Letter to the Editor, The Recorder

From Travis Clements

I own property right at the edge of Bath and Highland counties and would like to speak up in favor of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

While my first choice is to keep our neighbors in West Virginia employed and off welfare, it seems their fate is already decided. We have allowed government bureaucrats to arbitrarily shut down coal-fired power plants and so destroy many jobs and families. Our plants were much more efficient and clean than the plants in China and India, so why close down ours? Why not encourage them to make theirs cleaner? It is supposedly “global” warming right? But no, that is not logical to our government apparently; instead, the Chinese don’t even have to start thinking about being cleaner for years, but we have to practically instantly change all ours to natural gas to be cleaner overnight, which brings us to the pipeline.

Don’t blame Dominion, don’t protest Dominion, and please get rid of the anti-Dominion signs. Aim any anger, any blame, squarely where it belongs. What you need to be doing is protesting the Environmental Protection Agency and its unreasonable, unrealistic and downright hurtful, arbitrary, totalitarian, dictates.

Dominion has power plants already built sitting there, but the EPA says it can’t use them. So it is not Dominion that is the issue, it is the EPA. Does anyone really think Dominion wants to shut down perfectly good power plants? Do they really want to waste all that investment? Do they want to invest more than a billion dollars in this pipeline? Do they want to have to fight every Tom, Dick and Harry about every mile of pipeline? Of course not. But we all want electricity, they are mandated to supply it, and they have to have some sort of fuel, so what choice do they have?

It amazes me that everyone wants electricity and yet no one wants the infrastructure. Does everyone think electricity grows on trees? It is not just in your wall and you plug into the wall and get it out. It has to be generated. Windmills were proposed for Highland; that got shot down. Windmills are the “green” alternative. So why be against them? It makes no sense, but people were up in arms. I have seen them in Pennsylvania; they are neat; but no, we can’t have them here. The same way, it makes no sense to be against the pipeline.

We have to have electricity; we need the pipeline. I realize the end user power plant is not in Highland, but you can’t get from X to Y without crossing something; are you going to tell someone in North Carolina they can’t have lights? There are pipelines and power lines all over the country now, after (the pipeline) is built, it won’t even be noticed, but all the money that Dominion has to spend fighting has to be paid. Who is paying it?Everyone! Where does Dominion get their money? Every ratepayer.

So essentially, every anti-pipeline person is costing me money and I am tired of it. It is a needed infrastructure and unless someone gets the EPA to be reasonable, it has to be built.

Travis Clements
Staunton, Va.

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