Friday, December 23, 2005

A Christmas Wish for Broadwater: Say Goodbye

My Christmas wish this year is for all the nice people who work for the Shell-TransCanada disaster called Broadwater – John Hritcko and Amy Kelley and Joel Rinebold, the Broadwater consultant who managed to get himself appointed to the Long Island Sound Study’s citizens advisory committee – to pack up and go away. Instead of filing a formal application with FERC after the New Year, realize that the huge profits Shell and TransCanada stand to make, and the big fees and bonuses you stand to be paid are not worth the fight, not worth the bad will created, and not worth the integrity of Long Island Sound.

John and Amy and Joel and the others who want to use a public resource (the Sound) to increase the profits of these two big energy companies should realize that there’s really nobody around here who wants them to succeed, and that if they do succeed it will be at a tremendous cost to the region.

The amount of time and energy and expense already incurred to fight your bad proposal has already been tremendous. So do us a favor and cut our losses. Drop your proposal and leave us in peace.

In case that appeal doesn’t work, Broadwater opponents might find it useful to have a compendium of Broadwater posts written here over the past year or so. I’ve created direct links to almost all of them – 35 in all – and arranged them chronologically on the lower right side of this page.

I did this partly out of guilt after an anonymous commenter said the other day that all I do is complain and it might be more useful if I pitched in and DID something to help environmental groups. I responded that writing is what I do, but in the spirit of doing more, I’ve compiled the list of Broadwater links. You’d be amazed at how tedious it was, and I can only imagine how tedious it must be to read them all. An added disadvantage, which I haven’t figured out how to solve, is that many of the original links to newspaper stories are down because typically after a number of days the newspapers want you to pay for archived material. For a while I started copying and saving on a disk the stories I was linking to. But that proved to be a big enough pain that I stopped after about two months. I might start again but even if I do, it’s a help to me but not to readers of this site.

Nevertheless, there’s some useful stuff in the links. You can follow Broadwater’s arguments over the months, for example. You can also review the arguments that opponents have made, and see which ones make sense and which seem silly.

So scroll up and read. And let’s hope that all our Christmas wishes come true.

1 Comments:

Blogger Sam said...

I've been involved in LNG shipping around the periphery. The real qeustion is how to warm that stuff from minus 300 to room temperature. There are several technologies. Note that if seawater jacketing is used to warm the LNG, the result would be to COOL that part of the Long Island Sound.

Perhaps I missed the links and the argument, but LNG is part of the mix of stuff we need to consider in the future, even as a transportation fuel. So, what's the beef? /Sam

10:30 PM  

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