It’s Getting Hot In Here

Yesterday, the fight against new fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest rose to a new level.  For years, a remarkable coalition of activists – ranging from wilderness advocates, to small farmers and timber growers, to college students and climate organizers – has been fighting proposals by giant energy companies to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) into our region.  LNG is a foreign fossil fuel extracted from through basically the same processes as oil, with all or most of the attendant social and environmental costs.  Thanks to the energy-intensive process of supercooling the gas into liquid form so it can be shipped across the ocean and then re-gassified once it reaches its destination, LNG also has a carbon footprint much larger than North American natural gas.  Finally, the pipelines associated with LNG terminals would cut through salmon-bearing streams and Mount Hood wilderness areas, while decimating small farms and tree plantations across Oregon, all in order to deliver gas to the mammoth California market.

In response to this travesty against the climate, natural ecosystems, and the property rights of Oregon landowners, activists on Thursday launched a major campaign targeting Northwest Natural Gas – the one company that may stand to benefit more than any other from opening Northwest markets to LNG.  The new Hey! Northwest Natural campaign is now pressuring the monopoly gas company to pull its support for the Palomar Pipeline, which would connect the proposed Bradwood LNG Terminal to an existing gas pipeline pumping gas to California.

Teams of student activists in Portland, Eugene, and Forest Grove took to their communities yesterday to spread the word about the new campaign, chalking up the sidewalks to let passersby how Northwest Natural is chipping off consumers.  As a group of us went to work on the Pacific University campus in Forest Grove, a member of the campus security stopped by to make sure we weren’t doing anything illegal.  “Oh,” he said, smiling, when I explained that this was a student project designed to raise awareness of environmental issues in the area, “is this about those natural gas pipelines?  Good luck!”  Clearly, word at Pacific University was already out about the destructive impacts of LNG.

However, chalking sidewalks is only the first, small step for this campaign that will unite communities across Oregon and beyond to stop reckless, climate-costly energy speculating by one of our region’s largest energy companies.  This weekend, the campaign will begin building an even stronger network of student activists at PowerShift West, where we’ll be leading a workshop on NW Natural accountability.  Find out more at the Hey! Northwest Natural home page, and stay in the loop about this exciting campaign by becoming a fan of our Facebook page.  At a time when the whole country is (or should be) struggling to break our addiction to fossil fuels, we simply can’t afford to import a new, foreign carbon-based fuel into the market.  This effort is just beginning, and Northwest Natural will not be hearing the last of us for a while.