Schweitzer: "Montana is Energy Country"

Turner — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:19:15 GMT

I just received a letter from Brian Schweitzer. It was in response to an e-mail message I sent him some time ago complaining about his position of the Mountain States Transmission Intertie (MSTI) project.

The second paragraph of his letter to me begins, "Montana is energy country. . . . Our world class energy resources - wind, oil and gas, biofuels, biomass, geothermal, and coal - are second to none in the United States." He then goes on to explain how MSTI and five other huge transmission lines he's pushing are needed to create thousands of jobs and even to address global warming.

Inconveniently, MSTI's draft environmental impact study estimates that it will lead to approximately 59 full-time jobs for Montanans. This from a billion dollar project!

But what especially struck me was how Schweitzer's catalog of Montana's energy sources sort of tacks coal on at the end, as though suggesting it's the least significant of the seven he lists. Since coal accounts for most of the state's energy generation, this is at least misleading. And I suspect that it's an effort to deceive.

His list of supposed benefits from MSTI and other transmission projects is also misleading and deceptive. His claim that it is to be a "green" wind-energy line ignores two facts: (1) it is to be tied to the Colstrip coal-fired generation plants, and (2) NorthWestern Energy Company, which wants to operate MSTI, has secured no contracts with wind-energy producers.

It's easy enough to see what's really being planned. And it doesn't sound very "green" to me.

The preamble to the Montana Constitution reads, "We the people of Montana, grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of our mountains, the vastness of our rolling plains, and desiring to improve the quality of life, equality of opportunity, and to secure the blessings of liberty for this and future generations, do ordain and establish this constitution."

For the governor, though, "Montana is energy country." Its grand mountains and vast rolling plains are not for beauty but for industrialization.

Brian Schweitzer is the governor. But he and his corporate friends don't get to tell us what kind of a state we live in. We can see with our own eyes what a wonderful place our state is. Just as we can imagine how horrible it will become if he gets his way.

Letter from Dillon: HELP!

Turner — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:00:16 GMT

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.

Left in the West - MSTI

Schweitzer: "Montana is Energy Country"

Letter from Dillon: HELP!