Saturday, January 21, 2012

The Illusion of Environmental Protection

By Press Action

All branches of government, at the federal, state and municipal levels, insist on letting big corporations get their way at the expense of the environment. Nowhere will you find majority support among the ruling class for slowing down the destruction of the Earth, let alone entertaining the notion of downsizing industrial culture.

Occasionally, though, a rogue voice of sanity will be heard in the corridors of power. Last week, for example, a Pennsylvania appeals court judge filed a powerful dissenting opinion in a case about the devastation of forests and streams.

The case involved an electric utility company, PPL Electric Utilities Corp., which wanted permission to build a high-voltage electric transmission line that would cut a 100-foot-wide corridor through a pristine woodland preserve and a stream that is home to a number of cold water fish species.

The company, a subsidiary of PPL Corp. (formerly known as Pennsylvania Power and Light), argued that the environmental intrusion was necessary to meet the future electric service needs in the southern part of Lehigh Valley. PPL argued that it had reached this conclusion by using a planning process that was supposed to assure the public that it will “supply electricity to all customer loads in a reliable, economic and environmentally acceptable manner.”

Springfield Township, a Pennsylvania community affected by PPL’s electric transmission project, challenged the company’s conclusion, arguing that there is nothing environmentally acceptable about the proposal. The township went to court to fight the line after the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission approved the project. But on Jan. 13, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania upheld the PUC’s approval of the transmission line project.

The court’s decision was not unanimous. Among the seven-judge panel, Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt was the lone voice of reason. In her dissenting opinion, Leavitt said the Pennsylvania PUC has allowed its regulation of high-voltage electric transmission lines “to devolve into the worst kind of regulation.” (Click here for a pdf copy of the court’s majority opinion and Leavitt’s dissenting opinion.)

The PUC’s regulation, Leavitt argued, “creates busywork for corporate and government bureaucrats; billable hours for consultants and lawyers; and the illusion of environmental protection. In the end, however, the regulation does not advance the substantive goal of preserving” what Pennsylvania law describes as “public natural resources [that] are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come.”

Leavitt charged that the PUC “erred and abused its discretion in finding that PPL’s proposed [high-voltage] electric transmission line will have a minimum adverse environmental impact because it failed to follow the mandate of its regulation that it consider the available alternative.”

Springfield Township’s engineering expert, Peter Lanzalotta, explained that PPL could quadruple its transformer capacity at existing substations, creating “considerably more expansion capacity … than PPL would need by 2014 or for many years thereafter.” An alternative proposal, known as the Springfield Functional Configuration, could address the regional electric reliability issues without the need to construct a new high-voltage electric transmission line or a new electric substation. With minor modifications, the Springfield Functional Configuration also would be less costly than PPL’s proposal.

In her dissenting opinion, Leavitt noted that PPL was well past the planning stages when it submitted its application for the transmission project to the PUC. The company knew that the PUC would rubber-stamp the proposal, so it went ahead and purchased property, removing the home that sat on the property; purchased 85 acres for its proposed substation; negotiated rights of way with property owners along its preferred route; and worked with a municipal golf course to run the new high-voltage electric transmission line across its property.

PPL invested all of this money in the project long before it received regulatory approval from the Pennsylvania PUC. That says a lot because investor-owned public utilities are generally conservative spenders when they believe their shareholders could be on the hook for millions in expenses. In this case, of course, the residents served by PPL will be forced to pay for the unnecessary transmission project through higher monthly electric bills. PPL could invest in the property acquisitions and rights-of-way negotiations, with full knowledge that the PUC would approve the project and the company’s right to recover the project’s costs in its rates.

Leavitt explained that PPL rejected the Springfield Functional Configuration on the grounds of cost and the greater flexibility of its preferred route. “By its own admission, PPL did not factor environmental impact into that evaluation,” the judge said. “In the absence of that consideration, PPL cannot show that its proposed solution was a reasonable one.”

Leavitt rebuked the PUC, saying it “failed in its duty to avoid, where feasible, an adverse environmental impact.”

“In the absence of any environmental evaluation of the Springfield Functional Configuration [the less environmentally intrusive alternative], PPL did not prove that the construction of a 100-foot corridor through the Springfield Resource Protection District and deforestation of 44 acres of land was an unavoidable insult to the environment,” she said.

Relatively speaking, the PPL energy infrastructure project is small. It will include the construction of a 7-mile transmission line that will be operated at 69 kilovolts, with the capability of running at 138 kV in the future.  Across the United States, electric companies are planning to build mammoth transmission line projects at much higher voltage that will travel hundreds of miles through environmentally sensitive regions.

In fact, President Barack Obama launched a program last October to speed up the permitting process—which, of course, will lead to environmental protection getting short shrift—for several of these huge, high-voltage, cross-state electric transmission lines.

“The President wants to get America working again. He is committed to cutting red tape and making immediate investments to put people to work,” Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, said in an Oct. 5, 2011, statement about the fast-tracking of seven proposed high-voltage electric transmission lines.

When a government official, who works for a department or agency with “environmental” in its title, begins talking about “cutting red tape,” it is time to get worried and angry. And then, once you’ve calmed down, it is time to prepare yourself to fight yet another pending assault on the environment.

In a Jan. 17 speech, Obama reiterated his CEQ chair’s talking points, stating the nation “can’t be bogged down by red tape and bureaucracy if we’re actually going to get every bang for the buck. Building on administration efforts to streamline permitting, I issued an executive order to expedite review of job-creating infrastructure projects.”

The huge infrastructure projects getting pushed by the Obama administration will have devastating impacts on the environment. But even small projects, such as the electric transmission project rubber-stamped by the Pennsylvania PUC, will result in dramatic impacts on ecosystems. As noted by Judge Leavitt, the PPL project will cause the deforestation of 44 acres of land.

If only there were more people like Judge Leavitt, a Republican (yes, a Republican, who was re-elected last November to another 10-year term on the court), in positions of power, then there might be some hope for stemming the global environmental crisis. But the people need not wait patiently for more Mary Hannah Leavitts to assume positions of power. In fact, the U.S. political and economic system would never let people with views on the environment similar to Leavitt’s gain majority control.

Instead, the people must digest the wise words of Leavitt—and the words of others with sane minds—and then use those words as a guide as they go out and take the necessary action to put a stop to the never-ending environmental destruction.

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