The Delaware Riverkeeper and friends have gone hyperbolic over the Tennessee Gas Pipeline upgrade of its natural gas pipeline through Pike County, claiming all sorts of forest disasters from this project intended to deliver more inexpensive energy to New Jersey but their real goal isn’t to protect trees or rivers, but to stop natural gas development anywhere and they’re paid to do it.

“Serial protestor” Alex Lotorto and the Delaware Riverkeeper, the arch-typical representative of old monied special interests determined to keep the upper Delaware River Valley in pastoral poverty for the sake of a purist environmental vision, have been targeting the Tennessee Gas Pipeline project the last couple of weeks. What a farce it’s all been. We’ve heard about “rivers that speak to us,” “old growth forests,” men in trees and assorted other absurdities, none of which mesh with the facts.

Facts don’t matter much to these folks, of course. They go to the beat of a different drum and are darned proud of it. Well they should be, because it works for them, up to a point at least. They instinctively realize what the philosopher Blaise Pascal said three centuries ago: ”All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.” If you can, in other words, reach people emotionally through their imaginations, all the facts or logic in the world don’t matter.

There is a caveat to that worldview, though, and it is that feelings ultimately must give way to truth, but it can take generations for truth to emerge. Fortunately, the truth is emerging on natural gas and its role in meeting our energy needs. It is proving to be not only cost-effective, but also environmentally sound, but you wouldn’t know from the activities of the Riverkeeper or its serial protestor friends. Let me go where angels fear to tread and offer some reasoning to counter some of these feelings that seem to have taken over the airwaves and the news pages these last few days.

http://eidmarcellus.org/marcellus-shale ... ood/18339/