( - promoted by Jay Stevens)
I suspect that most of the readers and contributors to Left in the West live in and around Missoula. This is an urgent appeal to these people and others living in Montana's larger cities from someone living in a rural county.
What every Montanan needs to know is that there's a David and Goliath story that's getting almost no attention in Missoula, Billings, Helena, Great Falls, or Bozeman. To flesh out the analogy, we (that is, people living in Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and Beaverhead counties) are David. Northwestern Energy Company, and its political allies like Brian Schweitzer, are Goliath. Right now, it looks like Goliath is winning.
For this large corporation, with the complicity of the governor and state and federal agencies (DEQ and BLM mainly), is finalizing plans to build a gargantuan, billion-dollar power line through our counties. Called the Mountain States Transmission Intertie (MSTI), the 500kV line will run through and seriously degrade some of Montana's most scenic areas.
By "gargantuan" I mean that the towers carrying the power line, or lines, will be between 140 and 185 feet tall, most of them taller than the Statue of Liberty! There will be between four and six of these massive, ugly structures per mile carrying 500kv of buzzing, crackling electricity.
The MSTI power line is supposed to start near Townsend and end up somewhere in Idaho. NWE's preferred route parallels and criss-crosses some of the best fishing rivers in the state: the Jefferson, the Big Hole, the Beaverhead, and the Red Rock. It will cut a broad swath (220 feet wide) through miles of state, federal, and private property, the latter which NWE and its allies are prepared to seize through eminent domain laws.
NWE claims the line will allow Montana to transmit 1500 mw of wind-generated energy to consumers in Arizona, Nevada, and California. This isn't true, of course (most of the energy would be coal-generated), but even if it were true it would take more than fifty wind-farms the size of the one at Judith Gap to generate this much green energy.
NWE doesn't want to talk about it, but there's a big question about whether there are actually energy buyers in their target market. Recent solar and wind energy projects in the Southwestern USA may make it unnecessary for this region to import power.
NWE claims that MSTI will be a big job creator. But the draft environmental impact statement for the project finds that only about 59 permanent jobs for Montanans will be created by the project. Another 200 jobs might be created, but they will be temporary and filled by out-of-staters.
There are plenty of major, major problems with the MSTI project that I don't have space to go into here. For a more complete and better discussion of them, please go to www.keepitrural.net.
What NorthWestern Energy Company is counting on is that people in Montana's larger population centers will be indifferent to what happens to those living in a few rural counties. They think people in Missoula and other large cities won't care since the project won't be in their back yards.
I sure hope they're wrong.
We need people from all parts of Montana to contact Brian Schweitzer and tell him to stop lying about MSTI being "green" and a major job generator. He needs to stop helping a rapacious corporation industrialize some of Montana's most beautiful landscapes in order to realize an obscene profit for their mostly out-of-state shareholders. |