Have you heard about the North Brooklyn Pipeline? Greenpoint resident Kevin LaCherra is one of many community activists, who are educating neighbors and friends about this development. LaCherra helped lead the family climate rally against the pipeline last Saturday, February 15th in East Williamsburg, and Go Green BK is honored to share his passionate speech.
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My name is Kevin LaCherra and I’m from Greenpoint, Brooklyn. My family’s been in Greenpoint a long time, my great grandmother was born on Meserole Avenue over 120 years ago and we’re still there. I want to thank you all so much for coming out for waking up early and braving the cold to join with your neighbors, your friends, and your family. It’s the honor of my life to be here with all of you. I love this community and I’m here to fight for it. If you had said to me even a few months ago that I would be standing here today talking to you, I wouldn’t have believed it. But this neighborhood, North Brooklyn, Greenpoint, knows what to do when the house is on fire. We know what to do in an emergency. We step up and we don’t back down. And that’s what we’re here to do today.
Last October, I saw a posting about a meeting run by the Sane Energy Project about a pipeline. I asked some of the local environmental activists, and they hadn’t heard a thing. So I figured that was that. If these people, who had been doing the work for decades, hadn’t heard about it I figured that there was nothing to worry about. But I was wrong. A day or two later, I saw that NYS Senator Julia Salazar’s office had signed on as a co-host, and when I reached out Alvin Pena in the Senator’s office, who told me how serious this was. And a few days later, I met Kim Fraczek and Lee Ziesche from Sane Energy and got a sense of the scale of this threat.
What National Grid is trying to do is outrageous. Our civilization is staring down the barrel of the gun of an unprecedented climate emergency. And they want to build a massive fracked gas pipeline through our neighborhoods. They want to do it in order to increase record profits for their shareholders while we assume the cost of actually building the thing. And we assume the risk when something goes wrong. Our homes and our lives are their contingency plan. Activists across the state have been fighting for years to win a ban on statewide fracking, which they did. The corporations behind National Grid turned around and just fracked harder in Pennsylvania and ran the pipelines through New York. When National Grid tried to run those pipelines through the Harbor people rose up again, the Williams pipeline, and they stopped it. As a response to this, National Grid tried to hold the state hostage with a gas moratorium, saying they didn’t have the capability to heat homes if they couldn’t continue raking in massive profits. And Governor Cuomo to his credit called their bluff and told them that ultimately they work for the people, not for their own profits. And we are depending on him to do that again!
Because they are trying to do to Brooklyn what they attempted to do to the entire state! Instead of investing in the renewable energy that New York needs, they have been using hundreds of millions of dollars of our money to quickly and quietly put in a massive pipeline that crosses our Borough. They’ve done it in segments a bit at a time, knowing that if they stayed under the radar, our neighborhoods wouldn’t be able to effectively organize. And perhaps most importantly, they have done most of their work in black and brown communities of East New York, Brownsville, Bushwick, and East Williamsburg – historically redlined neighborhoods with tremendous and deliberate disinvestment in their institutions. These are neighborhoods where they know people are trying to keep up the fight on so many fronts and so lack the resources to fight back on this. When National Grid was asked about it, they told people they were fixing gas mains or repairing leaky pipes. But what they were also doing was laying a massive 30 inch fracked gas pipeline. It’s a transmission line that doesn’t provide heat to homes but instead, transports fracked gas to their facility on Newtown Creek. After that, the gas will be sold to outside markets and trucked through the streets of Greenpoint to get there. This is not about modernizing our system. It is about a massive expansion to charge rate payers and grow profits for National Grid’s shareholders.
So how do we stop it? The first three phases of this pipeline are complete but useless if they can’t connect them to their facility on Maspeth Avenue. Phase 4 is behind you, it’s been approved as well and they are working at a breakneck speed to get it done now that we’ve figured out what they’re doing. Phase 5 is the final phase of this pipeline and has to be approved by the Governor and the Public Service Commission sometime in March. That approval would mean nearly $200 million in rate hikes for our community. It also is the only way National Grid can make their money on all of the existing pipe that they’ve put down. They have to come through Greenpoint to finish it. Which is where we’re going to stop them.
Greenpoint is no stranger to what National Grid is trying to do. We’re one of the first environmental justice communities. The Industrial Revolution was born in our neighborhood. And as National Grid told us when they spoke at the Community Board 1 meeting, they’ve been here for a hundred years. In those hundred years, North Brooklyn has seen firsthand the consequences of this legacy. We see it in the outline of one of the largest oil spills in North America beneath our feet and a Superfund site that has poisoned Newtown Creek. We worry about that legacy every time our kids come in from playing in a park or yard because of the high levels of lead in the soil. We breathe that legacy as families on the Southside of Williamsburg and all along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway reckon with the asthma rates that come from a highway cutting your community in half. We know what it looks like to lose the fight and we know that the consequences of these decisions are generational because we are the ones bearing that burden.
And we know what it looks like to win. This is part of our story too. We’ve killed power plants and waste transfer stations, we’ve secured parkland, we’ve fought for housing justice, and secured hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations like Exxon to hold them to account and clean up the oil spill. We’ve killed the dragon before and we’ll do it again. We’ll do it together. Over the course of the past month and a half, a coalition has grown which is unstoppable. With the facts in hand from Sane Energy Project and a roadmap forward so many have answered the call: North Brooklyn Neighbors, El Puente, the District 14 Green Alliance, UNO, Sustainable Williamsburg, the North Brooklyn Progressive Democrats, the DSA, Los Sures, too many PTAs to name, Community Board 1 by unanimous vote! Environmental groups from throughout the city and the state, Food and Water Watch, 350 Brooklyn, NY Communities for Change, Earth Strike, Rise and Resist, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement.
Our elected officials have heard us too and we are depending on them to carry this fight to the places that so many of us aren’t able to go. They have made the commitment to us that they will. We won’t forget that they’ve made that commitment and we will remember who among them took the steps to stand with us. Your elected officials who have made that commitment: U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, U.S. Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez, NYS Senator Julia Salazar, NYS Assemblyman Joe Lentol, NYS Assemblywoman Maritza Davila, NYC District 33 Council Member Steven Levin, NYC District 34 Council Member Antonio Reynoso, NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, NYC, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and District Leaders Martiza Davila, Linda Minucci, Nick Rizzo and Tommy Torres.
We are waiting in the cold this morning for two more voices to join the fight. Just two more. Our mayor, Bill De Blasio and our governor Andrew Cuomo. We are asking the mayor to come out against National Grid’s rate hikes. We are asking him to stand with us in protecting our neighborhood from dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure.
And we are waiting for Governor Andrew Cuomo who can immediately halt Phase 4 and reject the funding for Phase 5. The Governor and Public Service Commission can reject this and we are demanding that they listen to the people that live here and do so. We don’t want this pipeline. We want renewables now.
We don’t want to be dependent on 5 people in a room in Albany for our future. If the Governor and the Mayor don’t shut this down we will. What you can do right now is put this number in your phone 866-739-8818 that is a direct line to Governor Cuomo. Tell him to shut this pipeline down. We have everything we need right here. I’d like to share something with all of you. It’s something I’ve carried with me every step of the way while I’ve been fighting this pipeline. In the darkest days of the Great Depression at a time when our economy had collapsed there was a program created called the Civilian Conservation Corps. My Grandpa, then 16 years old left Brooklyn for the first time and went upstate with thousands of others to plant trees. An investment in the ground, in the soil. In the next generation and the next. An understanding that even when things seem like they’re at their worst one person standing in solidarity with their neighbors and their friends and complete strangers can start fixing what’s been broken.
That is the work we are doing here today. For ourselves and for the future. To Governor Cuomo to Mayor DeBlasio. We don’t want any more pipelines. We want renewable energy for our homes. We are standing together. East New York, and Brownsville, Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint. Every neighborhood in this city. Every community in this state. Join us. We’re gonna shut this down.
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Governor Cuomo is headlining a fundraiser in Williamsburg tonight. Join Kevin and your neighbors in front of Giando by the Water at 5:30 this afternoon to rally and urge Governor Cumo to stop the North Brooklyn fracked gas pipeline. More details here.