The Fayetteville Observer covered a public meeting in Lumberton on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Although the meeting was nominally about the Department of Environmental Quality's limited role in permitting wetland and stream impacts under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, many attendees spoke out on the pipeline's negative impacts to culture and economy. Because the NC Department of Commerce also attended the meeting, I focused my comments on the negative impacts of climate change, exacerbated by infrastructure like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. I cited newly published research in Science by Hsiang and colleagues on the uneven distribution of economic damages caused by climate change. I noted that Robeson County would suffer the greatest losses in North Carolina relative to the county's total income. After analyzing publicly available data from Hsiang et al., I noted that NC as a whole would incur damages from climate change totaling billions of dollars annually by the end of this century.
The attached photo from NC Policy Watch shows me (Ryan) delivering the warning to environment and commerce officials in Lumberton on August 17, 2017. Sarah Rice, Title VI Civil Rights coordinator for the NC Department of Environmental Quality, is in the background.
Read the Fayetteville Observer article here.
Read the Fayetteville Observer article here.