Should Maryland Allow A Natural Gas Export Facility On The Chesapeake Bay?

WAMU 88.5

By: Jonathan Wilson

Jean Marie Neal leads me down a short-mulched path behind her house, onto the sand of Cove Point Beach. We’re looking out onto the Chesapeake Bay — Cove Point Hollow specifically. There are other homes that back up to the beach, but mostly what you see here are trees, sand and water… until you look to your north and a bit west, about a mile in the distance.

That’s where Dominion’s property lies, and where two stark white storage tanks rise up above the trees.

“The overall concern is that what you’re doing is you’re turning this entire area into an industrial site — that, itself, just blows your mind,” Neal says.

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200 Calvert Residents Protest Council Decision to Give Zoning Control to Federal Government Over Controversial $3.8 Billion Proposed Gas Export Facility at Cove Point

At least 200 concerned Calvert residents left highly frustrated and dismayed October 29 after the County Commissioners and the Planning Committee held a joint public hearing about the proposed Dominion Cove Point LNG export facility. The hearing focused on a proposal to grant exemption from the International Building Code on LNG export facilities. This would exempt the buildings associated with the Cove Point project from county building and zoning regulations, leaving it up to federal regulators in Washington, D.C. to enforce key local laws meant to protect Calvert County residents and businesses.
Despite the testimony of at least 35 people expressing concerns over the proposed Cove Point facility, the Commissioners voted 4-1 to hand over control to Washington officials instead of maintaining local control. Attendees overwhelmingly expressed their belief that local citizens’ health and environmental well being would be best protected with local zoning control, not control in Washington.
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Weekly Climate Insider: Chinese Smog, Powershift, and Fracking in Virginia

Bad news from Huffington Post: The Canadian Arctic has reached the highest temperatures in at least 44,000 years. Gifford Miller, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says, “This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” This study reaffirms that global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate: we’ve seen a warming trend for the past century, but the process has been accelerating significantly since the 1970s and has skyrocketed in the last twenty years. Miller didn’t end on a happy note. “We expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming.
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More than 300 people attend Calvert County town hall meeting concerning controversial proposal to export fracked gas from Maryland to Asia

The first town hall meeting concerning the risks of the proposed Cove Point LNG export terminal in Maryland was held Tuesday night, October 23. It was a big and rousing success. At least 300 people attended, most of them local residents. It was held at the Southern Community Center in Lusby, Md. in Calvert County, just a few miles from where Dominion Resources wants to build an industrial terminal to export fracked natural gas — piped in from Appalachia — and ship it to India and Japan. The $3.8 billion facility would chill the gas to 270 degrees below zero, turning it into liquid for 1000-foot-long shipping tankers coming into the Bay. It would generate 3.3 million tons of CO2 pollution per year. (You can learn more about the health and environmental risks of exporting fracked gas from Maryland by clicking here.) 

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Weekly Climate Insider: Green Business, VA Hybrid Tax and Power Shift!

Welcome back to the Weekly Climate Insider!
In Maryland, fracking and the results of the Environment America study posted in last week’s Climate Insider are still making headlines. As a recap, the report found that our water supply is put at risk by the billions of gallons of dirty wastewater produced by fracking. See the coverage from Capital News Service.

This week, we’re profiling two Maryland businesses that are environmentally newsworthy.
A Maryland construction company called Hobbitat builds small houses made out of reclaimed materials. The 250 square foot houses, called “hobs,” are made almost exclusively from from salvaged or repurposed materials, nearly eliminating the adverse effects of new construction. In energy terms, “The hobs’ square footage is about 11 percent of the median U.S. house size, so much less energy is required to heat and cool them.” Check out some photos of these gorgeous little hobs!

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Safe Coast Virginia: A First-of-its-Kind Conference on Climate Change in Hampton Roads

On November 16th, hundreds of Virginians will come together in Norfolk to launch the next phase of our grassroots movement to fight the climate crisis in the commonwealth.
Norfolk and the entire Hampton Roads region is ground zero for climate change impacts in Virginia. Residents of coastal Virginia see the effects in their daily lives: rising seas force residents of Norfolk to routinely bail out basements or change routes to work due to flooded roads. And this problem isn’t going away. Sea-levels are rising faster than nearly anywhere else in the country, forcing the raising of homes, roadways and naval infrastructure to fight chronic flooding. Ocean temperatures are warming, driving bigger and more intense storms and longer hurricane seasons. And ocean waters are becoming more acidic, harming the region’s seafood industry.
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On offshore wind, Congress is kingmaker

If congressional action is the proposed method to solve policy issues on climate and taxes, my usual advice is to draft a Plan B. In this realm, Congress is like that annoying friend who’s always a day late and a dollar short – reliably unreliable. Unfortunately, when it comes to the future of offshore wind in America there is no Plan B. Congress holds the cards.
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Presenting: The Weekly Climate Insider

In the fight against climate change and dirty energy polluters, there’s a lot going on. Some of it is good — take the global boom in solar power and its increasing affordability. Some of it just encourages us to push harder and faster. But whether the news is encouraging or frustrating, local or global, knowledge is power. That’s why we’re bringing you a new recurring blog post from CCAN: The Weekly Climate Insider.
Every week, we’ll keep you in the loop with important climate stories impacting Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C. and beyond. We’ll touch on big issues in our campaigns, like the threat of fracking and sea level rise, and we’ll also bring you broader climate news.
Let’s get started.
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