At long last, we finally have evidence that someone has been colluding with Russia.
Is it Donald Trump? Carter Page? Paul Manafort?
Nope. It’s radical environmentalists in New England, and their politician friends, who have prevented the construction of pipelines and other infrastructure to deliver natural gas to their region.
OK, we’ll admit that we doubt there is any formal relationship with Russian intelligence that has prompted these careless actors to advance Russia’s international interests. Perhaps they are no more than useful idiots, doing President Vladimir Putin’s bidding without orders or payment.
But thanks to their efforts, New England is now importing liquefied natural gas, commonly known as LNG, from Russia, despite the fact that America leads the world in natural gas production.
If it seems ridiculous, that’s because it is.
Nearly everyone else in the United States is using domestic gas. No one else is importing LNG, for the obvious reason that it’s easier and cheaper for most American utilities to use gas that doesn’t have to be liquefied or shipped from the other side of the world. As the world’s largest producer of natural gas, the U.S. has as much business importing LNG from across the world as Egypt has importing sand from Arizona.
Yet here we are.
Environmental activists in Massachusetts aligned themselves with the company that owns the local LNG terminal to fight pipeline construction and cut off the Northeastern market as much as possible from domestic natural gas. That’s what has made it cheaper to import liquefied Russian gas by tanker than it is to deliver gas from anywhere in the United States.
This result is so outrageous that the normally left-wing Boston Globe editorial board has been up in arms decrying fellow liberals’ “pipeline absolutism.” Last month, the editors of that publication excoriated local Democratic politicians in Boston for environmental hypocrisy, charging that they “have leaned heavily on righteous-sounding stands against local fossil fuel projects, with scant consideration of the global impacts of their actions and a tacit expectation that some other country will build the infrastructure that we’re too good for.”
The Bay State’s newfound dependency on Putin has not been lost on the local Ukrainian-American community. The majority shareholder of the firm extracting this gas, the Globe reported, is actually subject to U.S. sanction thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This adds context to the Left’s Johnny-come-lately anger over Russia. Not only did that anger conveniently skip the entire Obama era, but liberals lack awareness now of how their anti-pipeline activism, to the extent that it succeeds elsewhere, helps Russia maintain its threat to cut off gas supplies off from countries in Eastern Europe and even to … well, to Massachusetts.
The U.S. domestic gas industry is also obviously upset that its product has been cut off from a large American market. To make matters worse, the Jones Act means there aren’t enough tankers available to ship American gas to the terminal in Everett, Mass., at a reasonable price.
But this isn’t about making the gas industry happy or cutting off imports where they might make good free-market sense. This is about reversing dumb, shortsighted environmentalist policy that is defeating common sense and is based on ideology rather than science.
It is also about politicians who don’t mind imposing steep energy costs on the poor and needlessly paying extra for the privilege of sending America’s wealth and jobs overseas to her greatest global foe, just so they can feel good deceiving themselves about how “green” their state looks.
