Providence Journal Editorial: Playing politics with investments

Posted on 28 April 2011 Tags: energy cost savings &bull safety

http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/ED_lng26_04-26-11_PENMUI8_v7.1f417dc.html

Editorial: Playing politics with investments

01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Politicians, recklessly playing games with our region’s need for affordable and reliable energy, have been busy whipping up public fears of liquefied natural gas, hoping to cash in with votes and campaign contributions from the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) crowd.

Their latest ploy is especially outrageous. U.S. Representatives Barney Frank and James McGovern have joined Sen. John Kerry in proposing that Massachusetts divest its $28 million in Hess Corp., to punish Hess for developing an LNG facility in Fall River. This project will create much-needed jobs and help contain skyrocketing energy costs in our region.

Rhode Island NIMBYs are trying to get Gen. Treasurer Gina Raimondo to similarly politicize the state’s investments, at a time when its pension system is already approaching bankruptcy.

This is crazy. Hess employs 1,500 people in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and should hardly be treated as a pariah for trying to bring energy to the region, something that is vital to economic health. Moreover, once politicians start turning investments into a means of punishing people and businesses they do not like, the taxpayers will find their investments performing poorly and the system becoming rife with corruption.

Ms. Raimondo, like Massachusetts Treasurer Steven Grossman, should reject this political stunt.

True leaders look beyond the next election and consider the well-being of our region, something that will matter long after they have retired and returned to obscurity. It would be nice to have leaders who, instead of pandering to fears and reducing citizens to quivering children, encouraged people to think like rational adults, recognizing that nothing in life is perfect.

Like any source of energy, LNG has its risks. But it has a superb safety record in the decades it has been used. Natural gas is a relatively clean-burning fossil fuel and among the most affordable forms of energy we need to fire our electricity plants and heat our homes and businesses. Transporting energy by large ships takes it off crowded highways, which are much more prone to accidents.

As for the need for diverse and reliable energy supplies: Have any of these politicians paid the least attention to what is happening in Japan?

Officials there have dramatically increased LNG shipments to help rescue their citizens from cold and hunger, while keeping the economy alive, in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami that badly damaged the country’s nuclear-power capability. Had NIMBYs and short-sighted politicians been in control there, the people’s suffering would have been vastly greater – and you can be sure they would not be thanking those politicians for that.