyone who disrupts the construction of a pipeline has committed a Class C felony.
“The gas-fired fever dream gripping the South is completely at odds with the need to decarbonize how we get our energy,” said the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Greg Buppert. “Natural gas — methane — isn’t some climate elixir. It’s just another dirty fossil fuel that pollutes communities and heats up the planet.”
The so-called Southeast Supply Enhancement pipeline won’t reach Tennessee, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe from the dangers and destructions of pipeline and methane-plant construction. As WPLN’s environment reporter Caroline Eggers reported in December, the Tennessee Valley Authority — which provides electricity to most of Tennessee and parts of six other Southern states — has built or approved eight new gas plants just in the last three years. The T.V.A. is building out more new methane-power infrastructure than any other utility in the United States and has locked most of the local utility companies it serves into 20-year contracts.
We don’t have time for political obfuscation. We don’t have time for our utilities’ stubborn reliance on fossil fuels, despite their dangers. We certainly don’t have time for state officials to ignore their constituents’ choices regarding energy sources in their own communities. We don’t have time, and everyone, including red-state residents, knows that.
If you don’t believe me, watch what happens whenever the T.V.A. announces the route of a new gas pipeline or the construction of a new gas power plant.
Last summer, here in Tennessee, both the Cheatham County Commission and the Ashland City Council voted to reject the T.V.A.’s proposed gas power plant and 12 miles of pipeline in Cheatham County. “Every citizen I’ve spoken to and every elected official I have spoken to is opposed to this,” Gerald Greer, the vice mayor of Ashland City, told WZTV in Nashville.
“Constituents we support do not want this facility in Cheatham County because of noise pollution, possible contamination of drinking water, effects on wildlife, the list goes on and on,” said the Fourth District commissioner, Bill Powers. “We are going to try, tooth and nail, to fight this 100 percent.”
Last week, representatives from the T.V.A. were back in Cheatham County to hear residents’ concerns at a public meeting. Primed by Preserve Cheatham County, a new advocacy organization with an active Facebook group, as well as by long-established local-community Facebook groups that can disseminate information quickly, the bipartisan, standing-room-only crowd was more than merely concerned. Considerably more. Stomps and whistles and cheers broke out when two residents unfurled a giant drop cloth painted with the words “Not Welcome” and held it up before T.V.A. representatives.
Cheatham County is a largely bucolic part of Middle Tennessee, with small towns and farms that go back for generations. Politically, it is a very red part of the state. But it is also the site of a 20,000-acre state wildlife management area, and the new neighborhoods popping up around the interstates are becoming what amounts to suburbs of Nashville.
The coalition opposing the T.V.A.’s plans is motivated by a host of concerns, not all of them environmental. “We’ve been able to come together regardless of why we’re fighting,” Stephanie Henry, one of the founding members of Preserve Cheatham County, told me. “There are so many viewpoints, but we’re all able to come together and make a united stand.”
Ms. Henry understands the long odds her community is fighting. “Legally we’ve got nothing,” she said. “It’s an uphill battle, and our chances may be slim, but if we don’t try, then our chances are none.”
Given the extraordinary indifference with which Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly routinely regard their own voters and the way the T.V.A. has doubled down on fossil fuels, the residents of Cheatham County — like so many other communities fighting methane expansion in our region — are engaged in nothing less than a David-and-Goliath battle.
As always in such battles, the odds are heavily stacked in favor of the giant. But it’s worth remembering how that ancient story actually ends.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”