FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – June 29, 2021
Contact: Karen Feridun, Berks Gas Truth, 610-678-7726, berksgastruth@gmail.com
We Won’t Win the War on Climate Change with Rulings like SCOTUS’ on PennEast
Condemning the Planet to Climate Chaos Is Not “In the Public Interest”
As a crippling heat wave provides undeniable evidence that time is running out to address what President Joe Biden calls the “existential crisis of our time”, the Supreme Court, with his support, ruled today in favor of PennEast in its case against the state of New Jersey over the state’s right to protect its public lands from eminent domain.
The case boils down to a definition of what is and is not in the public interest. The bar is set so low for making that determination that PennEast was able to justify its need by saying it had customers for its pipeline, therefore the pipeline is needed. Many of those customers are the PennEast partner companies’ affiliates. It’s called self-dealing and it’s legal.
“The time has come to recognize that saving the planet is in the public interest,” said Karen Feridun, Founder of Berks Gas Truth, who organized the first community meetings to oppose the pipeline seven years ago. “Leaked details from the IPCC Sixth Assessment on climate tipping points tell a bleak story. The IEA didn’t need those new developments to conclude last month that we need to stop investing in fossil fuel projects now. That’s what’s to be done in the public interest. Letting a private corporation fatten its own bottom line by building an unnecessary pipeline and using eminent domain to rob public and private property along the way is the absolute opposite of acting in the public interest.”
“We are out of time for empty rhetoric from Biden who supported Line 3 in addition to PennEast and whose administration is still promoting liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and a host of other fossil-fuel-friendly projects,” continued Feridun. “We are out of time for a flawed and outmoded Natural Gas Act that allows companies to manipulate the definition of what is in our interest and for a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that always uses the tortured definition to justify its rubber stamping of new infrastructure. And we are out of time for judges, members of Congress, and others throughout the government to be the supporting players in this theater of the absurd.”
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