From Wild Virginia, see below for a press release entitled, “40 Groups Call for Fair and Open Federal Review of Mountain Valley Pipeline: Forest Service and BLM Must Not Rush Environmental Reviews.”
“As stated in the letter, the groups “are deeply concerned that . . . the Forest Service already has a thumb on the scales by proposing ‘to amend the Jefferson National Forest Land Management Plan as necessary to allow for the MVP to cross the Jefferson National Forest.’” Such an amendment to the Forest management plan, by which all other parties must abide, for the benefit of one destructive project, would allow environmental degradation in the Forest that is clearly inconsistent with standards laid out in the JNF management plan.”
Also:
“There is an important principle at stake here,” says Karenna Gore, executive director of the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. “The government should not hand over public land to private interests who damage it — all for the sake of a project that not only does
not benefit the public, but could do considerable harm. The communities who live within a natural landscape are those who know it best, and they deserve to have their voices heard about all the dimensions of value and meaning that might not be cared about or counted by outside interests. Ethics must inform development, and the ethical course of action in this case is to respect local communities’ relationship to the natural world they live in.”
Exactly. Also, of course, in order for humanity to keep global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius or lower, we simply cannot and MUST NOT build any new, long-term fossil fuel infrastructure such as this major fracked-gas pipeline. And then there are the financial/economic considerations, namely that clean energy is getting cheaper all the time, while it’s quite likely that many of these fossil fuel projects will end up being “stranded” due to becoming uneconomical in the next decade or so. In short, the Mountain Valley Pipeline is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons and should not go forward.
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