No Gas for the Wicked

Instead of building pipelines or running barges to deliver gas, just use less

By Renee Kjartan, Free Press contributor

ov. Gary Locke is scheduled to say yea or nay soon to a proposed pipeline across the Cascade Range. The Olympic Pipe Line Company, of Renton, owned by oil giants Texaco, ARCO and GATX, wants to build a 227-mile pipeline across several important wilderness areas including Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Wenatchee National Forest and the Ginko Petrified Forest. The conduit would bring gasoline, diesel fuel, and aviation jet fuel from refineries in Puget Sound to the eastern part of Washington.

One might think that a year after the Kyoto conference on global warming, which called for reducing the burning of fossil fuels--and seven years after the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, which also called for reducing greenhouse gases--the entire country would be well into a program of cutting fuel use and finding alternatives to fossil fuels. Instead, fuel use is wildly increasing around the country.

"There is no question that if we had more fuel conservation, we would not need this project [the cross-Cascades pipeline]," says Frank Hopf, Olympic's vice president and manager. "If we want to conserve, the price of the product has to go up, or we have to have artificial controls. The economic forces [as they are today] aren't going to make for fuel economy."

Many environmentalists oppose the pipeline, including WashPIRG, the public-interest action and research group [www.pirg.org; 5200 University Way NE, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98105] Cascade-Columbia Alliance, Washington Environmental Council, Trout Unlimited, the Tulalip Indian Nation, and others.

The alternative to the pipeline, continuing to transport the fuels to the eastern part of the state via the Columbia River, is also environmentally harmful. Hauling the fuel by barge harms the river because the oil-laden barges need dams that create slow-moving, deep waters. Salmon, the endangered icon of the Pacific Northwest, need swift, shallow currents to help them fulfill their long-distance travels. The barges themselves, like almost any traffic on the water, leave contaminants and, often, spills that sicken and kill birds, fish, and other estuarine life.

When the oil is removed from the pipeline in Portland after its 300-mile trip south from Anacortes or Ferndale in the existing pipeline, some 40,000 gallons of gasoline escape into Portland's air, in the form of vapors, as the oil is loaded onto barges for the trip east to Pasco or Spokane, Hopf says. If the entire trip could be via pipeline, this environmental desecration would not occur. He adds that thousands of gallons of fuel vapors are also belched from barges in Anacortes from the oil that doesn't go south by pipeline. As for transporting the fuel by rail or truck, Hopf says this is too risky.

But is a pipeline an acceptable alternative to barges? "Oil pipelines leak the equivalent of an ExxonValdez spill every year in the U.S.," according to WashPIRG. WashPIRG adds that building an oil pipeline through the Cascades "would be courting ecological disaster."

Must the public choose a pipeline across the Cascades to save the salmon or oil-laden barges plying Puget Sound and the Columbia River to save the mountains? Cascadia Times, usually a pro-environmental newspaper, came out for the pipeline, saying this would be better for the salmon. But the answer must be--neither a pipeline nor increased barging of oil.

Having it neither way

The 1997 Kyoto conference agreed on the danger posed by global warming and the continued heavy use of fossil fuels. The 38 participating industrial nations agreed to reduce their emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States, which emits more than 20 percent of the world's carbon dioxide from fossil fuels (the main culprit in global warming) agreed to a 7 percent cut. The European Union agreed to an 8 percent cut and Japan agreed to a 6 percent cut.

President Clinton and the rest of the governing figures in the U.S. have done almost nothing to promote the needed steps of reducing carbon emissions. According to Cascadia Times, shipments of oil on the Columbia River increased from 400,000 gallons a day in 1990 to 1.2 million gallons per day in 1995--a three-fold increase. Area refineries have increased production from 524,000 barrels a day in 1991 to 553,000 barrels per day in 1995. The refineries can increase capacity without filing an Environmental Impact Statement if the increases stay below a certain level.

The heating of the earth (1998 was the hottest year on record), the melting of the glaciers, the burning of the Amazon and other tropical forests, and the intensification of destructive floods and storms are the indisputable consequence of the burning of fossil fuels, according to University of Washington professor Richard Gammon. The professor of chemistry and oceanography told a Seattle conference on global warming recently that continued climate change will be with us "essentially forever." One consequence, he said, is that the earth may one day look like Jurassic Park, with crocodiles in the Arctic, the destruction of many species, the destabilization of ecosystems, and the spread of destructive pests including weeds and disease-bearing insects.

The coal and oil that are in the ground should stay in the ground, Gammon said. He added that the average American puts twice the weight of a car's worth of carbon into the air every year. Carbon traps heat and warms the earth. Gammon's research program is directed to the measurement and interpretation of the cycles of climate-forcing trace gases in the atmosphere and the ocean.

What can people do? The people of Puget Sound can take matters into their own hands, writing to Gov. Locke and to their federal and state legislators demanding that the pipeline not be built, that barge traffic be escorted by tugs in order to prevent spills (see accompanying article), and, most of all, that the government immediately provide incentives to reduce the use of fossil fuels and taxes to penalize their heavy use.

People can also join and support environmental groups that work for a cleaner environment, for alternate modes of transportation, for an end to massive road-building, for preservation of forests, and for "smart growth" that emphasizes dense developments that make public transportation more efficient. People can also work to get their own state, city, town, or district to "ratify" the Kyoto treaty and go on a "carbon diet" despite the inaction in Washington, D.C. Nearly 300 cities or municipalities around the world have already done this.

Some environmental groups advise working and playing closer to home whenever possible. Airplane travel is particularly fuelish, they point out, using some 40 percent more fuel to move a person in the air than on the ground. People can dramatically slash their discretionary driving; drive fuel-efficient cars; buy locally grown and locally made products to cut back on the transportation factor; and reduce discretionary consumption. Buy only what one really needs can help the environment because all that "stuff" takes energy to produce and to transport.

Other groups advise people to turn their heat down to 60 degrees when they are home, and even lower when they are not home. Many people are also conserving fuel by turning down the temperature of their water heaters (one woman said she turns on her water heater for only three hours a day); washing their dishes by hand rather than using their dish washers; and drying their clothes on racks instead of in clothes dryers.

At what today would be considered the extreme, some people have gotten rid of their cars, refuse to go anywhere in them, and have torn up their driveways, using the space to plant trees and vegetables. They are questioning all uses of fuels, asking even if every home needs its own refrigerator. [After home heating and hot-water heating, the refrigerator consumes the most energy in most houses.]

Clearly, with global warming a reality that cannot be escaped, a pipeline across the Cascade Range must be opposed, and the environmentally degrading transportation of fuel by barge must also be greatly reduced--by insisting that fuel conservation measures be implemented immediately on a national, local, and individual level.