This past winter in Massachusetts was a fierce reminder of how uncompromising Mother Nature can be in New England, delivering bone-chilling conditions along with one of the most brutal blizzards to strike our state in decades. The harsh season we experienced also served as another stark reminder that being able to turn the heat up in your home or business at a moment’s notice isn’t a “nice to have” – it’s a necessity and lives depend on it.
Our hard-working union members fully recognize this fact and take seriously their essential work to address aging natural gas infrastructure across the state. Nearly three million people across the Commonwealth have a critical need for natural gas to meet their heating and cooking needs, as well as business processes.
Providing access to a safe and reliable gas distribution system is our top priority, and I cannot stress enough how the Massachusetts Gas System Enhancement Plan (GSEP) has been fundamental to our efforts. Federal pipeline safety regulators know this to be true, repeatedly emphasizing how essential GSEP is to maintain compliance with gas safety requirements, particularly since the Massachusetts gas distribution system encompasses a disproportionately higher percentage of aging, leak-prone pipes as compared to the national average.
Not only is the GSEP program essential to meeting our collective responsibility to every natural gas customer in Massachusetts, it’s also fundamental to the livelihoods of our dedicated men and women who work on the system every day – helping to ensure their safety and future job security.
With this in mind, it is not possible to overstate how detrimental continued efforts to scale back the pace of GSEP will be for our members, the communities we work tirelessly to serve, and for the Commonwealth’s overall progress in protecting public safety and reducing carbon emissions.
The necessity of replacing aging pipes deteriorating at an accelerated rate is not going away and “repairing” this type of pipe, as some suggest, is neither cost-effective nor environmentally responsible. If we follow the “break-and-fix” model some are proposing in order to delay necessary GSEP spending, this will lead to higher long-term costs for customers because leak-prone natural gas pipes will continue to age, likely requiring multiple repairs in the future until they inevitably have to be replaced at an even greater expense.
While some are eager to use the critical work of our members to score political points, dismantling this vital program won’t solve the Commonwealth’s energy affordability challenges. It will instead increase system costs in the long term, create unnecessary risks to public safety and threaten the job security of our members – who take their civic duty seriously in the voting booths.
One other common misconception we continuously hear in our line of work is that natural gas investments are a hindrance to Massachusetts’ ambitious decarbonization goals – a wholly false proposition. In fact, the GSEP program has cut the number of gas leaks across the state in half since 2014 and has been one of the biggest contributors to the Commonwealth’s progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions over that time.
The replacement of these leak-prone pipes is not a detriment to the Commonwealth’s emissions reduction goals. It does more to further those goals than many other strategies put in place over the last ten years – a point that has been widely acknowledged and celebrated by elected officials and environmental advocates in the past.
The reality is that natural gas is a safe, reliable and less expensive energy source that millions of people and businesses in Massachusetts have a critical need for to meet basic everyday needs like cooking and heating their homes. It will likely continue to be a necessary resource as part of the Commonwealth’s “all-in” approach to its energy future.
We recognize the need to integrate new renewable energy resources as part of that approach, but we urge caution from our state leaders and regulators in their attempts to drastically diminish the replacement of aging gas infrastructure. These efforts are short-sighted, ill-advised, and possibly dangerous for our customers, membership, and industry – without doing anything to address the energy affordability challenges we all face in Massachusetts.
Dan Leary is President of the Utility Workers Union of America Local 369
