News | July 5, 2024

Energy expert talks moving beyond methane

Author and energy journalist Jonathan Mingle on the fight for America's clean energy future
Grassroots organizing against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was a major contributor to the death of the methane gas project. (Amy Jackson)

The takedown of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was a death by a thousand cuts. Four years after the final blow that killed the proposed fossil fuel project, we’re commemorating the remarkable win while bracing for a gas power plant buildout that imperils the fight against climate change.  

In “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future,” author and longtime energy journalist Jonathan Mingle observes that, to meet our most critical climate goals, we’re asking utilities to do something new and challenging: decarbonize as fast as possible, even as they keep the lights on around the clock.  

Mingle’s latest book digs into how grassroots groups with legal representation from SELC beat the odds against a powerful energy company when no one thought they could, plus the lessons both communities, advocates, and utilities can draw from this case that hits so close to home. 

Read the conversation for the author’s powerful insights into the ongoing fight to move beyond methane gas to a truly clean energy future. 

Your book came out in May. How is it resonating with readers? 

I’ve done some book events where people don’t know much about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and others where people are intimately familiar with it. Sometimes I see a lot of recognizable faces because the attendees are people I write about in the story.  

Some folks who knew all about the pipeline in their own communities told me the book gave them insight into how other communities experienced the fight against it, or into the larger struggle over increasing methane gas infrastructure in the United States. I’ve been gratified to hear that some people who I assumed knew everything there was to know had learned a few things from reading it. 

What themes emerge from what you learned while writing and reporting? 

As an author, you have the luxury of zooming out, and not just stitching together individual people’s stories but trying to distill out some lessons. My sense from talking to many, many people is that, at the outset in 2014, very few expected that cancellation would be the outcome. People had to overcome this resignation among their neighbors – a sense of inevitability that surrounded the ACP proposal. 

Neighbors educated themselves and each other on the consequences of living by a gas pipeline. (Credit: Julia Rendleman)

One theme that came up repeatedly, especially among landowners who lived along the project’s path, was this sense of isolation or being overwhelmed. You get a letter one day saying surveyors are going to come to your property, and this new pipeline project may get built through your land, and you don’t know what your options are. Then you learn that the pipeline developer will have the power of eminent domain once the federal regulators approve the project. There’s this process of slowly educating yourself on what it means to have a 42-inch gas pipeline coming through your land or your community, and so people told me time and again that they were very disoriented early on. 

The companies behind these projects don’t always share a lot of information at the beginning. The community had to figure out what was going on by talking to each other, sometimes going to great lengths to reach neighbors they might not have met before.  

What happened once neighbors started comparing notes? 

Neighbors reaching out to neighbors had two effects: They were able to share what they heard about the project, including directly from the Dominion surveyors on their property. They also started feeling a little less alone and a little more empowered when they saw other neighbors had similar concerns. Even if you don’t share all the same concerns, you start this organic process of talking and meeting, and things snowball from there. People discover they have much more power to shape the future than they thought, and it comes in the form of collective agency: they are much more powerful as a coalition than individually. 

Why do you call methane ‘America’s favorite fossil fuel’ in the book? 

Before I ever started reporting on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, I knew that there is a fair amount of confusion among the public about natural gas. Most people don’t associate it with fossil fuels. They don’t know that it’s actually methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which is responsible for a third of all warming to date. Some people have negative associations with methane, but mostly positive associations with natural gas. It turns out that’s not an accident.  

If you’re a journalist writing about these big gas infrastructure projects and you’re not covering that history and context, you’re missing a big part of the story. 

What were you hoping to reveal? 

Why did this pipeline project get proposed in the first place? To understand how this project landed in their lives and their communities, you have to back up and look at the larger story. I was interested in how this narrative that natural gas is a benign “bridge fuel to a clean energy future” has come to be so widely embraced by political and business leaders.

I wanted to shine a light on how the gas and utility industries have worked very hard, for decades, via public relations campaigns and other means to convince everyone that this fossil fuel is a climate solution. If you’re a journalist writing about these big gas infrastructure projects and you’re not covering that history and context, you’re missing a big part of the story. 

What did you find out? 

Utilities are incentivized to propose, and then if the regulators approve them, to build these fossil gas power plants and other gas infrastructure projects whether we need them or not, because they get a generous, guaranteed rate of return based on their capital expenditures. As I wrote recently in The New York Times, regulators and legislators urgently “need to overhaul the incentives driving utilities to double down on natural gas, so that they can turn a profit without cooking the planet.” 

Is there another energy project you have your eye on? 

Dominion Chesterfield plant next to a body of water.
A new gas-fired plant proposed on the site of this former coal power plant continues a legacy of pollution in Chesterfield, Virginia. (Mike Mather)

One project I’m following is the Chesterfield Reliability Center. This is a gas-fired peaker plant proposed on the site of a former coal power plant in a community in the Richmond-Petersburg area of Virginia where people have already been dealing with pollution for a long time. The rationale for this project is that data centers popping up in Northern Virginia are going to use a lot of energy. Utilities around the country, but especially in the Southeast, are proposing to build more gas-fired power plants to meet this forecast demand, much of which is driven by the growth in artificial intelligence computing needs. 

I’m keeping my eye on it because, if Dominion really pursues this Chesterfield project with vigor, then what does that suggest they learned from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline experience? Will state regulators go along with it, or will they hold utilities accountable to climate and environmental justice imperatives, and to the requirements of Virginia’s Clean Economy Act? 

As this gas grab continues, do you think the strategy used to beat the Atlantic Coast Pipeline can be replicated? 

A lot of the folks who I write about in the book remained involved after it was cancelled and put together lessons learned for other communities confronting similar projects. People would call them from other parts of the country saying, “Hey, we have something similar going on here, what do I need to know?” 

Where do you get your energy and climate news? 

This type of coverage has blossomed and expanded over the last several years. Now, outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times do have really robust climate, energy, and environmental coverage by great reporters who are teaching us all about the risks, impacts, and the solutions. 

There are still these bright spots amidst that dark landscape.

Inside Climate News has a really strong newsroom dedicated to these issues. Grist is another great online outlet that’s been around a long time, and some newer ones I follow include Canary Media and Heatmap News. 

The economics of the journalism industry are pretty grim these days, and the fight for readers’ attention has never been harder, but there are still these bright spots amidst that dark landscape.

Meet other storytellers reimagining how we get our news.