Regarding: Puget Sound Energy’s proposed LNG facility currently being built on Medicine Creek Treaty Territory, just outside the Puyallup Reservation.

Public money should not be spent unless it will benefit the public good. As currently outlined, Puget Sound Energy (PSE) has been authorized to pass on 43% of the monetary construction costs to residential rate-paying customers even though they are only scheduled to receive less than 2% of the projects use. This 43% cost to ratepayers for less than 2% use is simply unfair. The majority of this fracked gas refinery & storage facility will be used to sell the gas for a profit to industrial and maritime customers while residential ratepayers will be provided backup power for a few of the coldest days of the year known as peak shaving. Although the lease for this project is 40 years, the peak shaving will only happen for 10 years before ratepayers are not a part of the project at all. The disparity of the monetary burden appears not just wrong but fraudulent from a public standpoint. This alone is completely unacceptable. However, when we ask ourselves if a project will benefit the public good, we must look at more than just the price tag.

The “Human Cost of Carbon” must start to be given the same level of importance as upfront monetary costs. Costs such as the health effects of living or working near the facility and breathing in the benzene, xylene, toluene and other carcinogens daily as well as the health effects on our relatives living near the fracking sites. Value must be placed on the fresh water any project would consume. Water is Life. Fracking poisons millions of gallons of water at each well head, with no known way to make that water safe again. When we consider using fossil fuels, we must acknowledge our complicity in man camps, the instability and harm they cause to local communities, and the role this male dominant, transient workforce plays in the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. We must count the cultural wounds of environmental racism. Value must be placed on upholding treaty rights and ensuring true free prior and informed consent for Indigenous people. We must consider worker safety, public safety, the possible effects for other local species, possible effects on food supply, and the habitat lost to make way for the project. We have to give weight to how a project will contribute to or mitigate climate change.

The human cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels and building new fossil fuel infrastructure is nothing short of genocide for future generations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released a report that warns we likely have only 12 years to make drastic changes if we want to avoid thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, that will cause chain reactions that push our planet away from being habitable by the human species. Global scientists agree that we must leave remaining fossil fuels in the ground if we are to have any hope of keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. Already we see effects such as increasingly severe storms and wildfires, draughts, flooding, famine, deaths from extreme temperatures, deaths related to poor air quality, coral bleaching, algae blooms and the beginning of the 6th mass extinction. These conditions will only get worse as global temperatures rise. Building new fossil fuel infrastructure locks us into decades of future use when we need to be investing in renewable energy now. When we are listening to best available science, investing in any new or expanded fossil fuel infrastructure cannot possibly be deemed to be in the best interest of the public.

No public funds should be spent on Puget Sound Energy’s proposed LNG project as it is clearly not in our best interest, funds including approved rate-payer increases, tax breaks, subsidies, or other monetary incentives. These human costs should also be considerations transparently discussed when considering all future projects that seek to receive public funds.

Sincerely,