Activists Keith Benson (center) and Kevin Barfield (left) protest the LNG project with Rutgers student Kinjal Mody, at the microphone.Photo Credit: April Saul
At Camden City Hall on March 7, Eleanor Dill demonstrates against the LNG proposal.Photo Credit: April Saul
At Camden City Hall on March 7, Noa Gordon-Guterman of Food and Water Watch demonstrated against the LNG project.Photo Credit: April Saul
Activists Keith Benson (center) and Kevin Barfield (left) protest the LNG project with Rutgers student Kinjal Mody, at the microphone.Photo Credit: April Saul
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By April Saul
Published March 7, 2023 at 10:11 PM
Last updated March 7, 2023 at 10:14 PM
CAMDEN, NJ - Rutgers-Camden students and area residents came together outside City Hall on March 7 to urge municipal leaders to make Camden the 19th New Jersey municipality to register opposition to the proposed Gibbstown Liquefied Natural Gas Terminal.
“We’re trying to get every town we can to pass a resolution against it, because it’s so dangerous,” said Jim Stewart, who lives in Gibbstown and came to Camden to demonstrate.
Speakers cited the possibility of catastrophe, given the numerous trains and trucks that would carry highly flammable fossil fuel through the area as an extension of the export terminal.
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Kinjal Mody, president of the RUC Green Thumbs at Rutgers-Camden, said that when she first heard of the project, she was “shocked” that Gov. Phil Murphy hadn’t taken a stand against something that could potentially cause “an explosion greater than Hiroshima to occur that would destroy our school’s infrastructure, pollute our air and water supply and catastrophically interrupt our learning.”
Environmentalists have fought the proposal by New Fortress Energy since it was introduced in 2019. The Trump administration had lifted a ban on rail transport of liquefied natural gas without a special permit, clearing the way for the project, which would be the first of its kind in the country.
The February derailment of an Ohio freight train carrying toxic chemicals—with its resulting inferno and an environmental impact that remains unknown—has given new urgency to the fight against LNG here. That derailment, in East Palestine, involved 38 cars of a 150-car train; the Gibbstown proposal calls for 100-car trains with 200 miles of routing through densely populated areas.
That recent disaster was not lost on Keith Benson of the Camden Leadership Initiative. With “300 trucks per day and countless rail cars,” Benson said about the chances of a mishap, “it’s not a matter of ‘if,’ it’s a matter of ‘when.’ ” With the population of the area the rail lines would run through, Benson said, “An accident here will make Palestine look like a picnic.”
The project would pump LNG from northeastern Pennsylvania to a proposed terminal in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, and on to Gibbstown, moving it through Philadelphia and South Jersey.
Demonstrators urged residents to express their concerns to President Biden, because after a 2021 suspension of gas shipments by rail, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is expected to announce a decision shortly on whether to make that ban permanent.
With a history of environmental issues in Camden — which has a rate of asthma twice that of the state average — longtime resident Kevin Barfield of Camden for Clean Air said he was happy to partner with the Rutgers students.
Barfield cited an environmental justice law signed by Murphy in 2020 which requires the NJ Department of Environmental Protection to evaluate environmental and public health impacts on overburdened communities. “This opens the door,” he said, to try to prevent environmental catastrophes like the one in Palestine.
Mody said that 300 Rutgers students and educators had signed a petition against the LNG project.
“We come to school to learn and to grow,” she said, “not have our health and safety threatened by an unnecessary fossil fuel export scheme.”