I would like LG&E / KU and its government supporters to realize that the Bullitt County pipeline project has outlived its usefulness. It is better to stop now, and I’ll quickly touch on some of the reasons.
During the many years of this pipeline discussion, any advantage natural gas heating had for new residential customers has declined drastically with the increased availability of electric heat pumps and other high efficiency clean electric heat. At the same time, finding out that one in eight cases of asthma in children in the US is due to the pollution given off by cooking on gas stoves points to gas cooking and water heating as unnecessary risks in an era of Instant Pots and affordable induction stovetops.
Corporate users of the pipeline (like Jim Beam) may or may not have already figured out that they don’t actually “need” this pipeline any more. They—long-time patrons AND beneficiaries of Bullitt County—are even more capable of designing their buildings and industry to use more efficient, non-polluting sources of energy, to their profit and our own.
If this pipeline goes into effect, we lock in 60-80 years of polluting greenhouse gas emitters into this neighborhood, dependent on an infrastructure that starts with fracking in someone else’s backyard and is prone to leaks and methane emissions throughout production and delivery.
We don’t want this to happen.
I have lived in Bullitt County for all of my adult life. This week I’m scraping 45-year old wallpaper off my walls at home. It was hard work putting it up, and it had a pretty good run, but that’s not keeping me from steaming it off now and planning to repaint. It’s time—just like it’s time to dissolve this outdated pipeline project.
-- Maggie Hettinger is a volunteer with Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a non-partisan, non-profit, grassroots organization that exists to create the political will for a livable world.
