First, I want to thank the commenters on Part 1 — I didn’t actually get back to the piece until after the end of the comment period, by which time it had acquired a couple of exceptional and well-informed additions that I really appreciated.
In Part 1, I gave the basic outline of the process by which pipeline companies routinely get the power of eminent domain handed to them by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Once empowered to steal landowner rights, those pipeline gangs quickly set to work stomping all over places where they’re not welcome. Newspapers along proposed pipeline routes have regularly carried stories over the past few years about pipeline surveyors repeatedly trespassing on properties regardless of landowner objections and opposition.
Basically, the pipeline companies do whatever they want, regardless of legal implications, and as often as not, they get away with it, though not always. In the case of Mercer Co., NJ, county officials had given PennEast surveyors permission to survey public lands in the county, and then had to revoke that permission when they discovered PennEast employees conducting soil borings, which could potentially prove harmful to the environment.
The conflict between petrochemical industry desires and essential property rights has set up an interesting dynamic among self-described conservatives who supposedly stand on an ideology of support for property rights, but who, in the real world, and in positions of political power, generally cater to industry wishes. To their credit, a Republican majority in Georgia voted about a month ago to suspend a major pipeline project called the Palmetto, mainly due to property rights concerns.
All too often, though, the legal apparatus aligns itself seamlessly with the petrochemical industry. In February, a federal judge in Scranton, PA, handed over the property rights of the Holleran family in New Milford to the Constitution pipeline gang, who showed up on March 1, with a number of heavily-armed guards, and started a chainsaw massacre of the maple trees that had for many years supplied the sap for the family’s maple syrup business, called North Harford Maple. It remains an open question as to what just compensation actually means in such a circumstance.
Similarly, at the end of March, Sunoco Logistics sent its chainsaw gang to massacre trees on the Gerhart property in Huntingdon County, PA, cutting a path for its Mariner East 2 pipeline project. This beast, designed to carry natural gas liquids from the fracking fields of OH, WV and western PA, will, if completed, terminate in the Marcus Hook, PA, area, just as the Mariner East 1 already does. The Marcus Hook terminal, not so coincidentally, serves as an export facility from which Sunoco began ethane shipments in February.
As badly as I felt over the Holleran situation, being a personal friend of some of the New Milford protestors, and also being someone who had considered making the drive to NM, I still think the Gerhart episode makes the case against the eminent domain contradictions so much more self-evident. The company seeking to build the Constitution pipeline has tried at least in part to maintain the fiction of public benefit from its proposed project, whereas Sunoco doesn’t even bother with the lies when it comes to the ME 2. The company makes no secret of the fact that it ships the natural gas liquids to Europe, and that it has large contracts to fill in that regard. No public interest gets fulfilled by the Mariner East 2 — the only thing that gets filled are the wallets of Sunoco’s executives.
So then, what gives Sunoco the right to cut down trees and build a pipeline across the Gerhart property, where the company’s presence is obviously not wanted? The Gerhart family has owned that property since 1982, and has participated in a state program to preserve forestland on their property, but such facts clearly mean nothing to a greedy petrochemical company. Butane, propane and ethane moving through a pipeline are all, by the way, highly explosive — I mentioned in an earlier piece about 2 teenagers in TX who died when a Koch Industries butane pipeline exploded back in 1996 — so the Gerharts have more than one reason to not want the Mariner East 2 running through their place.
So what gives Sunoco the right? FERC gave it to them, and a judge put his rubber stamp of legal approval on it as well, even though the Mariner East 2 will serve no public good, and therefore, no actual justification exists for the eminent domain hammer Sunoco holds over the heads of the Gerhart family, and any others who might oppose the pipeline gang.
The Gerhart and Holleran stories are but 2 of many that revolve around the abuse of eminent domain. Some months ago an Ohio landowner walked out of a court and said to a reporter, “I thought we lived in America.” He apparently thought he had property rights, and maybe he did, until a pipeline company wanted to take them away.
I’ll have more pipeline stories to share in Part 3, but the main point to understand is that currently, pipeline companies commonly steal property rights through eminent domain, for projects that plainly do not benefit the public, and FERC empowers them to do so, all to serve a shared monetary interest.
One further note: I mentioned in an earlier piece about the Koch Bros. that David and Charles do happen to be in the pipeline business, and as anti-government as they claim to be, somehow, I still feel quite certain that they’re perfectly happy to wield an eminent domain hammer that’s been handed over to their company by the government.