A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds federal pipeline regulators were unable to document or explain their processes for assessing pipeline risk, and prioritizing safety inspections.
Marie Cusick / StateImpact Pennsylvania
Natural gas building boom fuels climate worries, enrages landowners
Kristen Lombardi is an award-winning journalist who works for the nonprofit investigative organization, Center for Public Integrity, covering environmental and social justice issues. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years. Her investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's lackluster civil-rights record for the Center won the top investigative prize from the Society for Professional Journalists and a special citation by Columbia University's Paul Tobenkin Award, among other recognition. Before the Center, Lombardi was an investigative reporter for the Village Voice, where she provided groundbreaking coverage of the 9/11 health crisis. Her investigative reports as a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix were widely credited with helping to expose the clergy sex-abuse scandal in that city. Her work for the Center has received national and regional awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the Dart Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service. Lombardi was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, in 2011-12. She graduated with high honors from the University of California at Berkeley and has a master's degree in journalism from Boston University. Currently, she serves as an adjunct master’s adviser and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Jamie Smith Hopkins/The Center for Public Integrity
Jamie Smith Hopkins is a reporter and deputy editor on the Center for Public Integrity's environment and labor team. Her work includes “America’s Super Polluters” — which revealed that facilities pumping out the largest amounts of toxic air pollution are frequently also the biggest emitters of climate-warming greenhouse gases — and an investigation of government inaction that has allowed a decades-long string of deaths from widely available paint removers to continue unabated. Honors for her Center stories include awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Education Writers Association and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. Previously, Hopkins spent 15 years as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, where her coverage of the housing market drew multiple national awards.
Marie Cusick / StateImpact Pennsylvania
A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds federal pipeline regulators were unable to document or explain their processes for assessing pipeline risk, and prioritizing safety inspections.
Companies have asked a federal regulator to approve thousands of miles of pipeline from Appalachia. They almost always get their way.
over owner Energy Transfer Partners, via the Ohio Environmental
Construction on the Rover natural-gas pipeline, which will stretch from Pennsylvania to Michigan, began this year. Ohio Environmental Protection Agency
They landed, one after another, in 2015: plans for nearly a dozen interstate pipelines to move natural gas beneath rivers, mountains and people’s yards. Like spokes on a wheel, they’d spread from Appalachia to markets in every direction.
Together these new and expanded pipelines — comprising 2,500 miles of steel in all — would double the amount of gas that could flow out of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The cheap fuel will benefit consumers and manufacturers, the developers promise.
But some scientists warn that the rush to more fully tap the rich Marcellus and Utica shales is bad for a dangerously warming planet, extending the country’s fossil-fuel habit by half a century. Industry consultants say there isn’t even enough demand in the United States for all the gas that would come from this boost in production.
And yet, five of the 11 pipelines already have been approved. The rest await a decision from a federal regulator that almost never says no.
StateImpact Pennsylvania is a collaboration among WITF, WHYY, and the Allegheny Front. Reporters Reid Frazier, Rachel McDevitt and Susan Phillips cover the commonwealth’s energy economy. Read their reports on this site, and hear them on public radio stations across Pennsylvania.
Climate Solutions, a collaboration of news organizations, educational institutions and a theater company, uses engagement, education and storytelling to help central Pennsylvanians toward climate change literacy, resilience and adaptation. Our work will amplify how people are finding solutions to the challenges presented by a warming world.
