December 12, 2014 – RI Future

Burrillville, Wakefield, RI; Danbury, CT; West Roxbury, MA — Grassroots groups from four states along the proposed route of Spectra Energy’s Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline expansion, which cuts through New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, have joined together to host a coordinated “Week of Respect and Resistance” with actions from December 13 through December 19 in opposition to the project.

The project includes the expansion of a compressor station in Burrillville which is already “a major source of hazardous air pollutants”, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee.

The actions are planned in anticipation of the release of the final Environmental Impact Statement by the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee (FERC) due on or about December 19, 2014. The week of action will target local, state and federal legislators and government agencies – all of whom have direct roles or influence in the approval of the project. These actions will build on the numerous rallies, vigils, meetings and call-in campaigns that have been happening across the states for the past several months.

“We are calling this a Week of Respect and Resistance: respect, because it’s important to honor the other struggles for justice that have come before us, and those that are taking place right now around the world. It’s also time for Spectra and our elected officials to respect our power and respect our desire to see a world powered by community owned renewable energy,” FANG organizer Nick Katkevich explains.

Fossil Free Rhode Island, a grassroots group promoting divestment from fossil fuels, will kick off the week with an event this Saturday, December 13, at the Alternative Food Co-op in Wakefield to highlight the need to build a localized, worker-owned economy and rein in the power of multinational corporations that perpetuates fossil fuel dependence.

Fossil Free Rhode Island will follow up with a call-in campaign next week to ask elected officials and state agencies to intervene to stop the AIM project.

Last year's news: " National Grid defends £1.5bn half-year profit and payout to shareholders " This year, National Grid obviously needs more money so their CEOs and stockholders can refine the well-deserved lavish lifestyles to which they are entitled. — Last year’s news: “National Grid defends £1.5bn half-year profit and payout to shareholders.” This year, National Grid obviously needs more money so their CEOs and stockholders can refine the well-deserved lavish lifestyles to which they are entitled.

Rhode Island groups will also be present at the meeting of the Public Utilities Commission next Tuesday, Dec. 16, to protest the 23.6% electric rate hike proposed by National Grid, a corporation headquartered in London, Great Britain. The meeting will be held at 10 am at 89 Jefferson Boulevard in Warwick.

Visit this website for updates on the actions planned for Rhode Island.

Late last month, Fossil Free Rhode Island launched a campaign urging the Rhode Island Department of Health to block the expansion of the compressor station in Burrillville, citing elevated asthma rates in the surrounding area. “We are outraged that Rhode Island’s political leaders—both Republicans and Democrats—are ignoring threats to our children’s health, and instead are siding with the fossil fuel industries,” said Tony Affigne, chair of the Green Party of Rhode Island, a signatory to the campaign. “This week will show the state’s leadership that people and the environment are more important than Spectra’s profit margin.”

Rhode Island Clean Water Action, the Sierra Club of Rhode Island, Occupy Providence, and the Voluntown Peace Trust have also signed on. As Peter Nightingale, Professor of Physics at the University of Rhode Island, stated: “We need an immediate end to uncontrolled experiments that threaten public health in Rhode Island and the habitability of the planet.”

Many elected officials in New York, including Congresswoman Nita Lowey, wrote to FERC requesting an independent risk assessment of a massive 42” new segment of pipeline that would run 105 feet from critical structures at the Indian Point nuclear facility.

Renowned pipeline expert Rick Kuprewicz stated: “[I] cannot overstress the importance of performing a full and complete process hazard safety analysis, independently demonstrating, especially to the public, that there will be no interplay between a possible gas transmission pipeline rupture and the IPEC facilities to failsafe shutdown or cause a loss of radiation containment in such a sensitive and highly populated area of the country.”

“We are at a critical juncture. Expanding the Spectra Algonquin pipeline will lock us into a reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure for decades to come. Communities across the region are coming together to oppose this pipeline and call for clean energy alternatives, energy conservation and efficiency,” says Michelle Weiser, Community Organizer with Toxics Action Center.

If approved, Spectra would begin construction as early as March 2015, and the project would be completed in November 2016. Another Spectra expansion, the Atlantic Bridge, is planned to follow right after the AIM Project with additional expanded segments of massive 42” diameter high-pressure pipeline segments and compressor station expansions, and a third project is also in the works.

These expansions would be devastating to the entire northeast region and much of the gas would be shipped overseas to foreign markets. “If the governmental agencies fail us and approve this project, our nonviolent resistance will only escalate. This week will be a demonstration of our commitment to stop this pipeline at all cost,” says Katkevich.

Groups involved with the action include: Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion (NY); Sierra Club (CT); Greater Danbury MoveOn.org Council (CT); Capitalism v. The Climate (CT); Occupy Danbury (CT); Fighting Against Natural Gas (RI); Burrillville Against Spectra Expansion (RI); Fossil Free Rhode Island (RI); Green Party of Rhode Island (RI); Occupy Providence (RI); Toxics Action Center (MA & RI); Mothers Out Front; No New Fracked Gas Infrastructure in West Roxbury, Dedham, or New England (MA); Flood Boston (MA) and Better Future Project (MA)

On Thursday night the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence and the Religious Coalition for a Violence-Free Rhode Island held its second annual Sandy Hook memorial and vigil, A Voice for Victims, at the First Unitarian Church of Providence. In addition to speakers such as Lisa Pagano, Wendy Bowen and Gladys Brown, who have all lost families and friends to gun violence, speakers included Providence mayor-elect Jorge Elorza, Central Falls Mayor James Diossa, Providence Commissioner of Public Safety Steven Paré, Rabbi Sarah Mack of the Greater Rhode Island Board of Rabbis and the Reverend Don Anderson, of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches.

The 250 attendees was about double the number who attended last year’s No More Silence vigil. The program ran a little long at 75 minutes, and was heavy on political, religious and law enforcement speakers. The most moving talks were given by those who lives were impacted by gun violence, those who lost loved ones and whose worlds were turned upside down in the time it takes for a trigger to be squeezed.

Coalition President Jerry Belair emceed the event, noting that this was just one of 197 similar events taking place across the country. Belair said that there have been 99 new gun laws passed in 37 states, adding that, “Massachusetts has the lowest gun death rate in the nation because they passed common sense gun control laws that work.”

Lisa Pagano is the executive director of the Lt. Jim Pagano Foundation. Jim Pagano was shot by his next door neighbor in Cranston, after an argument over an errant tennis ball. The neighbor was upset that the children playing outside during a birthday party allowed the tennis ball to hit his car while they were playing. “What could have been a simple neighborhood dispute,” said Lisa Pagano, “turned deadly because a gun was in the wrong hands.”

“I will never forget that fateful afternoon,” said Gladys Brown, whose son Michael was shot in 2009 at the age of 33, leaving behind two children, “when two Pawtucket police detectives knocked on my door with the most shocking and heartbreaking news a mother could bear…”

Wendy Bowen was a teacher at a Newtown Middle School when a gunman killed 20 students and six teachers next door at Sandy Hook Elementary. She was in lock down with her class, the majority being regular students with some mainstreamed special needs students mixed in, communicating by text message with the outside world as sirens and helicopters filled the air. “Along the way I learned from my sister that the principal of Sandy Hook, a colleague and friend that I knew well, had died along with many children. This was hard for me to hear and not cry, but I could not fall apart in front of my students…”

Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré spoke briefly about passing wise laws that make it more difficult for guns to get into the wrong hands.

Here’s the full video from the event:

Correction: An earlier version of this piece mistakenly implied that the entirety of Wendy Bowen’s class was special needs students. This has been corrected.

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Day: December 12, 2014

Multi-state week of action against fracked-gas pipeline expansion

A vigil for the 2nd anniversary of Sandy Hook in Providence