A Baptist preacher and Buddhist swami team up to fight a pipeline - Entrepreneur Generations

Natural gas pipelines are lightning rods for controversy, drawing protests from environmentalists, musicians, disgruntled land owners, and even nuns. It's made for some strange bedfellows too, at first glance, as is the case when two longtime friends, a Southern Baptist preacher and a Buddhist swami, joined together to fight a proposed compressor station in rural Virginia for the under-construction Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

The compressor station is slated to be built just down the road from one of the two Baptist churches where the Rev. Paul Wilson preaches in Union Hill, a rural community founded by freed slaves. Dominion Energy says the station will generate as much as $1 million a year in tax revenue for the low-income county. But, though state regulators say Dominion has promised to take great pains to make the station safe, "federal documents say such stations — which keep the gas flowing — emit toxic chemicals that can harm health. They can be noisy, and they light up at night. Once in a great while, such facilities explode — causing damages and fatalities for a significant distance all around," Gregory Schneider reports for The Washington Post.

Wilson's friend, Swami Dayananda, was also concerned. The pipeline will cross under the James River alongside the yoga shrine and retreat where she has worked for more than 30 years. Both feel that Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, has failed to adequately oppose the project despite proclaiming himself an environmentalist. Dayananda and Wilson have led local resistance to the pipeline and hope to convince the Virginia State Air Control Board to deny a necessary permit next month.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's impact report says "compressor station emissions could include carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and volatile organic compounds, and it notes that African American populations are more susceptible to related asthma. But it concludes that Union Hill is not populous enough to be of concern," Schneider reports.

Dominion says it has appointed a community liaison to make sure the town's concerns are heard: Basil Gooden, a Union Hill native who served as state agriculture secretary under former governor Terry McAuliffe.


from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2LnUnYl A Baptist preacher and Buddhist swami team up to fight a pipeline - Entrepreneur Generations

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