Gas lighting slows our transition to renewable energy

Anti-pipeline protesters stand outside the Stonewall Jackson Hotel and Conference Center on Sunday, October 21, 2018, during the opening night of the Governor's Summit on Rural Prosperity.

GAS LIGHT. The perfect title for a book about the failure of the largest, most expensive, unpermitted, fracked gas pipeline in American history: the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Jonathan Mingle’s new 282-page thriller chronicles the true story of a six-year struggle.

Augusta County residents would have to traverse more miles of the 42-inch-diameter pipeline than any other county along its 600-mile, three-state length.

Mingle’s book GASLIGHT: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Future it reads like a James Michener novel, weaving the stories of the passions of the people along the pipeline’s path with the history of the place. Mingle connects the dots between what was happening in Washington before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and what was happening in the courts where many permit disputes were taking place.

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Gaslighting is the act of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own benefit. The term was inspired by a 1938 play and a 1944 film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman, whose heroine marries a man who tricks her into believing she has lost her mind so that he can steal her money.

Gaslighting is exactly what Dominion and Duke Energy did to promote their fracked gas pipeline, and it’s the perfect title for Mingle’s work.

One of the gaslighting tricks during the six-year fight was to assure Dominion that fracked gas was needed. But the truth was, Mingle writes, that “nearly 80 percent of that gas went to power plants owned by subsidiaries of Dominion and Duke.”

But that wasn’t the greatest gaslighting trick. The greatest gaslighting trick was performed by our own Department of Environmental Quality and the state Air Pollution Control Board, whose representatives assured that the population of Union Hill in Buckingham County was not predominantly black. They claimed the population was less than 40 percent, when in fact it was 84 percent. The residents of Union Hill saw through this trick and took the matter to court. And they won.

This case, Friends of Buckingham against state air pollution control, is now one of the best examples of environmental justice in American history. Mingle expertly writes a gripping story.

Stories come alive. From the Augusta County Board of Zoning Appeals, from which Dominion tried to obtain a special permit to build a pipe depot in Deerfield, to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Dominion argued that America’s historic Appalachian Trail was not land.

In denying the existence of the Dominion pipe yard, George Coyner, chairman of the county’s Zoning Board of Appeals, said, “It’s hard to support something that no one supports.”

In the Supreme Court case ACP and U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture RiverDominion’s lawyer repeated to the judges, “A trail is not land, a trail is not land.”

“Nobody makes that distinction in real life,” Justice Elena Kagan dissented.

Fracked gas pipelines. Coal-fired power plants. The fossil fuel binge is coming to a frustrating and dangerous end. Mingle tells the story of Claudius Crozet, the French engineer who designed the Blue Ridge Tunnel for the railroad nearly two centuries ago. Crozet advised the Virginia Board of Public Works to stop investing in canals because transporting goods by rail would be much more efficient and cheaper. The board didn’t listen and continued to invest in canal construction, which “ruined Virginia’s finances and haunted its politics well into the 20th century,” Mingle writes.

Through many voices in GAS LIGHTMingle instructs us that we continue to build “channels” for fossil fuels when we should be increasing our use of renewable energy and storage. The term natural gas itself is a form of gas lighting. Natural gas is methane, a fossil fuel that is four times more potent as a greenhouse gas than coal. Let’s stop being enlightened by the fossil fuel industry and enter the era of 100% renewable energy.