This week, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz released a statement reiterating the College’s support for the Vermont Gas pipeline. This comes in the face of motivated and organized student and community opposition that has made its presence well known over the last few weeks. This decision repudiates the state’s ban on hydraulic fracturing by supporting a pipeline that will carry natural gas produced by the process across Vermont. It is also the right thing to do; it is the right thing for Middlebury College, the town of Middlebury and the state of Vermont.
I could spend pages debating the merits of fracking. It has become a dirty word within the environmental movement, and it is an undeniable fact that fracking has an environmental impact. Yet the severity of that impact has been overstated. Natural gas has replaced coal as the go-to method of electrical generation in the United States. This is a step forward; natural gas contains half the carbon dioxide and none of the particulate emissions of coal. Natural gas extraction, through hydraulic fracturing or any other means, has less of an impact on the landscape than the strip mining and mountaintop removal used to produce coal.
In this case, the gas delivered by the pipeline would mainly replace the fuel oil and propane that Vermont residents use to heat their homes. The process of producing either of these is no less fraught with pollution and environmental degradation than fracking. Propane is a byproduct of — surprise — natural gas or petroleum refining. Fuel oil is a similar, dirty leftover of this process. As conventional sources of oil disappear, oil companies increasingly turn to oil sand and oil shale. I don’t need to sell anybody at Middlebury on the harms of oil sand extraction, and oil from shale is produced by a mechanism similar to fracking for natural gas. Whether or not Addison County allows the pipeline, then, its residents will rely on the byproducts of the technological achievement that is fuel extraction through hydraulic fracturing. Continue reading