We won’t pay to be poisoned
What’s
Going On?
From 2019 to 2023, powerful activists in NYC fought against a massive new fracked gas pipeline snaking through Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint.
In 2019, we discovered that the North Brooklyn Pipeline had already started construction in phases back in 2016, with zero public input. This revelation triggered mass public outrage and led to overflowing Community Board meetings. Elected officials, ranging from the City Council to the State Senate and Assembly, all the way up to the Congressional level, opposed this pipeline.
The pipeline's final destination was slated to be National Grid's 120-acre liquefied fracked gas facility, situated in the heart of North Brooklyn on Newtown Creek—a body of water that New Yorkers have been working to remediate from past fossil fuel toxins that date back as far as the 1850s. This site, currently occupied by National Grid—a UK-based corporation and the largest importer of liquefied "natural" gas (LNG) in Europe—is considered the “birthplace of the fossil fuel industry in North America” where Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company began operating oil refineries on the creek in 1874. Rockefeller gained a monopoly on the refinery market along the creek, contributing industrial pollution.
On March 16, 2023, New Yorkers celebrated a victory when the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC)—tasked with regulating monopoly utilities to prevent harm to people—denied National Grid's request to build two new LNG Vaporizers. In response, National Grid withdrew its plans to construct the final connecting leg of the pipeline through Environmental Justice communities. Also, it withdrew an application to build an LNG trucking station (currently illegal on NYC streets).
Current
Status
One month later in April of 2023, National Grid returned to the PSC requesting an unprecedented amount of money to expand its fracked gas empire, raising monthly bills from $30 up to $67 over three years! We got in the ring and fought with all of our might to defeat National Grid’s request.
Yet on August 15, 2024, the PSC, now under the direction of Governor Kathy Hochul, approved nearly $5BILLION for fracked gas infrastructure in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, and Long Island.
However, the PSC told us that if we wanted to negotiate and discuss a shutdown of National Grid’s LNG facility (we call it The Heart Of The Beast), we could do so in a proceeding for National Grid to set out its 20-year plan.
National Grid believes that it will increase gas customers, more pipelines, and profits far into the future. We believe National Grid is delusional. As a plan to expand fossil fuels would ensure we are burning fracked gas well into the 2080s! This not only is unethical, but it breaks several New York State climate laws and emissions reduction goals.
We are currently filing testimony opposing National Grid’s long-term plan. We are also doing community outreach events to educate people about this facility via walking tours, art-making, and activist skills training.
We are in this fight to win it!
Join us and bring down the fossil fuel empire!
