Higher Natural Gas Prices Can't Be Separated from Old Battles over Pipeline

Remember that company from Texas, Kinder Morgan, that proposed in 2014 to bring bountiful Marcellus Shale gas from Pennsylvania to New England via a new pipeline across northern Massachusetts?  

Remember how Massachusetts basically told Kinder Morgan to get stuffed? 

(The list of influential politicians willing to support the plan had zero names on it.) 

Remember how so many of our leaders questioned the rationale for the project: that we needed more natural gas and a new pipeline was required to deliver it? 

Focus now on the present.  New Englanders are facing steep price increases for natural gas and other fuels.  On Sept. 20, Bloomberg reported, "Natural gas futures have been soaring, and they're set to get especially high in New England and California in the coming months."

Available inventories of gas, Bloomberg explained, "are tight to the point where a harsh winter could mean a supply crunch.  Any shortages would have an outsized impact on New England, where limited pipeline capacity makes it harder to bring gas from Appalachia."

In its latest Winter Energy Market and Reliability Assessment, ISO New England, which oversees the regional power grid, noted:

"Natural gas availability is more of a concern in New England due to the size of New England's peak winter natural gas demand combined with the limited number of pipelines and available pipeline capacity into the region...New England is served by three major natural gas importing pipelines; however, despite a few expansions, this capacity has remained largely unchanged for decades."

In April 2016, Kinder Morgan suspended efforts to win the necessary approvals for its $3.3 billion Northeast Energy Direct (NED) pipeline project, citing inadequate commitments from prospective gas customers.

In response, the Governor Baker administration said it believed the company's decision "highlights the pressing need to secure cost-effective hydropower and other renewable energy resources to meet the growing demand for affordable energy in Massachusetts and New England."  That was a reference to the plan to connect Massachusetts to hydroelectric power sources in Canada, which would involve new electric transmission lines within a 145-mile-long corridor cut through untouched forests in Maine.  

On Nov. 2, Maine voters approved a ballot question opposing this plan and requiring the Maine legislature to approve projects of this nature.  

Somewhere, Paul LePage must have been smiling.  

LePage was governor of  Maine when Kinder Morgan was pushing for the NED pipeline through Massachusetts and he supported it as heartily as Baker now supports hydropower from Quebec because it would have supplied a lot more gas to Maine and given a much needed boost to his state's economy.

Mainers were, of course, aware in 2016 that Massachusetts did not concern itself with how its actions relative to the pipeline might crush their ambitions, which leads to this question:  Was the Maine ballot question against Quebec hydropower transmission lines karmic payback for the loss of the NED pipeline?

Charlie Baker certainly hopes not.  

Asked on Nov. 4 if he saw the passage of the anti-hydropower referendum as the death knell for that project, Baker said, "No, I don't see it as dead."  There's talk of challenging the referendum in court as "unconstitutional," but details on such a move have yet to emerge.

Best Contact Tracing Tool Was Out of Bounds. What About in Next Pandemic?

The administration of Governor Charlie Baker has decided to shut down the Massachusetts Community Tracing Collaborative the end of this year and turn over all COVID-19 contact tracing to local boards of health.  To facilitate the transition, the administration will award more than $15 million in grants to the local boards.  It was during the second month of the pandemic here, April 2020, that the collaborative was set up to limit the spread of COVID-19 by contacting persons who were likely exposed to infected persons and getting them tested.

From April 2020 through nearly the end of October 2021, the state's Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) reports that the collaborative and local boards of health traced and found contacts for 1.1 million COVID-19 cases.  (The boards traced about 35 percent of all cases.)

The agency points out that, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was "limited (COVID-19) testing capability, minimal therapeutic interventions and no vaccines," whereas today, "...Massachusetts is a national leader in vaccine administration and free testing, and (has) the second lowest COVID-19 hospitalization rate and case positivity rates in the nation."

As of Nov. 4, Massachusetts has had 858,000 cases of COVID-19 and 19,046 deaths from the disease.  Overall, our state coped very well with this unprecedented public health emergency.  

Yes, we can be proud of how Massachusetts has dealt with the pandemic.  But that cannot mean that any errors, oversights and deficiencies in our pandemic performance should be minimized or ignored.  

Instead, we should be examining all of the ways our state and nation could have prepared better for, and responded better to, COVID-19.  Especially, we should pay close attention to the beginning of the pandemic, the period when the chances of containing the disease were the highest.  

Much has already been said and written on this subject -- but not nearly as much as will be said and written on it in the coming years... 

Exercising the blogger's prerogative, I'm going to hold up for renewed consideration a column written several months ago by a friend of mine, Tom Kelly, which appeared in CommonWealth Magazine under the headline, "Safety should trump privacy in next pandemic.  Phone geo-tracking data could save thousands of lives."  

"Historians of the future," Kelly wrote, "will not excuse the many ways we made the pandemic worse than it had to be; for example, how we failed to foresee the critical role that communications technology could have played in halting the spread of the coronavirus, and how we failed to establish beforehand the necessary legal and logistical structures to exploit that technology when it was needed most."

Those historians, he continued, "...will ask why, when Americans first started falling ill with COVID, we were not able or even willing to use geo-tracking data in those patients' smart phones to trace everyone they may have been in contact with and to get those 'contacts' quickly tested and isolated?"

Kelly has a provocative thesis: We have been acting throughout this crisis as if privacy rights are immutable, but they are not.  "Privacy rights can and should be adjusted -- temporarily -- in a true national health emergency," he wrote.

Here's a key passage from his column:

"...we need to be talking now about adopting new laws and policies that would allow government agencies, in an explicitly defined health emergency, to access personal information that has the potential, in the aggregate, to prevent deaths on a massive scale.

"The laws and policies I'm talking about would need to have strong, built-in privacy protections concerning the collection, transmission, and analysis of digital data.  These things would be difficult to write and enact.  But, with memories fresh in our minds of all the damage COVID has wrought, I believe we could get it done."

Kelly supported his thesis by citing the leadership meeting convened by Biogen in Boston on Feb. 26-27, 2020, which became a COVID-19 super-spreader event.  There were 99 individuals who left that meeting having been exposed to the disease who became responsible, ultimately, for as many as 300,000 COVID-19 cases in 29 states, according to "Science," the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"To those who believe in the immutability of privacy rights," Kelly wrote, "I would pose this question: Knowing now how a new strain of the coronavirus can quickly turn 99 cases of the illness into 300,000, can you really say you'd stick to that position, no matter what, in another pandemic?" 

Please read Kelly's entire piece.  It may be found at: 

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/safety-should-trump-privacy-in-next-pandemic/